Open source container runtime Kata Containers and gateway service Zuul have been named as the first official top-level open infrastructure projects of the OpenStack Foundation.

The news was announced at OpenStack’s Open Infrastructure Summit in Denver and should demonstrate the stability and maturity of the projects.

To get promoted to top-level status, a project has to have well-defined governance procedures, an actively engaged ecosystem and demonstrate a commitment to technical best practices and open collaboration.

Other than that its strategic focus has to be “aligned with that of the OpenStack Foundation and its Open Infrastructure mission” – which comes down to promoting the development, distribution and adoption of the projects fostered by the foundation.

Kata Containers was introduced as an OSF pilot project in December 2017, and coincided with the foundation branching out into its new strategic focus areas of container infrastructure, CI/CD, and edge computing after five years of being the home to OpenStack only.

Since then, AWS, Google, IBM, Microsoft, PackageCloud, Packet, SUSE, and Vexxhost have donated infrastructure resources to the Kata Containers project. There has been work to facilitate integration with other infrastructure projects such as the Open Container Initiative, Kubernetes, and containerd. On top of that Kata Container’s contributor base grew, so that the project now consists of commits by 116 authors.

Zuul only became part of the OSF in May 2018 and has since seen its community expand to include companies such as BMW, GoDaddy, as well as the Wikimedia Foundation and the Ansible community. Those helped to get case studies and features like speculative container control as well as support for OpenShift, AWS, and Ansible off the ground.