ALASCA Tech-Talks.

ALASCA Tech-Talk #38

Going full arctic circle: Running ALASCA on open cloud infrastructure & standards

Friedrich Zahn & Dr. Daniel Gerber (Software Engineers ALASCA FOCIS)

Fostering open source software communities in the 2020s needs more than a git server and a mailing list. However, ALASCA is the association for operational cloud infrastructure, so let’s get a plate of dogfood!

We’ll provide some insights how we are running ALASCAs infrastructure on open cloud infrastructure and utilize open standards, what works well for us – and what does not.

Specifically, we’ll showcase our OpenTofu repo to manage the ALASCA community resources based on the SCS-mandated Domain Manager role. It is accompanied by RacStack (formerly known as Raclette Billing Dashboard) to monitor actual resource usage.

We’ll also talk about our autoscaling GitLab and Woodpecker CI runners, as another example of an SCS-IaaS based application – and how we managed to DoS our cloud within the first week of bringing them to prod.

Users might know our GitLab projects, docs pages and are happy to pull from our registries. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg – we’ll visualize the suprising number of infrastructure services that are needed to run ALASCA and support our projects, and how we hope to increase transparency and reproducibility in the future.