The OpenStack Community in Germany – DOST

The open source project OpenStack provides software for cloud computing for example to virtualize the infrastructure with their component’s storage, network and compute. But with OpenStack you can also operate the identification and authentication modules in the cloud.
The community is developing the software in a continuous process, in Germany as well. And how lively the community in Germany is showed at the DOST – the German OpenStack days powered by B1 Systems – in Berlin September the 24th till 26th 300 attendees met for three days to learn even more about OpenStack.

The talks showed several use cases and projects based on OpenStack infrastructure, i.e. Christoph Streit from ScaleUp Technologies presented a case where an edge cloud project based on OpenStack was implemented in Vietnam in a textile factory. Or Ulrich Keller from the WWK Lebensversicherung talked about how a two-person-team gets an insurance company cloud ready with OpenStack and Rancher. Also, products, their development and improvements were shown, for instance the multi cloud management platform from meshcloud was presented by Christina Kraus.

The OpenStack community is working, inventing and improving all the time. So were the newest inventions introduced at the DOST by Ralf Dannert from SUSE like the 2.0 release from Airship in August 2019 (find the release here).

At the second conference day, Ceph was topic in most of the talks. Christian Berendt from Betacloud Solutions talked about Ceph in hyper convergent infrastructures to provide closely interlinked resources from the areas of compute, storage and network together on standard hardware with COTS components. Michel Raabe from B1 Systems showed how Ceph backups were implemented with the help of external tools and with Ceph on-board tools such as ‘rbd export’ or ‘rbd-mirror’. And, Danny Al-Gaaf from Deutsche Telekom presented how the Ceph community fixed security issues and how important it is that every issue is reported to the community. His advice: only use Nautilus! There are a lot of bugs fixed. (here)

My personal highlight was the talk from Sandro Kreten from the Umweltcampus Birkenfeld. His topic was how to save more than 1 % of overall energy consumption in containerized data centers. He showed several tricks how everybody can save energy with hardware components and little changes in software. I understand cloud as a sustainable system and thinking about saving energy is an important topic for the future!

All in once the DOST was a varied conference with great talks, great attendees and great food! I would have liked to have longer breaks to visit the booths of the sponsors more intensively. But the evening event at the boat was magnificent.

 

Friederike Zelke / Cloudical