Okay, thank you for showing up in person and so many people, so it's actually my first
time at FOSSTEM and I think it's super excited to see so many people and coming back to conferences
but also such a crowded conference so I mean the talks previously were super full now it's
almost half full or half empty depending on how you look at it and even for such supposedly
boring topics like a sovereign cloud I mean that's immediately sparked associations with
state and GDPR I mean all the cookies that you have to click away so sounds boring at first
but I think there's also some value in it and I think there's a journey where open source can
help to make a sovereign clouds come to life or like look at some aspects of it this is me I go
by the name due random on GitHub and on social media three days ago I changed roads so now I'm
in sales again yikes for as a managed open shift black belt so I'm still looking at a little bit
at the cloud topic open shift is like a cloud on a cloud before that I worked quite some time on
AI on AI ops in the office of the CTO and the last thing that I did for two years now is imagining
or revisiting open source now in the age of clouds and seeing how open source principles
can also apply to operations so we're going to look at the operate first community clouds why
do we need a community of practice around operations what does the this community cloud
look like and also where is it so I think this will be a it's not really a hands-on talk but you
can take things away you can if Wi-Fi works for you you can log into the cloud right now and I hope
to see you in some of the meetups or in the community after that because it's it's really open to
anybody who wants to learn something about operations or wants to teach something about
operations so when I first heard the term sovereign cloud like I said it sparked the sovereign the
the king who has now also occupied the cloud and I put it into my favorite search engine and it
immediately came up with a lot of definitions on sovereign cloud there was one from VMware some
from telecom and they all looked at different aspects and these days in case you're not living
under a rock everybody's talking about jet GPT so I thought maybe let's talk to this AI who
already read all the definitions for me and ask it about them sovereign cloud and this is just
the end of my conversation so I wanted to highlight the differences between the noun and
the adjective sovereign and the noun sovereign refers to a personal identity that holds supreme
power and authority while the adjective sovereign describes something that is supreme or superior
in rank that still sounds not really friendly to me like I do I really want something that is in
supreme power over me and why should I care about this then but is there also a notion of
independence in that in that adjective because that's what I always thought about when thinking
about it but a little bit and jet GPT came up with this that there's a notion of independence in
the adjective to be described sovereign means to be independent not subject to control by any other
person or entity which if you think about it that also implements if you have supreme power then
you can also move away and having the highest degree of power and authority the term emphasizes
the idea of self-governance and supreme power within a given context and the context seems to be
cloud so when I look at sovereign cloud at least in my small world view it means I have the power
to move away I have the power to control stuff and I have that that largest amount of independence
and that seems at first contradictory to that business model that we saw in previous talks
right so somebody a nice definition of cloud is I'm running stuff on somebody else's computers so
that doesn't seem to be like a lot of freedom because I have some some lock-in but actually open
source let a path away from lock-in so I think it's important that we apply these open source
principle also to operations and if you these days look at a cloud is it is it really open I mean
it's built on open source software you get your RDS or some some other product and underneath yes
it's running MySQL that's running elastic it's running all that open source stuff but you're
still tied to that to that experience that the cloud provider imposes on you if you want to
rebuild that with open source solutions you can do it it's well it's looking pretty complicated so
you need to master a lot of these technologies you need to stick them together and there's a
reason for why people defer to the cloud because they are interested in the workload they just
want to swap their credit card and consume and build away the applications so but I think the
the last speaker put it really or the previous speaker put it really nice that login to be defined
as a as a product of of cost and the likelihood that something is going away so you have to deal
with that stuff but open source somehow if you go to this slide here so open source actually showed
away out of this and the last the left side of that some funnel here is the traditional open source
as in as in software contributions funnel which we all know for decades and which we all love so
you find a project you use it there might be 100 users of it and at some point something breaks so
you might file an issue great you already contributed because you file that issue and then
maybe at the last time even somebody fixes or maybe you fix that project so there's really a
funnel of 100 users then 10% reporting issues and making up that community and 1% actively
contributing to that project if I'm using something as a service I'm essentially drowning this
funnel so I'm I'm stopping at the at the API layer I might contribute to the underlying open
source software that might run this service but in terms of contribution I'm usually I'm stuck
with maybe filing in the support case and maybe the provider comes back to me but I have no
possibility to actively contribute to that and maybe fix that API outage but maybe I'm the only
person having that problem and so the cloud provider doesn't even care about this and this was the
the notion that our team thought about when thinking about open source in the age of cloud where
it's where there's more value apparently in running and providing the software then the
software code itself or at least that's an unequal scale and as we see with many enterprise
distributions or business models you can get the source code of that database or that service but
you don't get the sometimes you don't even get the built tools you don't get the tools that
actually operate that service the SLIs the metrics that you need to run there the runbooks etc so
every deployment is either behind a paywall because that's the differentiating factor for
that company or you have to learn it yourself and it's it's actually quite hard to open up
something also with legal constraints right here so you may have might have proprietor
PII personally identifiable information in in there you have logs so you need to make sure that
you don't expose any of these secrets so that there's a tight balance and that's why most
