OpenMetal’s 2024 Year in Review

We’ve released numerous updates to OpenMetal Central, our custom user dashboard and management portal. These helped streamline the user experience with a focus on checkout enhancements, improve resource management, and provide a new and improved organization-level dashboard. Highlights include:

• Revamped checkout process with features like order IDs, additional user controls and options, and semaphore UI improvements (February, April, May, September)
• Bandwidth usage tracking and notifications (February)
• Detailed billing information and support ticketing options (February)
• Introduction of FinOps dashboards (April)
• New product tiers including v4 hardware and bare metal options (June)
• Launch of the HTML5 IPMI web console (October)
• Transition to organization-based view with consolidated billing and resource management (October)

This major release brought some big updates to our underlying infrastructure, including:

• CentOS Stream 9 as the new base OS (April)
• OpenStack 2023.2 (“Bobcat”) with support for Kubernetes v1.26.8 (April)
• Enhanced memory management and overcommit options (April)
• Built-in Let’s Encrypt support for automatic certificate updates (April)
• Migration to Ceph Reef for improved storage management (April)

We boosted our participation in the open source and cloud communities through:

• Joining the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and FinOps Foundation (January)
• Renewing our membership with the OpenInfra Foundation (January)
• Supporting the OpenInfra Foundation’s CI/CD cloud with our latest OpenStack release (July)

We became more active within our industry and community by:

• Partnering with Scramjet to be our recommended multi-cloud system integration tool for OpenMetal users. Check out their tutorial for launching their Scramjet Transform Hub on our platform! (January)
• Attending and speaking at industry events like ASCII and SCALE (February)
• Joining experts from 451 Research, Economize, and Caligo in the FinOps-centered webinar “Beyond Variable Costs: Integrating Fixed Cost Pricing in Cloud FinOps Strategies” (July)
• Guesting on Severalnines’ cloud computing podcast discussing the shifting paradigms of cloud (May)
• Chatting about OpenStack and the modern cloud environment with Storware on their BackupMonster Show – catch the replay here! (February)
• Hosting our first LinkedIn livestream event with Tom Fanelli from Convesio, discussing how WordPress agencies, e-commerce organizations, and SMBs can future-proof their businesses using AI and private cloud innovations (December)

We love showcasing our awesome customers and telling their success stories in using our platform. Customer case studies published this year include:

• Coder (January)
• A New Public Cloud Hosting Provider (November)
• Stakater (December)

Startup Support

• We launched the Startup eXcelerator Program to provide early-stage businesses with cloud credits, consulting, and technology assistance to support and help grow their fledgling organizations (July)