The organiser of this international event is the OpenInfra Foundation. With over 110'000 members in 187 countries, the OpenInfra Foundation supports open source communities in the development of tools that infrastructure operators need for data centre clouds, 5G, edge, containers, CI/CD (Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery as well as Contiunous Deployment) and much more.
At this event, experts were able to exchange ideas with colleagues internationally on current topics and technologies such as Kubernetes, CI/CD, challenges in scaling an OpenStack Cloud and many other common areas of interest. stepping stone Ltd gained the following insights from the summit.
Kubernetes
The future of cloud computing clearly lies with Kubernetes. Kubernetes is increasingly becoming an integral part of modern cloud solutions. First and foremost from the perspective of customers, who can deploy their applications independently and benefit from the great stability and flexibility of container solutions. A standard is emerging for the components that form modern clouds today, which is called LOKI (Linux OpenStack Kubernetes Infrastructure).
For stepping stone Ltd as a cloud operator, the switch to Kubernetes as the basis for the cloud (especially the control plane) will clearly entail many advantages.
Gnocchi and Ceilometer
The components for collecting (Ceilometer) and evaluating (Gnocchi) usage data of a cloud are actively being developed further. Various physical or virtual parameters and events can be collected. From temperature data in a data centre to data on the CPU usage of a virtual machine up to events such as the arrival of an interface (API) request or the start of a virtual machine. Areas of application among others are monitoring, alerting or billing.
stepping stone Ltd is currently implementing an automated solution for billing based on those technologies.
Sovereign Cloud
As an open source technology, OpenStack forms an optimal basis for implementing the sovereign cloud ideologies, which are currently being driven by the GAIA-X project in Europe. In the long term, a European alternative to the American and Chinese hyperscalers should emerge. With this approach, data can be distributed over several providers and several clouds. Moreover the clouds can be linked to each other. A special focus is also on data protection and compliance with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Supported by the public policies of various European states, a great deal of development can currently be observed in this area.
Confidential Computing
As a long-term perspective, we see the greatest potential for cloud computing as a whole in confidential computing technology. In the future this should allow customers to migrate their applications to the cloud without giving insight to the provider. This protects the customer not only from the cloud operator, but also from any intruders. Confidential computing is a new technology that protects data and applications by running them in secure enclaves. Data and code are isolated to prevent unauthorised access, even if the computing infrastructure is compromised.
The trustworthiness of cloud solutions can thus be further improved. This should enable applications that are not yet feasible in the cloud area today and the advantages of cloud computing can be made accessible to completely new industries.
Outlook
Cloud computing continues to grow and evolve at a rapid pace. As an open source project on which a large number of cloud providers are working with a wide range of challenges, OpenStack is often at the forefront of innovation. stepping stone Ltd and its customers can benefit from this. This enables smaller providers to also offer a modern and competitive cloud solution.