Dear Community,
How is it August already? As you may have noticed, there wasn't a newsletter for Q1. But no worries (and please forgive us!) - we will serve you all the interesting things that happened in the first half of 2024 with this digest:
- An update on the ALASCA Summit 2024
- ALASCA's new members and collaborations within the open source community
- Our participation at the Sächsischer Digitalpreis 2024 (spoiler: we won!)
- Events ALASCA has attended in the past months
- A brief look on this year's ALASCA Tech Talks
- … and of course updates from our open source projects Yaook, Yake, and Krake
Enjoy this issue and please let us know how you like the digest format!
Cheers,
your ALASCA team
ALASCA Summit 2024
We are in the midst of preparations for the first ALASCA Summit, taking place on October 29 and 30 2024 at the Deutsche Hygiene Museum in Dresden! 🎉
We're currently putting all our energy and passion into the planning and organisation to be able to offer you a valuable event on the topics of open source, cloud and digital sovereignty - all in the spirit of this year's motto: Beyond Boundaries: Shaping Europe's digital future together.
Find our program here and learn more about the interesting talks and practical workshops you can expect at the summit.
Want to attend? Registration is now open - get yours here for free!
ALASCA keeps growing!
We're happy to welcome UhuruTec AG as a new member! The people behind UhuruTec are experts in the field of private cloud solutions and true open source enthusiasts - thank you for supporting us in our mission to promote digital sovereignty. It's great to have you on board!
Furthermore, ALASCA has become an associate member of the OpenInfra Foundation! We deeply appreciate the work that the OpenInfra-community is doing for the open source landscape; it's a great joy for us to use OpenStack technologies on the one hand, and also to enrich the projects by developing additional tooling (such as Yaook) on the other hand.
Speaking of: Yaook is now listed as a project of the OpenInfra Universe As a lifecycle management tool for OpenStack, Yaook provides additional support for DevOps-teams working with OpenStack. The inclusion in the OpenInfra Universe not only increases Yaook's visibility, but also highlights the project’s significance for building digitally sovereign infrastructures.
Sächsischer Digitalpreis 2024
For the second time, the state of Saxony awarded the Sächsische Digitalpreis. This year’s focus was on “Digital solutions in the field of raw materials and energy” – and we took our chance to apply with Krake in the category Open Source.
The main objective of Krake is energy optimization of compute jobs within a distrib-uted infrastructure: The open source tool is continuously checking energy-related circum-stances at different locations within the infrastructure and automatically moves the work-loads to where energy efficiency is at its highest (think of a very busy kraken using all its arms simultaneously to move small blocks from A to B 🐙). This way, Krake can reduce the CO2-print - especially of applications that use a lot of energy, such as AI - significantly.
After being evaluated by a jury of experts, it all came down to a public voting - and we won! We are SO happy and proud that Krake's potential for making our digital transformation more sustainable is being recognized and acknowledged.
A massive THANK YOU goes out to the people behind the Sächsische Digitalpreis for bring-ing attention to such an important topic and supporting so many promising projects; to eve-ryone who voted for us - it really means the world to us! 💚; and of course to the community behind Krake. We truly appreciate your inspiring passion and your tireless efforts. This wouldn't have been possible without you.
Event Recap
For ALASCA, this year's event season started in March: The working group Cloud Trans-formation of Silicon Saxony came together to discuss the topic Strong community despite competition: How cloud ecosystems can work on an open source basis. Several members of ALASCA (Marius Feldmann/Cloud&Heat and ALASCA chairman, Steph-an Ilaender/STACKIT, and Kai Martius/secunet) shared their experiences with FOSS (Free and open-source software) and debated how these technologies will shape our digital future. Find the recording (only in German) here.
Not even a week later the next event was up: The DecompileD Conference in Dresden - something we definitely couldn't miss! It was a pleasure for us not only to highlight the importance of open source and digital sovereignty but to do this alongside Mirko Swillus from the Sovereign Tech Fund .
