Dear Community,
...and with that Q1 of this year is coming to an end. We hope you had a great first quarter - we've had a lot going on again and are looking forward to telling you about it in this issue:
1) Update on the ALASCA Summit 2025
2) Information about the very first hackathon
3) Update on our funding project FOCIS
4) Report from the ALASCA RoundTable on Digital Sovereignty
5) News from ALASCA's Technical Steering Committee
6) Insights into the current developments of our open source projects Yaook, Yake and Krake
7) News about the ALASCA TechTalks
8) More exciting news
We hope you enjoy reading this issue - and let us know what you think. ☕
Cheers, your ALASCA-Team
1) ALASCA Summit 2025: Date - Location - Call for Contributions
Preparations for the ALASCA Summit 2025 under the motto "Not from Alaska. From Europe. Built for Europe's Cloud Future" are in full swing - and we look forward to keeping you up to date with all the developments happening in the coming weeks and months.
Here are the first key facts that you should definitely remember:
When? 3 - 4 November 2025
Where? German Hygiene Museum, Dresden
What? Everything to do with digital sovereignty for Europe - from new technologies to the protection of European values such as data protection, data sovereignty and open standards
Stay tuned for the possibility to register.
Call for Contributions
The ALASCA Summit feeds off of your contributions! We kindly ask you to submit you ideas by 30 May. We are looking for:
Presentations (30 min.) or Lightning Talks (10 min.)
Workshops (half-day)
Please make use of our contact form on our official summit site and feel free to get in touch if you have any questions in advance. We look forward to your submissions!
Sponsors wanted!
Just like last year, we are looking for sponsors for the ALASCA Summit. All of the information about our sponsorship packages can also be found on our summit site.
2) The first ALASCA Hackathon: Register now!
For those of you who don't live in the Dresden area and would like to see an ALASCA event in another corner of the country: Here it comes!
As part of our funding project ALASCA FOCIS we are curretly organising our first Hackathon on 03 and 04 June 2025 near Stuttgart (the exact location will follow) and would like to invite you to join us.
While we primarily want to come together as a community and have a great time, we want to use the two days efficiently and work together towards concrete results in the following subject areas:
Further development of our open source projects Yaook, Krake and Yake
Advancing the integration of the SCS standards
Improving the technical documentation of our projects
Want to hear the icing on cake? Our member UhuruTec invites us to its big summer party on the evening of 3 June - We are very much looking forward to it!
Would you like to take part? Then register now free of charge: https://pretix.eu/focis/alasca/
Sponsors wanted!
As a non-profit organisation, we are dependent on your support. If you can imagine supporting our Hackathon with a small sponsorship, please contact us. You can do so here.
3) FOCIS in action: Launch of our Funding Project
As you may have heard, last year ALASCA received a grant of 734,000 Euros from the Saxon State Ministry of Economic Affairs, Labour and Transport (SMWA) to strengthen digital sovereignty in Saxony - what a milestone!
Specifically, the further development of ALASCA's technology stack, incorporating the SCS standards, is to be driven forward and piloted in Saxon companies and public institutions as part of the funding programme. In addition, user-friendly documentation for the installation, operation and development of open source technologies is to be created and expanded. Corresponding knowledge transfer and dialogue with various Saxon stakeholders round off the project.
The project now has a name (FOCIS - Free and Open Cloud Initiative Saxony) and two employees (welcome, Helena and Matthias!) - and work could officially begin.
The FOCIS team dedicated the first quarter primarily to the strategic direction and the definition of milestones (such as the Hackathon and an initial pilot of the ALASCA technology stack in September 2025). In addition, a separate logo was designed for FOCIS and all information about the project was published on the ALASCA website . As improving the documentation of ALASCA's open source projects plays a fundamental role in FOCIS, the team also tests the documentation of the projects to identify any gaps.
4) ALASCA's RoundTable on Digital Sovereignty in Berlin
The topic of digital sovereignty and the associated importance of using open source technologies is gaining more and more attention - and we are loving it. We took the discussions further with an ALASCA roundtable in March.
Within our RoundTable we discussed the following questions:
How do we create a stable, sovereign digital infrastructure for Europe?
What challenges do we need to overcome to ensure long-term success?
How can business, politics and research work even more closely together?
