Get the highlights of StarlingX discussions and project updates at the April, 2025 virtual OpenInfra Project Teams Gathering (PTG) event.

The StarlingX community held one session during the event to discuss use cases, go through project team updates, talk about the 11.0 release and further roadmap, and more. This article is the second piece of a mini-series to provide a highlight of the conversations the community had at the event.

Project Team Updates

The main topic area for this PTG session was to go through project team updates, which provided a great opportunity to get an overview of new features that were recently released as part of 10.0, along with a sneak peek into current work items and roadmap.

Distributed Cloud

The Distributed Cloud team is responsible for all aspects of central management and orchestration of a geographically distributed network of StarlingX clouds.

As use cases are becoming more wide-scale, the team has been focusing on further increasing scalability and manageability of the platform. Contributors added 6 new features during the 10.0 release cycle, where their main focus was on the new USM framework and enabling it in a distributed cloud environment. Starting this release, users can now pre-stage sub-clouds and then enroll them into an existing StarlingX system. The scalability of the platform increased by 5x, which in practice means that one system controller can now manage up to 5,000 sub-clouds, and the O-RAN related features got some improvements as well.

Contributors set the main focus on scalability again for the 11.0 cycle, where their current plan is to bump the number of sub-clouds per system controller up to 10,000. Further enhancements are also planned to the O-RAN application as well as to the new functionality to enroll sub-clouds into the system even more flexibly.

To take a look a bit further ahead, the team is planning to start working on a rather architectural change to increase the StarlingX platform’s flexibility. The idea is to extract the components of the StarlingX central/SystemController that manages and orchestrates the remote sub-clouds, into a containerized application, such that it is portable and could optionally run in a public cloud, rather than requiring a central private cloud for this function. This development will likely span multiple release cycles, stay tuned for updates!

Build

This team works on the build system, which turns the source code into a deployable ISO image. The contributors are collaborating closely with the Distro team to ensure a stable and efficient build system and process.

During the 10.0 release cycle the team was experimenting with using RAM disks to improve the build performance, however, the results they got were below expectations. Some of the reasons included the change of hardware in the build lab, as well as challenges with fine tuning the size of the RAM disks. The latter issue can likely be attributed to the complexity of the StarlingX platform along with using Helm, which all together make it harder to have good visibility into how the build process utilizes the RAM disks.

For the 11.0 release cycle, the team is planning to update the Secure Boot Certificates, which requires an update in the build system to be able to configure multiple keys. Contributors are also looking into a few more improvement ideas, which include reviving the layered-build process, but with more fine grained layering this time. Reusing the artifacts that were generated by previous builds is another idea contributors will explore to improve the build efficiency and performance.

The team is actively working with other project teams on the features and enhancements that will span multiple release cycles. The Debian upgrade and portable Distributed Cloud feature got their own feature branches for now, which require the build team to create weekly builds for these as well. In addition, the team will explore to create some tools to help merging the feature branches back into the main branch.

Test

The community has always been putting high emphasis on testing to ensure the stability and robustness of the platform, and that was no different in the 10.0 release cycle. Beyond the automated unit and functional testing that is preformed by Zuul, the community is also doing targeted feature testing as well as sanity and regression testing. The test infrastructure for the latter is donated to the community by Wind River Systems.

Some statistics from the 10.0 release cycle:

• Feature testing

  • 45 features explicitly tested
  • 1406 manual test cases executed
  • 97.4% Feature test Pass Rate, same as for 9.0

• Release regression testing

  • 441 Tests executed in automation on AIO-SX -100% pass
  • 386 Tests executed in automation on AIO-DX -100% pass

For the 11.0 cycle the team will keep the same cadence for sanity and regression testing as for previous cycles. However, for these methods they will use a new test framework, which they have been working on up until now, you can find some details about that in this article below.

Docs

The documentation team is working on maintaining and improving the structure and format of the documentation to ensure that users and newcomers have a cohesive experience, and the large amount of documentation that the project has is easy to navigate.

During the 10.0 release cycle the team made a lot of enhancements to the project’s documentation, including the Distributed Cloud Guide, Security Guide and REST API Reference Guide. They were working with the test team to test more of the documentation along with the code and make sure the content is updated, accurate and easy to follow.

During the current release cycle, contributors will be working on enhancing the documentation build process as well as to explore the possibility of generating the documentation for CLI commands in a more automated way. The team is also looking into restructuring the documentation a bit to make it easier to follow for users in different industry segments.

Release

This team is helping the community to plan the release cycle, which includes milestones, roadmap and overall timeline. Members of this team also track the community's progress with the planned additions, changes and fixes, to coordinate the steps throughout the release.

The 10.0 release in numbers:

• 49 new features and enhancements
• 712 bugs fixed

The 11.0 release cycle is currently ongoing, the community is still finalizing the content for the new version of the platform. During the session attendees discussed the timeline for this cycle, and and are currently planning for the new version to come out towards the end of September, 2025.

New Test Framework Demo

The test team has been working on a new test framework to make it easier and simpler to execute sanity and regression test suites through a higher degree of automation. Beyond making the test team’s work a bit easier, the framework is also available in the StarlingX Test repository. Users have access to the framework and can deploy and use it in their local environments, which will allow them to better test the platform locally in their own labs with any specific hardware and configuration options that their use case might require.

The team walked attendees through a demo during the PTG session to show how to configure and use the new framework. Among other functionality, the demo showed how users can specify their lab and lab configuration, which starts with adding the floating IP, admin credentials and ssh port to the framework’s configuration. As some of the StarlingX features depend on the underlying infrastructure, the framework allows users to specify those as lab capabilities in the framework. This enables to skip tests that would otherwise fail due to an unmet requirement. While this can be configured manually, the framework is also equipped with a discovery function that is executed through a series of API requests against the lab.

The new framework is built on the principles of stability and readability, which was demonstrated during the PTG session. Check out the session recording to find out more, the demo starts at 1:23:00! Also look out for a blog post that the team is working on to further introduce the new StarlingX test framework.

For further notes of the discussions at the event please refer to the session etherpad which also contains the link to the recording of the session.

About StarlingX

If you would like to learn more about the project and get involved check the website for more information or download the code and start to experiment with the platform. If you are already evaluating or using the software please fill out the user survey and help the community improve the project based on your feedback.