Kurt Garloff – following his time at university as a physicist – has spent his professional career in the open-source IT world. He began as a Linux kernel developer and had the privilege of establishing SUSE Labs in his roles as team lead, department manager and engineering manager. He is convinced that key foundational technology should be developed collaboratively and openly to foster transparency, innovation and trust.
After many years at SUSE, he has spent the last 14 years as part of the Open Infrastructure Community, building cloud (and later container)
infrastructure, and, last but not least, as chief architect for Open Telekom Cloud at T-Systems.
He was a co-founder of the Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) project in late 2019. The OSBA received funding for the SCS project from the German government for the period 2021–24, with Kurt acting as technical lead. SCS aims to achieve a high level of digital sovereignty by establishing joint technical standards (to facilitate provider switching and federation), producing production-grade, openly developed open-source reference implementations, and fostering joint knowledge-building, particularly in relation to operational processes. SCS standardisation is now supported by around 20 organisations in OSBA’s Forum SCS Standards, and the reference implementations are used by more than half a dozen public clouds as well as some private installations.
Kurt supports this through his own company, S7n Cloud Services GmbH.
