Dear ALASCA Community,
Today you receive the 1st ALASCA Community Digest of the new year. We have lots of news about our projects, upcoming events, such as our ALASCA Tech Talks or the 3rd ALASCA Summit, as well as new developments in our organisation for you.
We also warmly welcome our latest ALASCA project:
And now: Have fun reading - if you have any feedback or questions, get in touch with us! ☕
Cheers,
your ALASCA team
New community manager
With a smile and a tear in our eye, we would like to announce that ALASCA will be accompanied by a new Community Manager from the beginning of the year. To our regret, Ariane Segelitz-Karsten has decided to move on to new shores and is handing over the baton to Helena Ott. In her new role, Helena will be the contact person for all organisational matters within the association and will provide us with reliable support for many tasks, such as member administration, managing our communication channels and our governance processes. We would like to thank Ariane for her outstanding work for ALASCA and wish her all the best in her new role.
Events for the year 2026
ALASCA Summit
On 3 and 4 November 2025, we organised our 2nd ALASCA Summit here in Dresden and would like to thank you once again as part of our ALASCA Digest for the outstanding support of our community in organising such an event together. With a total of around 200 visitors, we are delighted that our community is growing steadily.
If you would like to reminisce, you are welcome to watch our video full of highlights of the ALASCA Summit 2025 . We are also looking forward to showing you the talks and discussions of our speakers.
Save the Date: ALASCA Summit 2026
We really stepped on the gas in the last few weeks before Christmas and pushed ahead with the preparations for the next ALASCA Summit. Today we can announce: The 3rd ALASCA Summit will take place on 3 and 4 November 2026 as usual in Dresden. Due to the great interest in our event (which we are very pleased about), we will be moving to a larger location, so this year our Summit will take place in the Mighty Twice Hotel .
Further information will follow soon. If you don't want to miss anything, you are welcome to subscribe to our ALASCA Summit mailing list: https://lists.alasca.cloud/postorius/lists/summit.lists.alasca.cloud/
Hackathon on „SCS-compliant Yaook-based OpenStack“
We would like to invite you to our hackathon in Hamburg on 26 February, which we are organising together with Dataport.
The aim of the hackathon is to simplify and automate the operation of a SCS-IaaS compliant Yaook-based OpenStack instance with the aim of positioning Yaook as a further reference implementation of the SCS IaaS standard and thus diversifying and jointly advancing the SCS ecosystem.
So if you want to learn about the development of a Yaook Operator or the SCS-IaaS standard, this is the right place for you and we look forward to your participation.
You want to be there? You can register via the following link: https://scs-hackathon.dsecurecloud.de/dataport/scs-hackathon/.
You can find all other relevant information in our pad: https://input.scs.community/scs-operator-hackathon?#
See you in Hamburg!
Save the Date: ALASCA FOCIS Hackathon Stuttgart
We are delighted to be organising another ALASCA FOCIS Hackathon for our community this year. Like last year, it will take place in Stuttgart and - because it was so nice - again in combination with the summer party of our member UhuruTec.
Mark the 1st and 2nd July in your calendars! We're looking forward to it and hope to see many of you in Stuttgart again this summer!
Further information and a link to registration will follow in the coming weeks!
Update from our Technical Steering Committee (TSC)
In December, the TSC and those responsible for the project discussed possible Community Goals for 2026. The Community Goals were created last year as a measure to support the technical development of our projects towards reaching Glacier Stage . For 2025, the goal was to create an Install Guide for all our projects - a goal that each of our projects have achieved. For 2026, the TSC and the project representatives agreed that all open source projects should have an SBOM or the ability to generate an SBOM by the end of the year. SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials) list all commercial and free software components of a product. They create transparency about dependencies on third-party components and support manufacturers, security researchers and professional users in vulnerability monitoring.
We also discussed how to deal with security issues under embargo and how we want to issue security advisories. Of course, the results still need to be implemented. For the time being, security issues should be created as confidential issues in the respective project repositories.
Progress and news from our ALASCA funding project FOCIS
A lot has also happened in our FOCIS funding project during the last couple of months. Among other things, we have been able to provide our community with a few services for collaborative work, including a HedgeDoc, which can be accessed at pads.alasca.cloud.
We would also like to take the opportunity to inform you about our newly established mailing lists. Please subscribe to the mailing list relevant to you so that you don't miss any more news. Here you will only receive information on the overarching topics and can of course easily unsubscribe at any time.
