Dear ALASCA community,
our last ALASCA-Digest is not that long ago and yet we already have a full load of news for you today. This time we are pleased to be able to inform you about the following points:
Announcement of our 2nd ALASCA Community Hackathon in Stuttgart
Insights into the current developments of our open source projects
Other exciting news, including.
Mastodon
Podcast
Before we go into the digest, we would like to welcome our two new members:
We are delighted to have you on board.
And now: Have fun browsing! ☕
Cheers,
your ALASCA-Team
Update on our new open source projects
We are very pleased to announce that ALASCA is now managing 7 open source projects and would like to give you a short update on the 2 newest projects.
Our minimal IaaS for strong client separation (formerly known as SCL) has now officially been given the name Seconlay. We have also been able to finalise the onboarding of the Ixpect project.
Seconlay
We are delighted to officially present the SCL project, which joined us at the end of 2025, under its new name Seconlay. Seconlay - the compact IaaS layer for strong client separation - was largely driven by our founding member secunet Security Networks AG. Ultimately, the initiative to make Seconlay an open source project and to place it in the care of our association also goes back to our partners at secunet.
“Seconlay exemplifies our understanding of open source in the cloud environment. The project addresses a concrete problem, secure client separation with minimal system complexity, and we have made a conscious decision to release this work and place it in the right hands. ALASCA is doing important work for an open, operable cloud infrastructure in Germany, and I am pleased that Seconlay has found a good place there.” - Kai Martius, CTO of secunet Security Networks AG
We are very pleased with the trust placed in us by our members and contributors. Seconlay is now technically fully onboarded, has been given a place on the alasca.cloud and is now just waiting for a logo.
IXpect
We are pleased to welcome a new project to ALASCA and would like to introduce you to the IXpect project brought to ALASCA by DD-IX.
Not all types of packets should arrive in a local network. The peering LAN of an Internet Exchange Point (IXP) is particularly challenging here, as it brings together many different network operators. To this end, IXpect can analyse Layer 2 packets from network devices, PCAP files or packets packed directly into VxLAN. It analyses so-called BUM traffic (Broadcast, Unknown Unicast, Multicast), for example packets from dynamic routing protocols or IPv6 router advertisements. The unwanted packets originate from incorrectly configured routers of the connected peers. IXpect consists of various modules that can recognise different types of errors. The events generated by the modules are aggregated and transmitted to the IXP operator as notifications.
“With the transfer to ALASCA e.V., we are further developing IXpect into a project independent of DD-IX. This should particularly appeal to developers and network engineers outside the DD-IX community to participate in the further development of IXpect.” - Tassilo Tanneberger, Chairman of the Board of DD-IX e.V.
Update ALASCA Summit 2026
Call for Contibution open until 31 July
Preparations for this year's ALASCA Summit are already in full swing and so we were able to go live with our official Call for Contribution a few weeks ago and cordially invite you all to submit topics and talks. This year, the ALASCA Summit will be held under the motto With C - as in Community. Breaking down technical silos united for a digitally sovereign Europe and we want to actively pursue the goal of real cooperation, even across technical, organisational and national borders.
We would be delighted if you could support us again this year with exciting submissions so that together we can put together a great programme for our community. If you have a new project, an exciting use case or classic lessons learnt - keep them coming! As you all know from previous years, this year we are once again offering short and snappy lightning talks, longer presentations and workshops, for which you are welcome to submit your topics by 31 July 2026.
OpenInfra Foundation
In the spirit of collaboration across organisational boundaries, there will be a parallel track at our ALASCA Summit this year, to which we can look forward to a variety of talks and contributions from the community around the OpenInfra Foundation.
It's great for us to see how our ALASCA community and the interest in our events continues to grow and we're really pleased to be able to work with parallel tracks within our summits and also involve other communities!
Further information regarding our Call for Contribution can be found on our website.
Registration & room contingent
Register now for the ALASCA Summit free of charge. Early registration helps us with the organisation and gives us a certain degree of planning security. And you have your ticket for sure!
We would also like to inform you that we Hotel rooms reserved at the Mighty Twice Hotel at discounted rates have. If you would like to have a short and comfortable way to the Summit location, please register by 31.07.2026 a room in the Mighty Twice Hotel secure.
ALASCA Community Hackathon #2 in Stuttgart
In addition to the ALASCA Summit, we are also working on various events and formats for our community around it. And since our 1st ALASCA Community Hackathon was a complete success last year, we are delighted to be able to organise it again this year.
