Dr. Daniel Gerber – Saxony in Action: Supporting a Lasting FOSS Foundation #FOSSBack

This talk introduces Alaska, an open source software foundation dedicated to developing operational open cloud infrastructure for Europe. The speaker discusses the motivation behind its founding, highlighting issues related to digital sovereignty and the predominance of US hyperscalers in the European software market. He shares insights on the foundation's growth, governance model, and its involvement in various projects, including Cloud Foundry and OpenStack. The speaker emphasizes the importance of enhancing European cloud providers' market share and fostering an inclusive community among members. He also touches on their educational initiatives, hackathons, and public engagement efforts to promote open source practices.

Thank you all to being here and good morning to you all. Um, I'm Daniel. I want to I'm very excited to talk to you about our open source software foundation, which is called Alaska. It's an association for operational open cloud infrastructure. We are developing open source software to strengthen digital sovereignty in Europe and for Europe. So, in in case you were wondering what all those animals are,

this is our little zoo of logos from Project Wolf within our association. Um, the first thing I wanted to share with you is a quote from Aryana, which is the community manager or was a community manager of our foundation. She also had a talk here last year where she presented the initial steps of our foundation. And it actually made my day at a Friday afternoon where we

had like an internal meeting with all the projects and technical steering committee. And I just want to read it to you because I think it's very great. I would like to briefly note that what we initially hoped for Alaska three years ago has now come to pass, creating a space where Alaska projects can interactively exchange ideas on all kinds of topics so that they can learn from

each other and not just exist in isolation within the association. Hats off, really great. So, this made my day. This is I think a really great quote which which I wanted to share with you. Before I want to talk to you about the internal stuff, I would like to tell you why we actually do what we do. So, what we currently see is that the federal government

is spending lots of millions software for for from American hyperscalers. We just recently learned that Microsoft uh, that the the government spends 500 million uh, in 1 year for software from uh, US tech and this obviously creates login effects. So, um, and these login effects then can be used to just uh, creates uh, to to to to to make software more expensive as they see fit if

they want to push AI slop into it and then you basically have to pay for it. Also, you see license changes which we see with Broadcom and Bitnami images. You probably were also affected by this. This also hit us hard and is still hitting us today. with this um, with this thing that we get uh, we can get pressured by um, the US. We we we see

that diplomats are fighting data sovereignty. Um, they are trying to trying to influence uh, our uh, laws at the EU level. They're shutting down our uh, legislation or the ICC which is our traditional system last but not least, they decide who gets into the country or which I think is the main issue here who gets to have a bank account in Germany. So, we all have we

there is so many talks about here about the digital sovereignty in general and this is basically yeah, the answer from US Big Tech and also German German companies. Everything is basically sovereign now in my opinion. If everything is sovereign, probably nothing is. We also have if you look at the cloud market in general, the the the numbers are rising from the last in in the last couple

of years, so that's a good thing in in in my opinion. What is not the good thing is that all the growth is basically eaten up by US hyperscalers and the and the market share of European cloud providers that's actually stagnating for the last couple of years at about 13% or 15%. So and in my opinion, this is probably not going to change if you look at

the investments done by US cloud providers here in Germany and in the EU. nobody is putting this amount of money into into this system. So this is what's uh made us uh or brought to action basically. This is why we founded Alaska which is an open source software foundation for uh cloud software. it was initially uh thought of for this project called Gaia-X, which is uh a

joint project by our founding members Cloud & Heat and Stackit. they started this in 2020 and they wanted to have uh a long-lasting foundation where they can move the IP to so that they can work on this together, which led to the foundation in 2022 of uh our association. If you want to have more details into that, you can have a look at the talk by Ariana

from last year. So from then on, we worked mostly internally um to get the governments right, to get the marketings right, to get the the events right, and today um, we have 22 members, 17 companies, one association. I get to do detail that later. We have uh, now seven open source projects, and we think a solid governance with uh, What are our goals? So, they're threefold. Um,

we want to develop open source technologies, and we want to promote their use. We want um, to contribute to public and professional education, and we also want to build an open and inclusive community. We uh, a code of conduct at the moment, and we also uh, want to, or we will a podcast uh, of our own. to our members, we I already said we have 70 members.

