ALASCA's history.
The foundation in 2022.
Yaook is not only ALASCA's original project, but also laid the foundation for the creation of the association: ALASCA's founding members Cloud&Heat Technologies and STACKIT have been developing the jointly initiated open source tool since the end of 2020; and as the community grew and the tool was increasingly adapted, the desire to decouple Yaook from the two companies and set it up on its own grew - not least in order to promote independent further development.
The idea for ALASCA was born - and with it the clear goal of including other open-source projects that enable the construction and operation of cloud infrastructures in the association alongside Yaook, thereby contributing to strengthening the digital sovereignty of Germany and Europe.
In September 2022, the founding meeting took place in Dresden, at which the seven founding companies Cloud&Heat Technologies, Cyberus Technology, D3TN, dNation, secunet, secustack and STACKIT solemnly and full of motivation sealed the start of ALASCA. A few weeks later - in January 2023 - we finally went public and presented ALASCA to the world for the first time.
ALASCA Tech-Talks.
The launch of ALASCA also saw the creation of the ALASCA Tech Talks - our monthly online format in which open source technologies and other exciting developments from the cloud infrastructure context are presented and discussed.
New projects and a first award.
While ALASCA presented itself at various events such as CloudFest in its first year as an association, work also progressed within the association; this mainly centred on the governance of the association - for example with regard to the establishment of a Technical Steering Committee - as well as the initial preparations for the inclusion of new projects. And so, at the end of 2023, we not only looked back on an exciting first year, but also concluded it with the launch of the second ALASCA project: the Workload Orchestrator Krake officially became part of the association.
The first ALASCA Summit 2024.
2024 was also to be the year in which another major milestone was reached: The first ALASCA Summit took place on 29 and 30 October in Dresden and with around 100 participants, we gathered for two exciting days of presentations, workshops and lots of fun and games at the German Hygiene Museum.
Funded by the Free State of Saxony.
We closed 2024 with another piece of great and groundbreaking news for ALASCA: The association was awarded a grant of 734,000 euros from the Saxon State Ministry of Economic Affairs, Labour and Transport (SMWA), which aims to drive forward the further development, piloting and dissemination of open source software and standards for cloud services within the Saxon ecosystem, with the deepening of our collaboration with the Sovereign Cloud Stack also playing a central role.
The funding project has been running under the name FOCIS since the beginning of 2025 and has also enabled ALASCA to hire its first employees.
