Events¶
The FOCIS team organized and visited various events connected to the Open Source, SCS and ALASCA communities.
Talks¶
SCS Summit 2026¶
2026-05-21, Berlin: Deploying SCS-Compliant OpenStack: Child's Play Thanks to the Yaook Operator: In this lightning talk, Matthias Büchse presented the current state of a proposed Yaook operator that automates large parts of both achieving and maintaining SCS conformance. While it is well known that Yaook can be used to deploy an SCS-compliant OpenStack (see, e.g., the ALASCA Tech Talk from January 2026), establishing conformance still requires additional effort, and errors affecting conformance cannot be ruled out during ongoing operations. The talk showed what the operator can already do and which improvements are still possible – watch the talk.
DD-IX Open Tech Meetup¶
2026-05-07, Dresden: Introduction to the ALASCA SONiC Community Build: Networking event for local ISPs and network operators. Friedrich gave a lightning talk (in German) at the meetup introducing the ALASCA SONiC Community Build (SCOMB). Other speakers highlighted issues with other networking operating systems, and the costs complicated licensing schemes inflict on both procurement for and operation of large-scale networks, underlining the need for an open solution such as SCOMB.
Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2026¶
2026-03-28/29, Chemnitz: Shift your FOCIS: Digital Sovereignty with ALASCA: Daniel Gerber gave a compact insight into the origins, mission, and activities of ALASCA (Association for operational, open cloud-infrastructures e.V.), a Dresden-based non-profit working towards a digital future in which our data truly belongs to us, powered by open-source cloud infrastructure. ALASCA focuses on two core areas: the technical development of its six open-source projects and knowledge transfer through monthly Tech Talks, a podcast, the ALASCA Summit, and hackathons – since February 2025 supported by the Free State of Saxony through the FOCIS project – watch the talk on media.ccc.de.
FOSS Backstage 2026¶
2026-03-16/17, Berlin: Saxony in Action: Supporting a Lasting FOSS Foundation: Daniel Gerber shared insights at FOSS Backstage 2026 into how the state of Saxony is becoming a pioneer for open source in Germany – with a clear open-source strategy and real financial support such as the publicly funded project FOCIS, which enables the non-profit association ALASCA to grow into a more stable, independent home for FOSS projects. The talk traced ALASCA's journey from a young, mostly volunteer-driven association to a professionally staffed organization supporting six projects, and showed how public funding can help bootstrap an open-source foundation, what benefits and structures it has enabled, and what other communities or regions can learn from Saxony's example – watch the talk or view the slides.
ALASCA Summit 2025¶
2025-11-03/04, Dresden, two lightning talks.
FOCIS on a digitally sovereign future: Matthias Büchse provided insight into the project ALASCA FOCIS, funded by the SMWA, which strives to advance the development, demonstration and dissemination of open-source software and standards for cloud services in the Saxon ecosystem. The talk covered the overall project goals, the current status after about half of its runtime as well as our plans for the upcoming months. As one highlight, the talk presented the first of two demonstrators of the ALASCA stack – an SCS-standards compliant OpenStack cluster for our ALASCA community – watch the talk.
Biggest digital sovereignty fails so far: Daniel Gerber provided a brief overview of incidents in the recent past in which people, companies or governments have been or would be restricted in their actions due to a lack of digital sovereignty. The talk focused on the social consequences and how to avert damage, rather than on technical details – watch the talk.
SCS Summit 2025¶
2025-09-24, Berlin: „Frei wie in Freiheit" für Europa – Offener Code gegen Digitale Abhängigkeit: In his keynote, Daniel Gerber traced the ideological roots of Big Tech's growing entanglement with authoritarian politics and argued that Europe's answer must be digital sovereignty through open source – built on collaboration, transparency, and openness that doesn't stop at national borders. He presented ALASCA as a company-independent open-source foundation where 16 member companies jointly develop operational cloud infrastructure projects, and announced an SCS reference implementation on ALASCA-stack basis – watch the keynote.
Panel discussions¶
SCS Summit 2026¶
2026-05-21, Berlin: Open-Source-Standards in der Praxis: Moderated by Daniel Gerber, representatives of Cloud&Heat, OSISM, and UhuruTec discussed at the SCS Summit why they, as direct competitors, deliberately collaborate within the SCS Forum and the open-source ecosystem, what experiences they have gained with the SCS standards, and what the future of SCS might look like. In short: SCS develops the standards for sovereign cloud infrastructures, while ALASCA, together with its members, puts them into operation – watch the discussion.
Hackathons¶
Yaook SCS Operator Hackathon¶
2026-02-26, Hamburg: ALASCA meets SCS & dataport: Hackathon to bring SCS and Yaook closer together, by automating parts of the SCS-compliant IaaS requirements within the Yaook operator framework. All materials and minutes have been archived.
Workshops¶
CLT 2026 Tarook Workshop¶
2026-03-29, Chemnitz(er Linuxtage): Kubernetes ohne Hyperscaler - Tarook, die OpenStack/SCS-integrierte, „batteries included” K8s Distribution: To spread awareness of the possibilities to run Kubernetes on sovereign infrastructure, we prepared and held a workshop showcasing Tarooks unique capabilities. We demonstrated how easy it is to bootstrap a K8s cluster with it on an OpenStack/SCS-IaaS compatible cloud, and that it includes all necessary building blocks to run a sophisticated cloud application by deploying OpenDesk.
The workshop was designed to be completely hands-on, enabling participants to go through all instructions on their own, with the goal to maximize learning effects and encourage Tarook usage beyond the workshop. Instructions have been publicly archived and should suffice to run the workshop on your own if you are familiar with OpenStack and Tarook.
The ca. 15 participants gave a lot of positive feedback, especially running Tarook was generally perceived to be a smooth and user-friendly experience. Installing OpenDesk is a rather advanced objective, requiring some deeper Kubernetes knowledge when running into problems. As such it posed some hurdles, and not all participants were able to finish the deployment to their satisfaction.