What is it?
It’s time for the OpenInfra Summit again. The OpenInfra Summit is an annual event organized by the OpenInfra Foundation. According to the foundation themselves ‘’The OpenInfra Summit is a global event for open source IT infrastructure professionals to collaborate on software development, share best practices about designing and running infrastructure in production, and make partnership and purchase decisions. It brings together more than 2000 influential IT decision makers, infrastructure architects and open source developers from around the world. Professionals from many industries, including financial services, government, manufacturing, telecom, and IT rely on open infrastructure to run their business.’’
We love the summit and participating in community events. We were present at the last OpenInfra Summit in Berlin and plan on attending the summit of 2023 as well. During the summit in Berlin, we interviewed several attendees and stakeholders of the OpenInfra Foundation. In case you are interested and would like an impression of the summit, you can see and listen to those interviews through the following link: https://www.youtube.com/@FairbanksOpenSource
When, where and a little history lesson
The summit will be hosted from the 13th until the 15th of June 2023. Tickets are now available for purchase and what’s interesting to mention is that the price for the tickets will increase as of February the 15th.
This time around the OpenInfra Summit will not take place in Europe like last year, but in Vancouver, Canada! Vancouver is the biggest city in the western part of Canada. Moreover, Vancouver is one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities in Canada. It has been consistently ranked one of the most livable cities in Canada and in the world.
The city takes its name from George Vancouver, who explored the inner harbour of Burrard Inlet in 1792 and gave various places British names. Relating it all to our Fairbanks’ home country, the family name “Vancouver” itself originates from the Dutch “van Coevorden”, denoting somebody from the city of Coevorden, Netherlands. The explorer’s ancestors came to England “from Coevorden”, which is the origin of the name that eventually became “Vancouver”.
Subjects we are looking forward to in particular
We took a look at the OpenInfra Summit’s schedule for you, and listed some presentations that seem most interesting to us:
Deploying OpenStack in 2023 by Jadon Naas
This talk will focus on OpenStack an its rich ecosystem of deployment tooling including but not limited to Charmed OpenStack, Kolla, Kolla-Ansible, TripleO, Airship, OpenStack Ansible, and pure package-based OpenStack. Each deployment tool has its own approach and opinions to how OpenStack should be installed, configured, and managed. Learn about each of the ways you can deploy OpenStack on your own infrastructure and how you can decide which tool is right for you.
In addition, questions will be discussed such as: How do users know which deployment tool and method will best meet their own unique needs? We like this talk by Jadon Naas because we support different flavors, distributions and deployment tools for OpenStack.
Building a research platform on OpenStack and Kubernetes by Kevin Hannon
This talk takes into account that quantitative researchers require a lot of hardware and the major goals of aresearch platform are to enable high-throughput scheduling of jobs, use open source software and to provide queueing capabilities once the number of jobs exceeds capacity. OpenStack is used for hardware provisioning. However, provisioning hardware is only the first step in building a research platform. Therefore, the talk will discuss how you can build a research platform on top of OpenStack and Kubernetes to better enable quantitative researchers to run their workflows. This talk is interesting for Fairbanks because we are involved with several research platforms running OpenStack, Kubernetes or a combination of solutions.
Pushing OpenStack workloads to the edge by Darin Sorrentino and Krzysztof Janiszewski
In this talk, the presenters will talk about how edge computing is an emerging trend that involves bringing computation and data storage closer to the edge, closer to the users and devices that generate and consume data. The benefits of pushing OpenStack workloads to the edge will be discussed and the challenges and considerations involved in doing so, will be explored. In addition, it will be described how to deploy and configure OpenStack at the edge, including some examples of deployment topologies and the results they have achieved. We love this talk because we have been actively involved with the build and support of several edge clouds, and some rather interesting challenges. You can find one of our blogs about one of our Edge client cases here: https://fairbanks.nl/how-we-set-up-an-edge-cloud/ .
Self-service LOKI applications for non-technical users by Matt Pryor and John Garbutt
This talk will discuss Azimuth, the open-source, application-focused platform that empowers non-technical users by allowing them to self-provision applications on LOKI, from web-based remote desktops to complex multi-node systems and Kubernetes-based applications, using a simple web interface. It will be demonstrated how Azimuth utilises LOKI and open-source automation tools to allow users to deploy and manage curated applications with just a few clicks, and how the Zenith application proxy provides secure, SSO-authenticated access to these applications. More and more of the Fairbanks clients extend their cloud functionality from an ‘OpenStack-only or Kubernetes-only infrastructure’ to a LOKI infrastructure, combining both of best worlds.
Let’s not worry anymore. Your Kubernetes can roam freely over hybrid (private, public, arm, x86) environment by Jaesuk Ahn, FunFun Yoo and Seungkyu Ahn
In this talk the presenters will explain how to abstract and simplify diverse infra environments and how to efficiently manage Kubernetes clusters in a declarative way with a GitOps pattern. In particular, with increasing the importance of the ARM server, it explains how to freely utilize x86 and ARM-based Kubernetes clusters in a hybrid environment, and compares the advantages and disadvantages of x86 and ARM-based clusters. Finally, the case of ARM-based Hybrid Cloud is introduced.
Many many other subjects are discussed, but these subjects look interesting to us in particular. Mostly because these subjects are close to the services that we provide our clients. The full schedule can be found here: https://vancouver2023.openinfra.dev/a/schedule
What do you think of these talks? Will you attend the summit? Let us know in the comments and who knows, maybe we can meet there!