In March another highlight waiting was for us: CloudFest 2024 in the EuropaPark Rust! ALASCA was represented by several of our members (STACKIT, UhuruTec, 23Technologies and Cloud&Heat Technologies). The best part for us was the rollercoasters the endless amount of enthusiasm and cheerfulness from all participants. The encounters with members of other communities (such as the Sovereign Cloud Stack) and discussing latest cloud developments in such a special setting is a unique experience that we cherish.
In May, we went to Berlin to visit the SCS Summit which was combined with the OpenInfra Day . At the SCS Summit, we attended highly engaging talks and discussions, as for example on developments of open standards for cloud infrastructures. At the OpenInfra Day, our chair Marius Feldmann gave a pitch with an overview of ALASCA. Additionally, we had many inter-esting discussions at our stand afterwards, and we also had the chance to briefly talk about Yaook and Krake in the LOKI (Linux, OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure) panel.
In June, our Deputy Chair Josephine Seifert presented a lecture on ALASCA during the chair session "Cloud Transformation" at the Silicon Saxony Day .
Last but not least, in the same month we participated in the Output.DD - an event organized by the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of Dres-den, where we had the opportunity to talk to many students about ALASCA. It was quite in-teresting to see the very different levels of knowledge on the topic of digital sovereignty; we were therefore all the more pleased to chat with the next generation of IT professionals about this important topic and answer their curious questions.
ALASCA Tech-Talks
One of our favorite things to do is talking tech - and the first half of 2024 didn't disappoint!
It was packed with interesting presentations and discussions in our ALASCA Tech-Talks cen-tered around cloud infrastructures, open source solutions and digital sovereignty. Thank you to our brilliant guest speakers and to everyone who joins us!
Here's an overview of all the Tech-Talks we’ve had so far in 2024 including links to the recordings:
Highlights from our Open Source Projects
The Yaookcommunity has been busy with different developments for the OpenStack lifecycle man-agement tool. For example, Yaook now supports releases of certain OpenStack services (such as Keystone) and has also implemented some upgrade paths (Ceilometer, Neutron). Further developments in progress are the support of IPv6 - currently for Ironic (Bare Metal Service) - as well as adding further open OpenStack services, such as Designate (DNS as a Service).
Another exciting new feature is Yaook's ability to set up SCS-compliant cloud deployments. In the very last step of the installation - after the OpenStack deployment - Yaook users now have the ability to semi-automatically deploy all the necessary artefacts and configurations to become SCS compliant. This is good news not only for those installing Yaook from scratch, but also for those who already have an existing OpenStack.
The SCS defines and implements open standards for cloud and container infrastructures on an open source basis to ensure the interoperability and portability of different applications and systems. However, SCS conformity is of course optional - users can continue to use Yaook without this configuration.
Learn more about this new feature in our latest Tech Talk.
In the past six months, the Yake (Yet Another Kubernetes Engine) community has looked for ways on how to integrate the new new Gardener Operator .In the future, the Gardener Operator will take over large parts of Gardener's life cycle man-agement, which used to be the main focus of Yake as a Gardener installer itself. Until now, Yake has had its own Helm-based solution for the life cycle management and will soon use Gardener operator for this. Yake's focus will now shift to the management of exten-sions and integrations with services like for authentication or backup. The focus of Yake will now shift to the management of extensions and integrations with services such as authentication or backup.
The Krake community dedicated the first half of 2024 primarily to code and stability improvements. This includes for example bug fixes, adjustments of the Readme and documentation, refactoring and clean-up of Krake Kubernetes files, the integration of the renovate bot in GitLab for better release and package management, the addition of towncrier for creat-ing release notes, as well as general CI/CD pipline improvements. Furthermore, automat-ic cluster deployment (if no suitable k8s cluster is available) is now possible, the applica-tion status “completed” was added, and configmap was added to the “shutdown hook” manifest. We’re also very pleased that Krake was accepted to the GitLab for Open Source Program again.
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Until next time, we wish you a good time.
