FOCIS - Free and Open Cloud Initiative Saxony
This measure is co-financed with tax revenue on the basis of the budget approved by the Saxon state parliament.
At the end of 2024, ALASCA e.V. received a grant from the Saxon State Ministry for Economic Affairs, Labour and Transport (SMWA), which enabled the association to employ four staff members for the first time. The grant, which had previously been scheduled to end on 31 July 2026, has now been extended on a budget-neutral basis until 31 March 2027, thereby enabling the organisation to continue pursuing the objectives set out in the project with the support of the staff employed through the ALASCA FOCIS project. The entire team at ALASCA e.V. would like to express its sincere thanks for the ongoing support from the Free State of Saxony.
Outlook for upcoming activities at ALASCA FOCIS
Over the coming months, until the end of the project’s now-extended duration, the ALASCA FOCIS team is planning to carry out a wide range of activities. Some of these planned objectives are as follows:
- Full installation of the ALASCA open-source project Yake on the ALASCA infrastructure dd8a
- Continuation of the FOCIS demonstrator: OpenStack installation for the ZIH at Dresden University of Technology
- Providing an open CI/CD infrastructure
- Provision of an SCS operator for ALASCA’s open-source project Yaook
- Further development of governance structures and processes within the association (i.e. clear guidelines and role definitions, including responsibilities)
- A clear presentation of all the results achieved in the project on the docs.alasca.cloud
Anyone who would like to find out more about the work of the ALASCA FOCIS team is welcome to attend the next project status update meeting. This will take place on Friday 31 July 2026 at 9.00 am.
Results to date from the ALASCA FOCIS research project
Since the start of the ALASCA FOCIS funding project, the project team has already carried out a wide range of tasks that contribute significantly to achieving the project’s objectives. These include providing ongoing support for the further development of the association’s members Open source projects, to which the team has made a number of upstream contributions to date. The page on ALASCA Documentation, also created by the ALASCA FOCIS team. The overview also provides all the relevant information at a glance regarding the projects based within the association, along with their points of contact and contact details, an overview of the current technical status of the projects, as well as important information regarding various TSC guidelines and the onboarding process for new projects joining the association. General information about the ALASCA FOCIS project, the demonstrator implemented as part of it, and participation in various events can also be found here.
For example, the team put a great deal of effort into the area of community building and knowledge transfer, which is very important for the ALASCA FOCIS project. Since the start of the project, the team has attended a number of relevant events and represented the association in many different contexts through presentations, workshops, exhibition stands and even by organising events themselves. Thanks to the support of the Free State, the ALASCA FOCIS team has so far been able to organise three hackathons for the community, thereby providing a high-quality space for the exchange of knowledge within the ALASCA community. Networking amongst the project communities, as well as with the Executive Board, the Technical Steering Committee, the FOCIS team and related organisations within the ALASCA ecosystem, is always a key priority. Furthermore, the ALASCA FOCIS team played a key role in the organisation, implementation and programme of the ALASCA Summit 2025.
In addition to these event participations, there have been various statements, for example on the Germany Stack or to the European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy as well as an increased number of technical presentations, for example at the ALASCA Tech Talks, the Chemnitz Linux Days and the past SCS Summits . The collaboration with the Sovereign Cloud Stack This represents a key aspect of the work carried out within the FOCIS project, and, in addition to participating in the events, the team was also able to make important substantive contributions to the standards, such as the SCS Compliance Monitor and the conformity checks for an SCS-compatible Kubernetes-as-a-Service. The demonstrator, which was defined as one of the key objectives in the project proposal, also supports collaboration with the Sovereign Cloud Stack and forms an open, operational cloud stack in Saxony that complies with SCS standards.
In the Demonstrator Is this a project carried out in collaboration with our member company based in Saxony? Cloud&Heat Technologies a deployed OpenStack environment, which is managed using the Yaook lifecycle management tool and has a direct connection to the Dresden Internet Exchange (DD-IX) offers. Thanks to the support of the ALASCA FOCIS team, the set-up is compliant with the SCS-compatible Infrastructure-as-a-Service v5.1. Cloud&Heat Technologies donates some of the cloud resources available in the set-up to the association, although these are partly used by the ALASCA FOCIS project itself, for example as a test environment for workshops and hackathons, as well as for the association’s internal production infrastructure. The association makes further resources available to the community and now hosts various open-source projects such as FOSSGIS, Elbforge, fediway and Turing e.V.
In addition, the ALASCA FOCIS team played a key role in supporting the association’s technical governance and infrastructure, for example by setting up and providing various mailing lists and collaborative pads, and by establishing Matrix channels and one Mastodon accounts as well as through the ongoing expansion of the structures within the ALASCA GitLab Name Space (in collaboration with ALASCA’s Technical Steering Committee).
Project team
Project management FOCIS
Communication and documentation specialist
Software Developer
Software Developer