The event brought together stakeholders from industry and politics and together we looked at the role of European initiatives such as GAIA-X, IPCEI-CIS, Sovereign Cloud Stack, Manufacturing-X, 8ra - Cloud-Edge Continuum and others - after all, the path to digital sovereignty is a joint effort.
We would like to thank all participants for the great exchange. You can find more information in the article "The European path to sovereignty" (Susanne Ehneß, eGovernment) and in a comprehensive white paper that we are currently working on, which will appear in May.
5) News from the Technical Steering Committee
In the last Community Digest we told you about the election of the first official ALASCA TSC and since then the work of the TSC has been in full swing. The focus is on developing the admission process for new open source projects. As a reminder, the TSC is responsible for assessing and accepting projects that would like to join ALASCA (although the Board retains a veto right).
For this purpose, criteria and a catalogue of questions are being developed - based on past workshops with ALASCA members, among other things - which potential projects can use to apply. A corresponding form will be made available on GitLab in a separate ALASCA organisation that is currently being set up.
In addition, the TSC worked with ALASCA's open source projects to discuss community goals that the projects should work towards. This is necessary to ensure that the projects are continuously developed, remain operational and are easily accessible for users and contributors. One of the first goals should therefore be the creation of a Getting Started Guide.
6) News from our open source projects
Yaook
The Yaook community focussed on the following topics in the first quarter:
Support for Horizon in versions zed, 2023.1, 2023.2, 2024.1, 2024.2
Support for newer Openstack versions for Nova, Ironic, Glance, Barbican, Ceilometer, Keystone, Cinder (until 2024.1)
Octavia is now supported
new mariadb version is supported
Update to OVN version 24.03
Some improvements to OVN have been added
Recommended settings for oslo.messaging are set. This still leads to errors in existing clusters - the team is currently working on this.
In addition, the community has been working on the fork of Tarook - the Kubernetes part of the project. The background to this is that both the Yaook operators and the Kubernetes distribution, which was previously included in Yaook, were used independently of each other in different contexts. The transition requires technical and organisational adjustments, for example with regard to the GitLab structure.
In addition to the spin-off, technical developments have also taken place at Tarook:
Nothing since release v9.0 as a fixed and only dependency
Configuration based on Nix
IPv6 support
The following topics are also in progress:
CNCF certification
Support for OVN-based OpenStack environments
Freely configurable helmet chart values
Krake
Krake has a new website! In the first quarter, the Krake community was in intensive dialogue with ALASCA's design and marketing team to create not only a website for the project itself, but also a blueprint for all other open source projects.
In addition to an overview of Krake's functionalities and features, it was also important to show specific use cases and provide community information for users and contributors. Of course, the visual representation of the (always hard-working) Krake in different scenarios was also a must.
Take a look at the page of Krake with pleasure.
Yake
Yake is currently doing what it is supposed to do very well - and so the Yake community had the opportunity to dedicate itself to the initial deployment of the tool. The aim is to greatly automate and simplify this process. To this end, yake-ansible is currently being developed (see the Repository).
In addition, the Gardener updates for Yake are being rolled out - Yake is currently running version 1.116, which is also the last stable release of Gardener.
7) It's tech talk season again!
After an extended winter break, we have started a new round of our ALASCA Tech Talks lively and motivated and have already had two great sessions with you:
Also get ready for our tech talk in April: On 25 April, we welcome Michelle Fuchs from Pacifico Digital Exploration, who will introduce us to raclette - an open source tool for the uncomplicated creation of scalable UIs for CLI tools (including a demo using Krake).
You can find all information about this and past Tech Talks here.
8) Further news
ALASCA has already travelled to two events in the first quarter:
Of course, we couldn't miss CloudFest at Europapark - and in addition to riding the rollercoasters, we took the opportunity for a small, cheerful ALASCA Community Meetup, where we got an update from the TSC and chatted about other club activities. It was great to see some faces from our community in person!
We were also at the FOSSBackstage in Berlin with ALASCA. This event is all about open source and everything that is not directly related to code - and so we took the opportunity to present ALASCA and, in particular, to discuss community and governance aspects and exchange ideas with other organisations and foundations.
Register for ALASCA Community Digest
Do you have any questions or comments about our news? Then please contact us via hello@alasca.cloud We look forward to hearing from you.
If you would like to receive the ALASCA Community Digest directly in your mailbox every quarter, you are welcome to subscribe to the newsletter mailing list using the contact form below.
Until next time, we wish you a good time.
