fkr

In January I blogged about an upcoming change for the professional part of my life. Since then I was, apart from items posted to talks, fairly silent. As one can imagine the 50/50 job (50% at gridscale and 50% at SCS) that I did until end of june kept me fairly busy. Not just timewise, but for the most parts focus wise. I’m still glad I went for this option as it allowed for a very(!) smooth transition at gridscale, while being able to already add value to the SCS project. However having two primary focus areas led me to having to shave focus of my usual side projects, which I can now proceed again.

Since first of July I’m now full time onboard the SCS project and am able to focus on that. One of things that I really enjoy - aside from working with experienced and fantastic colleagues such as Eduard and Kurt - is our open community and that everything we do is out in the open.

Since the reference implementation of SCS builds upon on OpenStack, I started to dive technically into OpenStack and the OpenInfra community. Early in June we participated in the OpenInfra Summit and us from the scs community where fairly active.

Speaking of which, the SCS news site is a place where I started publishing posts as well.

With events starting to happen in person again, my traveling also picked up again. I missed in person events and am glad they’re happening again. For once, because I get to see many of my friends again and I do really love the hallway track but also as a speaker I was looking forward to having “3D events” again. As a speaker I really enjoy having the immediate feedback from the audience (smiling, smirking, even eye-ball rolling ;). Many events and teams did an awesome job with their online events - I’d never try to downball that - but in-person events (with the appropiate hygiende measurements!) are nice again.

Aside from the technical work we’ve been pushing forward in the SCS project a fair share of our work is to grow a community of cloud service providers (CSPs) that work together in an open fashion, exchanging their experiences, discussing problems and working on solutions to them together. At the end of 2021 I gave a short talk at the SCS community summit titled “Collaboration over competition”, which basically summarises this. Half a year later, I must say I’m really proud of what we were able to establish since then. The SIG (Special Interest Group) Monitoring within SCS just had their one year anniversary. One of the outcomes of the SIG was the talk I presented together with Mathias Fechner on Observability on OpenStack at the OpenInfra Summit. Another format that has came to life is our Lean SCS Operator Coffee. On a monthly base operators from SCS-based environments come together to discuss issues and matters all around running SCS clouds.

Kurt and I presented at the OpenInfra Summit the concept of Open Operations and with the SCS community and the involved companies we’re on a good track towards that. With the open source movement we (as the Open Source community overall) have championed this subject in regards to source code in a lot of areas (despite the usual foul players) now it is time to take this to the next level in regards to processes, concepts and operational transparency. CSPs that work together and share operational knowledge hardly have to fear anything. Often a competitive advantage is brought up if reasons are needed for not being transparent - however by working together an advantage to the proprietary, closed up hyperscalers can be gained which will eventually lead to a better overall experience for the customer. The market share that is available (and which is currently locked up in propietary, closed-up solutions) is huge, so that customers switchting from one open CSP to another can easily be neglected.

While the term digital sovereignty has been wildy overused (and moved into the state of it being a buzzword), the core of its definiton and the need to work towards solutions that allow oneself (person, company, NGO,..) to be digital sovereign is valid and needed. A few colleagues and me wrote a paper on why digital sovereignty is more than mere legal compliance.

That this is more than a pure buzzword discussion, is something that Nic, Mareike and me explained in our talk on Digital Sovereignty in the environment of civial search and rescue (german only, sorry).

Expect to read more on these subjects from me ;)