OpenInfra Summit Europe Kicks Off in Paris: OpenInfra is the Resilience Playbook for AI, Sovereignty and VMware Migrations

European leaders BT Group, OVHcloud and ECMWF take center stage, showcasing OpenInfra role in organizational resilience.

PARIS, Oct. 17, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Keynotes begin today at OpenInfra Summit Europe, and leaders from across cloud, AI, telecom and public sector are showcasing how open source infrastructure has become the engine of IT resilience. Examples from navigating vendor upheaval and geopolitical requirements to scaling AI securely and cost-effectively were featured in today's keynotes at the event, held at École Polytechnique in Paris, France.

The Summit is the first since the OpenInfra Foundation formally joined the Linux Foundation, strengthening collaboration across the world's most widely deployed open technologies. Keynotes focused on the pressures that every CIO is managing, all answered with open infrastructure. The theme of "OpenInfra as a Catalyst for Resilience" highlighted how open source helps organizations withstand and adapt to:

• Corporate change: (e.g., VMware licensing shifts) Research indicates that 73% of VMware customers anticipated price hikes of 100% or more following the Broadcom acquisition, prompting users to accelerate their evaluation of open alternatives. A live VMware-to-OpenStack migration demo during the keynotes showcased Canonical, Rackspace, Red Hat, Worteks and ZConverter, each illustrating real-world pathways to OpenStack from proprietary islands.
  
  
• Disruptive AI demand: As organizations race to scale AI securely and cost-effectively, open infrastructure has become the foundation for GPU-dense, high-throughput architectures. AI is now one of the strongest proof points for OpenInfra's innovation and longevity: from OpenStack's accelerator scheduling, networking and storage capabilities to real-world collaborations with partners such as NVIDIA, which is advancing confidential computing for AI with Kata Containers. To coincide with the Summit, the community is releasing a new white paper, "Open Infrastructure for AI: OpenStack's Role in the Next Generation Cloud," detailing how open collaboration is shaping the next era of AI-ready infrastructure.
  
  
• Security and trusted AI: As AI and container-based workloads scale, Kata Containers and Confidential Containers are advancing confidential computing to make security by default a reality. A keynote from Ant Group explored how these technologies deliver stronger isolation and attestation for GPU-accelerated AI pipelines, ensuring trust and resilience from the infrastructure layer up.
  
  
• Digital sovereignty: European users and providers like Telekom Cloud, OVHcloud and VanillaCore are highlighting how open technologies deliver portability, transparency and control to meet emerging policy and compliance requirements across the region.

"Right now the world needs sovereign, high-performance and sustainable infrastructure that remains interoperable and secure, while collaborating tightly with AI, containers and trusted execution environments," said Thierry Carrez, general manager of the OpenInfra Foundation. "Open infrastructure allows nations and organizations to maintain control over their applications, their data and their destiny while benefiting from global collaboration. This Summit reflects that spirit—contributors and organizations across industries are working together to define the next decade of resilient, AI-ready, open infrastructure."

The Summit features prominent adopters and contributors illustrating resilience in action:

• BMW and Workday shared how Zuul (OpenInfra's CI/CD gating system) helps prevent breakages before code lands, directly improving uptime and change velocity at scale.
  
  
• OVHcloud and other European operators presented innovations in storage, networking and sovereignty-aligned cloud, with multiple sessions on OpenStack, Ceph and NVMe-oF in production.
  
  
• ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts)—one of Europe's most mission-critical compute users—highlights the role of open infrastructure in operational forecasting.
  
  
• All five finalists for the Superuser Award are European organizations: ECMWF, G-Research, StackHPC, STACKIT IaaS Team, and the CIR team at Telecom Paris, underscoring Europe's leadership in advancing open infrastructure.

Keynotes emphasized that resilience is no longer just about failover: it's about sustainability, skills and freedom of choice. Open source infrastructure mitigates vendor lock-in, strengthens security through transparency, and ensures recoverability through global collaboration. True resilience also depends on people and policy: addressing the shortage of open infrastructure talent through university partnerships, and engaging policymakers on new regulations shaping the future of open source.

"As OpenInfra enters its next chapter, our community is proving that open collaboration is the most sustainable way of building resilience," continued Carrez. "Together, we're building infrastructure that's ready for AI, capable of enabling sovereignty, and designed to thrive through change for the next 15 years and beyond."

OpenStack User Survey Preview
The latest OpenStack User Survey, currently in the final stages of production, underscores an upswing in adoption, with an increase to 55 million cores of compute in production. OpenStack remains one of the most active open source projects in the world, with nearly one million code changes contributed by approximately 10,000 contributors. The latest survey also reveals major OpenStack adoption drivers, which include digital sovereignty, its use as a VMware alternative and its ability to support AI and HPC workloads.

The data shows that 30% of User Survey respondents are running AI/ML workloads on OpenStack. Among those, 60% are located in Europe and 88% run the OpenInfra Blueprint (Linux, OpenStack and Kubernetes). Top industries relying on OpenStack for AI are IT, research, telecom and financial services.

About the OpenInfra Summit Europe
OpenInfra Summit Europe runs October 17–19 at École Polytechnique in Paris, convening developers, operators and decision-makers from finance, government, telecom, manufacturing and IT. The program features OpenStack, Kata Containers, StarlingX and Zuul alongside collaborations with Linux, Kubernetes, Ceph, RISC-V and more. Co-located events include the Gerrit User Summit and VM Migration Day. Headline sponsor of the event is OVHcloud, and premiere sponsors include Huawei, Canonical and Mirantis.

About the OpenInfra Foundation
The OpenInfra Foundation builds communities who write open source infrastructure software that runs in production. With the support of over 110,000 individuals in 187 countries, the OpenInfra Foundation hosts open source projects and communities of practice, including infrastructure for AI, container native apps, edge computing and datacenter clouds. The OpenInfra Foundation is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. Join the OpenInfra movement: www.openinfra.org

Media Contacts
Jenny Fowler
Cathey.co for the OpenInfra Foundation
e [email protected]

Allison Price
OpenInfra Foundation
e [email protected]

SOURCE OpenInfra Foundation