When and where
We will be in Stuttgart-Vaihingen on 1 and 2 July in the Urban Spaces to spend two days working on our open source projects, developing them further and finalising open issues. As last year, we are expecting around 45 participants and will then work together in smaller groups on various topics and projects.
Please get in touch here if you would like to take part in this hackathon.
Topics?
At the moment we are still looking for a few topics to work on. So if you would like to contribute a topic that you would like to work on in a focus group during the hackathon, you are very welcome to contact us via the hello@alasca.cloud. to get in touch with us.
Supporting programme & UhuruTec summer party
A wonderful evening event has already been organised for the evening of the first day of the hackathon. As last year, all hackathon participants are once again cordially invited to the summer party organised by our member UhuruTec. The summer party will take place directly after our hacking session at the same location. When you register, please let us know whether you would like to attend the summer party so that we can provide UhuruTec with a number of participants.
On the evening before, 30 June, there will again be an informal get-together for all those arriving the day before. We will meet for this at around 19:30 in the Restaurant Schwarzbach in Stuttgart-Vaihingen for a get-together and dinner.
We are very much looking forward to a great event and would like to thank UhuruTec in advance for their renewed hospitality!
Update from our funding project FOCIS
Our FOCIS funding project is also making steady progress and the focus of our last quarter was on outreach - which means the team was out and about a lot!
At the end of February, a hackathon was organised in Hamburg together with Dataport, which focused on understanding the SCS IaaS compliance requirements and translating them into concrete measures for Yaook developers and administrators. In the course of this, a draft for a Yaook operator was created in order to plan the SCS compliance checks as recurring tasks. In addition, we were able to show that it is possible to manage OpenStack resources as Kubernetes resources within the Yaook cluster. To top it all off, we were able to pool the knowledge of the community in Hamburg and improve the default settings for running end-to-end tests on OpenStack clouds, as requested by SCS.
In March, parts of our FOCIS team travelled to the FOSS Backstage, where Daniel Gerber (ALASCA FOCIS) also gave a presentation on the topic of Saxony in Action: Supporting a Lasting FOSS Foundation could hold. If you are interested, you are welcome to watch this lecture here look at. FOSS Backstage was once again a very valuable event and we were able to learn a lot from the open source ecosystem that goes beyond pure coding.
The Chemnitz Linux Days also took place at the end of March, where we as ALASCA were well represented this year with our own stand, a presentation and a workshop. The compact insight given by Daniel into the origins, mission and activities of our association met with great interest and you are welcome to download it. here can be viewed. In our workshop, the FOCIS team focussed on the installation of our Tarook project on a Sovereign Cloud Stack-compatible cloud. The sovereign workplace software openDesk from ZenDiS (Centre for Digital Sovereignty) was then jointly installed in this cluster.
It was a really successful event for us and it's always nice to meet our community again at events like this.
In addition, the focus continues to be on the daily (further) development of our open source projects and the continuous integration of SCS standards, largely driven by the linking and coordination of the SIG Standardisation/Certification by ALASCA FOCIS project manager Matthias Büchse. ALASCA FOCIS is also currently supporting the ongoing collaboration with our Yake project with the aim of ultimately making it available on our ALASCA cluster.
Update from our Technical Steering Committee
In February, we received the go-ahead for a Community Build of the Thanos Helmet Chart given. In addition, we are in the process of assuming project responsibility for Glacier projects to define. Our ALASCA projects have started work on the SBOM Community Goal (see our last digest).
News from our open source projects
The teams behind our open source projects were once again hard at work in the last quarter. Now let's move on to the updates:
Arko
The following has happened at Arko since the last ALASCA Community Digest:
We are participating in a small ALASCA project to provide a custom helmet chart for Thanos, which Arko is dependent on due to licence changes at Bitnami.