companies or most projects default to closed and even for even for communities that run their
infrastructure like the Fedora infrastructure that's somewhat open but you still need to be
going through a lot of hoops to to contribute and to do something so it's not really open by
default and it's also not meant to be as a blueprint for something only 10 minutes left but I
think I can go to the next part of this presentation so this is the this is the concept
right so we need to shift left we need to open up operations and the practice something so that
we build up a community so that we don't have to build our operational deployments from scratch
and what that was is is the concept of this operate first idea we also thought you need to
some have something physical something hands-on where people can actually contribute because
otherwise it would be just a talk show so somebody needs to lead the way and implement that stuff
and we tried to build a hybrid cloud with full visibility into the operation center and hybrid
cloud these days is for a lot of people Kubernetes and so we have two bare metal Kubernetes
clusters running at the Boston University with 34 nodes and 1200 cores so it's not a small
setup then there's one larger cluster running in AWS from the OS climate project which is
also managed with these operate first community cloud ideas and we also work with a German
super scaler that's what the the layer between below a hyperscaler means Jonas they donated
some hardware and we deployed also some some classes there so my vision actually is to to
have a really resilient distributed clouds set up operated under these principles at as many
hardware or cloud providers as possible 626 individuals locked into these into these clusters
about 200 namespaces are there that's the so we do a lot of stuff on most of the stuff is
happening on GitHub we have 150 people on the operate first in the operate first community
there are like 1000 issues being filed the in terms of diversity it's since it's a red
hats bootstrap project it's like one third or half of the people are red hat employees but
there's also a lot of university contributions from American universities and also a lot of
open source projects already contributing them it's just a highlight of some some of the
more noteworthy projects using this infrastructure like OKD the upstream of OpenShift or OS climate
or Janus IDP which is a project for for some backstage plugins so backstage if it's currently
one of the one of the more hyped tools for a server developer portal by Spotify these
are some of the services that are running there like the usual stuff that you would
expect from a cloud setup we have Argo CD for doing GitOps we have Grafana for monitoring
stuff we have tecton pipelines for building things there's a brow instance running for
doing CI CD and a lot of other things so every and that's all deployed by the community
in a GitHub repository where you can integrate into into these into these other services
and I think that's where the actual value comes from so let's get real we love hands
on keyboard and as I said it's all done via a really a GitOps SRE no a GitOps Git first
approach the current entry point for you would be going to operate-first.cloud or and that
click through some hoops and you end up at the service-catalog.operate-first.cloud which
is an backstage instance where we for one showcase the services so you go to the catalog
you see all these services with all their dependencies and you see all the managed clusters there
so you click on one of these clusters and you are presented with a single single sign
on logging screen and if you choose the second option operate-first you can lock in with
your GitHub account so it's authenticated against GitHub and without even signing up
for an account you get a read-only view of the cluster which is pretty awesome so you
see how these these services are being deployed and how other community services are being
deployed so you get a a a hello world example a live hello world example of a of of a fully
production cloud environment which you would see at your at at your site either at your
for your project or for your customer whatever and we documented the way and the why we came
up to certain decisions so in this case it's application monitoring or there's also how
to store credentials in a cloud and these are the the questions that you will face if
you're setting up a your own local cloud and we documented these for con to bootstrap
either other deployments or to contribute back so that you don't have to really read
through so many blog posts and documentations and make your own choice there are some dashboards
here and these are the dashboards that we use for troubleshooting or the community uses
for troubleshooting so you would see Kafka or open data hub and Prometheus live dashboards
and here's one dashboard for our for our clusters and that's the that's the github org where
you would start talking to us or talking to the community the main entry repository is
the support repository you can ask questions or you start with a one of these templates
and one of the coolest templates here or processes is onboarding to a cluster so you get a form
it looks like a form it's a github template you choose which cluster you want to be on
boarded the team name and then we have some automation in place that would automatically
create a pull request to our github repository and we only have to say looks good to me to
it if you're for the person that's part of the operating team and they are onboarded
so that's also giving giving you some sense of how would I automate my local clouds deployment
you don't need to do that but it's it's it's a way to bootstrap you and there's a lot of
other issues going on and as said it's a community so things will eventually also break right
now we have problems with our object storage it's broken if you are an expert in nuba or
in object storage and you want to get your hands dirty in rebuilding some of that stuff
this is the issue so to me though here which will give another awesome talk at the end
of this track here left some comments how to get started nobody worked on it yet so
it's up for grabs thank you
thanks myself question oh hey you provided a good definition for sovereign cloud who
are the customers for sovereign cloud I don't know to be honest so I'm looking at it really
from a technical perspective and I think my key takeaway is everybody who wants to build
their own clouds probably wants to be sovereign in running their cloud and then you have to
focus on stuff like minimizing vendor lock in and being able to move to another cloud
provider or move your data across clouds to jump just on the question is one of the customer
that would like a sovereign cloud because of the resiliency that we need to have because
we have critical infrastructure I think that was a statement not a question right
okay alright take out your smartphone snap that QR codes and there's a bi-weekly community
meetup where you can meet all the wonderful people that are involved in this community
where with