Airship 2021 Annual Report

By Ildiko Vancsa on 26/01/2022

Since Airship was announced as an OpenInfra Foundation pilot project at the 2018 OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, it has provided operators with a unified, fully-declarative, versatile platform that transforms bare-metal infrastructure into a resilient Kubernetes cluster supporting user-defined workloads. At the Denver Open Infrastructure Summit in 2019, the Airship project committed to overhauling the platform by improving document management, re-imagining the upgrade workflow, and utilizing additional Cloud Native projects to provide Airship functionality with the next generation of Airship: Airship 2.

In April 2021, the community achieved the ultimate objective for Airship 2: provide a declarative interface to assemble and orchestrate best-of-breed Cloud Native building blocks for provisioning and life-cycling Kubernetes clouds and the resulting software stack. Airship 2 takes cloud native projects like Cluster API, Kustomize, Metal3, and the Helm-Controller and integrates them into an end-to-end solution with a smooth operator experience.

Airship 2 has also been designated as a Certified Kubernetes Distribution through the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's Software Conformance Program, guaranteeing that Airship provides a consistent installation of Kubernetes, supports the latest Kubernetes versions, and provides a portable cloud-native environment with other Certified Platforms.

A few of the notable high level goals Airship 2 accomplishes include:

  • Declarative intentions
  • Simplified control
  • Support for multiple use cases, like workloads from CI/CD to CNFs to VNFs
  • Support for a variety of infrastructure backends and operating system choices from public clouds to VMs to bare metal

Shortly following Airship 2, version 2.1 was released with a multitude of enhancements in November.

Learn more in the Airship 2 Release Notes.

Looking into 2022, other features such SR-IOV and IPv6/v4 Dual Stack are being worked on and discussed as candidate features for inclusion in a future release.

On the community side, Airship decided to merge the Technical and Working Committees into a single seven-member Technical Committee (TC) due to the numerous overlapping responsibilities. The current TC members are Drew Walters (Microsoft), Jan-Erik Mångs (Ericsson), Alexey Odinokov (Mirantis), John “JT” Williams (Dell), Alex Bailey (Microsoft), Matt McEuen (Microsoft), and Ruslan Aliev (Mirantis).

Get involved:

The Open Infrastructure Foundation just published its 2021 annual report. Learn more about other OpenInfra projects and how you can get involved.