Lajos Katona writes:
OpenInfra Summit Europe 2025: A Focus on Sovereignty, Resilience, and Community
"We had the chance to participate in the OpenInfra Summit Europe 2025, held from October 17–19 in one of the leading research and innovation hubs of France, Paris-Saclay, in the south of Paris.
The energy from the global open infrastructure community was palpable, with more than 1,200 attendees present. A major highlight was celebrating the 15th anniversary of OpenStack! The summit was held as a joint event under the Linux Foundation umbrella, running alongside the Gerrit User Summit and VM migration day.
While sessions covered everything from open source AI to container-native applications, one overarching theme dominated the discourse: the critical and growing importance of digital sovereignty and resilience, and how these must be balanced by the strength of the open community.
As Thierry Carrez, General Manager of the OpenInfra Foundation, noted, the goal is not isolation, but resilience in a fast-changing world. Open infrastructure provides the means to maintain control over applications and data, creating robust and flexible systems capable of weathering unforeseen technical, regulatory, or economic events.
Key Topics from the 3-Day Event
- Hyperscaler Alternatives: Many discussions and presentations concentrated on how to make collaboration easier with projects like Kubernetes to enable high-performing, easy-to-scale open alternatives to proprietary hyperscalers. One example is the quite new project based on Gophercloud: the OpenStack Resource Controller (ORC), which offers a simple way to manage Kubernetes and OpenStack resources with a single toolset.
- VMware Migration: Migration from proprietary platforms was another area with significant focus, with sessions showcasing how organizations can regain control of their infrastructure by moving to open source.
- AI Infrastructure: OpenStack is serving as critical infrastructure for AI, giving the option for building high-performing alternatives together with projects like Kubernetes and PyTorch.
The Value of Face-to-Face Community
As the event happened just one week before the regular autumn PTG (Project Teams Gathering)—the developers' virtual planning conference—it was a fantastic opportunity for us to meet face-to-face, chat, and pre-plan with fellow developers from the community. These personal interactions are invaluable for strengthening the connections that drive the OpenInfra ecosystem forward.
You can find the videos of the OpenInfra Summit keynotes and sessions on the Foundation's YouTube channel "