We uh, started with seven, and each year we are growing. We have members uh, which are small startups. We have even members which are uh, now EU hyperscalers. And so, uh, we are very diverse. We're very much diversified. We are not even all uh, or based in We have seven projects. Six of them have logos and the name, and the seventh one is actually currently in the

onboarding process. So, um, I can't show you this here. And I actually also won't go into detail about what these projects are, but uh, they all deal with some sort of cloud infrastructure uh, software in general. I would like to also give you an overview about um the cosmos we are living in, basically. So, um as I've said, we do Cloud Foundry. We are uh a member

in the Open Infrastructure Foundation, mainly because we um we deploy and develop um OpenStack. And uh yeah, this is uh we also have our own uh CNCF certified Kubernetes distribution, and therefore we uh work closely with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. And uh just recently we joined the um Open Source Business Alliance, and uh the disclaimer here, I'm also in the board of the of the OSBA.

um the Open Source Business Alliance started a project which is called Sovereign Cloud Stack uh sometime ago, which is an project to standardize infrastructure as a service and Kubernetes as a service, so that you can uh just simply switch your um your provider, and you're not stuck into uh one provider um for all for all eternity. We collaborate also with local initiatives like the uh Dresden Internet

Exchange, and we have uh some member overlap with the Neo Metal Foundation. You probably have heard of them. They are uh a member of the Linux Foundation Europe, and they more uh they've they focus more on the EU But of course, we talked to them, and we uh learn from one another. The governance model we uh came up so far um is all not written in stone,

but uh for now this works uh very well for us. We have uh a general assembly which appoints a board of directors and the then in turn um, appoints a marketing and PR persons. They appoint the community management. and they send a a member to the technical steering the general assembly also appoints the technical steering committee. They are elected for 2 years and the steering committee then

decides or one one major task that TSC has to do is is to decide um, about the acceptance of projects into our foundation. Each project has to have or or has to appoint um, a project representative. In case it's a larger project, they have to have multiple representatives and yeah, this is basically the um, the the the persons responsible to communicate what the projects want um, the

foundation. And there there's this thing called focus which I will get into detail. This is the team I will I will work in or I work in and um, we basically help at all different stages Okay, so we have also come up with this project acceptance pipeline. If you want to join our foundation, if if you have interest in joining and we all always get uh, new

uh, new interests every every now and then, you have to answer uh a questionnaire. And this helps you decide all the all all the hot questions, why you want to join, what you want to achieve by being member of the foundation, and if you have done that the technical is deciding if there is a mission fit between your project and the foundation. This is then um brought

to the attention of the board of directors, and then if the board of directors decides you will uh that you that you fit, you get onboarded. And then we start this uh three-pronged uh pipeline here, which basically uh does you onboard in our uh test lab. If you need resources for your software, then we have that covered. If you want to join our GitLab instance, which is

uh run uh by these special permissions for open source projects, um you can join there. And the I I think the most difficult one is the marketing and the marketing onboarding, where you decide on a name and the project. This is typically the one which uh takes the longest amount of time. And but once you've done that, we uh this is also a service from our foundation,

you get a a landing page, um you get your complete uh corporate identity basically for the project, and then you can use that uh wherever you want. In our project, we have two different stages of um of of of of projects. Um you can be either a snowflake or a glacier. Uh the TSC decides uh what you can be or what you are you've joined. There is

technically no limitation of time to get from one stage to to to another, but we are very closely monitoring that you try to move in the right direction and right now is not a problem at all. So, we come up with or the technical steering committee came came came up with a guideline for all those projects know where to work on. divided into six dimensions. It's the

road map, documentation, release management, collaboration, quality assurance, and governance. This is all split up for snowflake and glacier projects. So, the amount of work is always adapted to the projects current state. And as I've said, we we started with one project. We then had three and now it's like seven. It's very difficult for the technical steering committee to know everything about each state of each project. So,

we try to automate this. I try to automate this. I try to codify the the guidelines which you can see at this URL. And we each built this project matrix. I don't know if you can see this. The columns are the projects and the lines the guidelines from the TSC. That's similar to what the Open SSF best practices batch program does if you know that. So, I

think this is a very interesting piece of software which helps our projects in the future to get better. Also to to know which other projects does one thing good and where you can go to learn from. Okay, so the title of my presentation also said Saxony in action and I want to get into detail about this. In my previous occupation I have been a member of parliament

in Saxony and I this was like the one thing I I like most doing about it. I Yeah, the the the state of Saxony um has now an open source software strategy. This is something where they analyze all their software and they came up with like an Excel document of 6,000 lines of different software they're using. They checked all the licenses. Um what they have and they

now are forced to measure and increase the amount of open source software they're using. You can also if you're interested here there the links here and there's also a reason recently parliamentary inquiry like a kleine Anfrage where you what the current status in Saxony. We had a talk in Saxony where all the people from the state government came a very large crowd. I would have never thought

that so many people are interested in in that topic. Um I already talked about Focus, the team I I I I I work in and you can't be in computer science if you have not an acronym as a name and free and open cloud initiative Saxony is ours. Um this is something I think is really important for the people who look into uh financing and funding open

source projects. Our project is funded by the Richtlinie Landes in Technologie Förderung. There is no English translation, sorry. And uh subsection F, other measures supporting innovation. And the main target um of this Richtlinie is to uh that the funding is intended to enable the implementation of measures aimed at strengthening the innovative capacity of companies in Saxony's economy and their competitiveness. So, I think there are similar Richtlinien

in other uh states as well and you should have a look there as well. I think that's uh that's a good way to um finance open source software uh even if it's not explicitly stated in the Richtlinie. It went for quite well. Uh it's like I think it was 10 months from the initial idea to uh the signature and we are very grateful to the state of