We also presented Arko and ALASCA as part of a talk at the Open Sovereign Cloud Day at KubeCon in Amsterdam
Tarook
Tarook successfully released versions v12.0 and v12.1 in the first quarter of 2026. Both versions offer a range of enhancements and improvements:
Support for Kubernetes v1.34 and v1.35 added
Added support for custom hooks for pre-drain and post-uncordon actions
Added management of the used containerd version on Kubernetes nodes
Updated Helm charts for multiple managed Kubernetes components
Affinity and tolerances for multiple Kubernetes components improved
Increased flexibility thanks to freely configurable values for multiple helmet charts
More detailed configuration options for booting instances from volumes
Extension of the Wireguard tunnel to enable an optional connection to the Kubernetes pod and service network
Improved modularisation and clean-up of the code base
Extension of the documentation
Yaook
- In the Yaook project we can inform you about the following project updates:
- Add OVN driver to Octavia
- Introduction of support for AMD SEV-SNP for Nova instances from version 2024.2
- Nearly all OpenStack images created by yaook now have an SBOM; in addition, the build process has been extensively restructured to reduce code duplication and provide a better overview
- The process to improve the patch process for the images has been started; the first images now use the new approach
- Update of the documentation and scripts for RabbitMQ 4
- Adding a hotfix for OSSA-2026-004 in the Glance image service
- Corrections/adjustments for Octavia
- Add backup support for Netbox
- Job added to recognise differences between neutron and OVN
- Some fixes to make the RabbitMQ setup more stable when redeploying nodes. OVN driver added to Octavia
- Introduction of support for AMD SEV-SNP for Nova instances from version 2024.2
- Nearly all OpenStack images created by yaook now have an SBOM; in addition, the build process has been extensively restructured to reduce code duplication and provide a better overview
- The process to improve the patch process for the images has been started; the first images now use the new approach
- Update of the documentation and scripts for RabbitMQ 4
- Adding a hotfix for OSSA-2026-004 in the Glance image service
- Corrections
ALASCA Tech-Talk
Exciting TechTalks from our ALASCA community await you again in the second quarter of 2026.
In April you can look forward to Vasu Chandrasekhara, Advisor for the NeoNephos Foundation. In his TechTalk, he will discuss the challenges of the IPCEI, explain some of the technical aspects of NeoNephos and present a project that takes a new, innovative approach.
So stay tuned and tune in to our April Tech Talk on 24 April 2026.
May also has an exciting topic in store for you: The technical presentation of our new ALASCA project IXpect. If you are interested in the principles, the specific technical architecture and the deployment of IXpect, you should definitely tune in in May. We also have a demo of the project waiting for you.
So if you would like to see IXpect live in action, you are cordially invited to our Tech Talk on 29 May.
More news
ALASCA is on MASTODON
A lot has also happened here in the last few months and we have continued to work on various measures to expand the communication channels and general awareness of ALASCA. As part of this, we set up a Mastodon account for ALASCA in Q1 of 2026, on which we already have an impressive 63 followers. We would be delighted if you would also actively support us on this communication channel, follow us there and interact with our posts. You can find our account under the name @alasca@mastodon.social.
ALASCA at the KubeCon
In addition, ALASCA was represented by our member dNation in a presentation at the Open Sovereign Cloud Day at KubeCon in March. We are very happy when our members represent our association at events where we cannot be present ourselves and would like to thank dNation for their commitment!
SONiC Community Build
Furthermore, we are currently working on creating a well-functioning and reliable SONiC community build from our ALASCA community (Scomb). The pain points associated with SONiC are also known in our community and there is an increasing interest in trying to get the project up and running. We would be delighted to have your support and would like to invite you to get involved. Please have a look at our Scomb GitLab Repository and join the Mailing list and the Matrix Channel so as not to miss any important information.
ALASCA Podcast
Last but not least, at the end of our Community Digest, we would like to announce a new format that we have been working hard to realise in recent months. Together with our member UhuruTec, ALASCA now has a podcast - the ALASCA OpenSnac. This podcast will be created from within our community and will focus on all the topics that concern the open source cloud infrastructure industry on a daily basis. With OpenSnac, we would like to create a space in which open conversations and differentiated perspectives are allowed and even encouraged, and various guests from the industry are welcome. We're starting off slowly with one episode per quarter and look forward to seeing where our journey together takes us. So far, we've released a short teaser about the background of the podcast and a first episode with an all-round introduction to ALASCA and we'd love to hear your feedback!
In line with our guiding principle, we also realise the podcast completely on an open source basis. It is hosted on Castopod and we use open podcast directories such as fyyd.de and podcastindex.org. You can easily subscribe to our podcast by copying the RSS feed into the podcast app of your choice.
You can find all information about our podcast here. Have fun listening!
Thank you for your interest, your support and see you soon - online or in person.
