Cloudflare Continues To Praise Open-Source OpenBMC

It was just one and a half years ago that Cloudflare began rolling out OpenBMC on their massive array of servers to replace traditional proprietary Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) firmware stacks. Since the end of last year they've been talking up their successes using OpenBMC and now as we approach two years of their OpenBMC use within production, they continue singing the praise of this open-source, Linux-based BMC software stack.

In a new public blog post on Tuesday, Cloudflare engineers continue drumming up their support for the Linux Foundation's OpenBMC project. Their newest post on the topic talks up the greater control they have now over their fleet of servers, various challenges they've encountered and how it has been overcome, ACPI state support within OpenBMC, and items they are working on moving forward around OpenBMC integration.

The Cloudflare blog post concludes with:

"With each passing day, Cloudflare’s OpenBMC team, which is made up of folks from different embedded backgrounds, learns about, experiments with, and deploys OpenBMC across our global fleet. This has been made possible by relying on the OpenBMC community’s contribution (as well as upstreaming some of our own contributions), and our interaction with our various vendors, thereby giving us the opportunity to make our systems more reliable, and giving us the ownership and responsibility of the firmware that powers the BMCs that manage our servers. If you are thinking of embracing open-source firmware in your BMC, we hope this blog post written by a team which started deploying OpenBMC less than 18 months ago has inspired you to give it a try."

Great seeing their continued success with OpenBMC and continuing to publicly promote this open-source BMC software solution. It's been very refreshing to continue to see the mass adoption of OpenBMC and general interest around open-source firmware solutions within the industry in more recent years.

In case you missed it, Cloudflare also recently detailed their next-gen server builds powering all of this widely-used Internet infrastructure.