stepping stone Ltd's experts attended this year's OpenInfra Summit in Berlin

stepping stone Ltd's experts were in Berlin the 7th-9th of June 2022 attending the OpenInfra Summit and tell about their experiences.

After the Corona Pandemic, the OpenInfra Summit was held in Europe again for the first time. We took this opportunity to exchange experiences and knowhow with other members of the community. It was also a good occasion to see where the trends are going, what the visions are and to learn about the latest technology developments.

A lot has happened in recent years, especially in the area of Kubernetes. When we last attended an OpenInfra Summit in 2018, the integration between OpenStack and Kubernetes was still in its infancy. Here, we were excited to see how other companies have approached the problem and what is emerging as state of the art today.

After the sovereign cloud ideologies, which are currently being driven by the GAIA-X project was launched in 2019, the OpenStack community got involved in the discussion with a lot of enthusiasm and even drew attention to itself with a first implementation. We were also looking forward to exchanging ideas with other experts in this area.

It was the first event of this kind for Fabian Zoffel and for him every topic related to Kubernetes was enthralling. A particularly meaningful information for him was the variety of options for building an OpenStack cloud.

Niklaus Hofer spoke with various providers of OpenStack solutions and operators of OpenStack Clouds about the structure of the control plane. It clearly emerged that the ultimate solution for this issue does not yet exist. However, it is becoming apparent that Kubernetes will also be heavily relied on in this area in the future and that some of the typical challenges can be tackled.

For Yannick Denzer, it was particularly interesting to see which projects deal with automated bootstrapping and management of Kubernetes clusters. A particular focus was on the integration into modern OpenStack cloud environments and everyday operations.

The train journeys, losing our way with public transport in Berlin, the joint dinners and activities after the Summit will be remembered positively. The visit to the oldest crashed space station from the future, the c-base, was especially fun (c-base Hacker Space).

On the return journey we were tired but satisfied. The days in Berlin were very interesting and the offer of the Summit was very diverse, on the pulse of time and exceeded our expectations.