Community: https://lists.alasca.cloud/postorius/lists/community.lists.alasca.cloud/
In addition to the ALASCA Community Digest, all news that could be of interest to the ALASCA community can be shared here.ALASCA Tech-Talk: https://lists.alasca.cloud/postorius/lists/tech-talks.lists.alasca.cloud
Find out here which ALASCA Tech-Talks are coming up soon and receive the dial-in details and a calendar entry directly in your mailbox.ALASCA Summit: https://lists.alasca.cloud/postorius/lists/tech-talks.lists.alasca.cloud/
You don't want to miss anything about our ALASCA Summit? Then this is your mailing list. Here you will find information about the Call for Contributions, our programme, planned community events around the Summit and more...
For some time now, there has also been an official page for the ALASCA Documentation, where you can find information about our FOCIS project, our open source projects, the TSC guidelines and the application process for new projects.
On a technical level, the FOCIS team was able to collate the conditions that need to be met for the successful installation of an SCS-compliant OpenStacks with Yaook. In addition, improvements were made to the Yaook Tempest Operator and work continued on the SCS certification structure.
The FOCIS team is also actively involved in the organisation and implementation of topic-related hackathons. At an OpenDesk install party last October, they were able to develop valuable suggestions for improving the OpenDesk documentation, which were subsequently adopted. They are also in the process of organising various hackathons and technical workshops.
Upcoming ALASCA Tech Talks in Q1 2026
The pipeline for our Tech Talks 2026 is already well filled and you can look forward to the following speakers and topics:
27 February 2026: “Running Yaook on internal network with bonded interfaces to double the bandwidth: Lessons learned”, Martin Pilka & Matus Jenca (DNation)
27 March 2026: “Standardised observability at scale with uMon “, Marc Schöchlin , Technical Lead uStack IaaS and uMon Observability (Uhurutec)
You can watch missed ALASCA Tech Talks afterwards on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@alasca_e.V.
Do you have a technical topic that you would like to share with the open source cloud community? Then we look forward to hearing from you and your project.
News from our open source projects
Last but not least, we would like to inform you about news from our projects:
Arko
The following has happened at Arko since the last ALASCA Community Digest:
Arko now also has its own project logo (see left)
The project team has been expanded to include a new active developer who is working on important updates and bug fixes.
Dashboards for OpenStack and Ceph have been added.
At the request of users, Arko now supports air-gapped installations.
We have planned and started the process of transferring the Arko repositories to their new location in the ALASCA Gitlab.
Yaook
In the Yaook project we can inform you about the following project updates:
We have introduced a new release management system, use semver there and now have release notes, which can be viewed at https://docs.yaook.cloud/releasenotes.html
Part of the project team is working on optimising the image build process and reusing as much as possible -> one Dockerfile per service image
The creation of an SBOM is also integrated into the image build process
The upgrade to RabbitMQ 4.2 has been completed
Documents for creating an operator have been added - a result of the ALASCA Summit 2025
Many different document improvements have been made, e.g. for Octavia or RabbitMQ
Overwriting the enforce_scope and enforce_new_defaults policies is now permitted - Preparation for new policy formats
Support for additional services added to OpenStack Release 2025.1, support for OpenStack 2023.1 has been discontinued
A fix has been made for CVE-2025-14758: MariaDB with IPv6 enables TLS for replication → This was the first security issue with Yaook, which our project team handled excellently.
Tarook
Tarook released version 11.0 in the fourth quarter of 2025 as planned. This contains the following improvements and enhancements:
Further development of freely configurable values for various helmet charts
Improvement of the load balancing solution so that the NAT routing of the source IP can be deactivated in the front end and a similar effect is achieved as with a direct server return
Optional use of audit logs for Kubernetes
General optimisation and clean-up of the project code
Improving documentation
More exciting news
A lot has also happened on our GitLab. In the spirit of open source, we have now made all ALASCA logos, including the general ALASCA logo, but also the ALASCA FOCIS logo, the ALASCA Summit logo and the ALASCA Tech-Talk logo as well as the logos of all our projects, available to our community for free download. Here you can access our logos. You are welcome to integrate them into your communication about ALASCA or the associated open source projects at any time. We would just like to ask you to take a look at the Terms of use and to always observe these when using the ALASCA logos and project logos. In addition, we have the Application and onboarding process for future projects in a clear diagram and have also made this available to our community on GitLab.
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 or use the mailing list above.
Until next time, we wish you a good time.
Your ALASCA Team