Saxony that we um on uh on open source software. We try to work as openly as possible. We We have all our issues in an uh openly accessible GitLab. Uh we work closely with all the project project representatives and yeah, this is really great fun. Helena is also here. If you have uh questions about What we do also is we try to demonstrate and try to help

you get off the ground. We have uh call for demonstrators online. If you have uh something which is in the cloud service provider domain, come to us, ask us. Uh we have resources which we want to share. uh some other things we are able to do with the funding by the are the tech talks. They are basically also a foundation of our um um of Alaska. This

is something we do from the beginning with this like the I think we have 33 talks right now. Um every last Friday of the month you get high-quality content about something which is done in the cloud-native environment. And it's you can apply there, but it's so booked the next free slot I think is away available in June. We also do summits. we have done two already. They

are growing every year. We actually outgrew venue in Dresden, the Hygiene Museum, if So, we have to go into a larger place this year. this is I think something which is really great to get to know the people which you see only in this small rectangles over the year in person. Uh you we we we talk to our local politicians. We have workshops. And we talk to

people like the people from New Relics or Zendesk outside of our association. call for participation is open. We have we plan with 300 participants, 30 talks, and the best thing is it is free. So, get your ticket today if you want. Also, one thing we do we we really like to do our hackathons. and this is something which is where we were very glad that our founding

member Cloud and Heat provided us with um, yeah, cloud resources. I don't know if you know, but um, hackathons in this domain are very resource intensive. For example, we will have a hackathon at the Chemnitzer Linux Days in 2 weeks from now. And we are deploying Open Desk on our um, Kubernetes called Taruk. And you need 12 cores and 30 32 gigabytes of RAM for like one

participant and we can spawn like 20 of them in uh, in the hackathon by with our own infrastructure. So, that's that's really great and also something we really like um, to get to know with the SS community or yeah, here's something which we did in with data port in um, Hamburg a couple of weeks ago. Um, we also do political campaigning. We have done that from the

beginning of our association. We talk we have press conference or press talks. try to do that with company leaders and political leaders. We participate in uh, the Sächsische Digitalpreis and we actually won it. We talked to our publish white papers, we publish uh opinions for the Deutschland stack and I mean lots of other people also have uh done that. and we actually have been successful. So, the

sovereign cloud stack is now part of the Deutschland stack. We also sign open letters where when the head of the BSE, for example, says that digital sovereignty is not achievable in Germany right now, we uh raising our voices there put in our opinion for the call of evidence from the European from the most recent European open digital ecosystem strategy call by the European Commission. And we also

try to our community thinks. So, for this presentation here and for our future work, um we did a little questionnaire within our community and we found out that almost all of our uh people who participated here, they want to have they that the things they want from our community is they want to have stability, they want to have uh long-term governance, they want to have guidelines. Um

they want to have uh the foundation to be technical mature, they want to have interoperability, and they want to share their knowledge, they want to learn stuff. In general, people think um that we are actually quite healthy. Um I think I hope we can get into the 1.x territory next year, but I think in general this is um quite nice. And also know what we should tackle

in the future or what people in our association think we should tackle in the future. um lack of funding and the lack of procurement by uh the public sector of open-source software. Not all of this in our power, yeah, we at least we know what they want. Okay, and with this I would close my presentation and thank you all for your attention and I am very happy

to take any questions if you have them. Hi, did you ever explain what the difference between glaciers and snowflakes is? I'm not sure if I phased out for a second or something, but I was really curious about it when you mentioned it and then I think you never explained it. Can you get into this a little bit, please? It's basically a measure of maturity within for our

projects. Um typically if you are joining the foundation, you will be a snowflake project. And if you fulfill all the requirements defined by the technical steering committee for being uh like a glacier project, you rise up, but it's the standard is very high. You have to have all different uh yeah, you >> Uh Yeah, the there is so many different things you have to to have documentation

in the DiaTax framework. You have to have a quick start guide. You have to have SBOMs and so on. So, the list is actually quite long which you have to achieve. One more question from the online people. You said open issues were open You said your issues were open on GitLab. Are you also open to contributions? Are you collaborating with other federal states? All our projects are

open source project, of course. So, the the the projects itself are open for project part part participation. We do that in summits. We do that in workshops and so on, but this is not I mean, I work in the organizational part of Alaska and I do not really uh program there. the projects are open for collaboration. We are um the focus team is obviously open for collaboration,

but I think the tasks which we do at focus are in are there like internal structure of Alaska and probably not uh possible to to work on this with other federal states. I'm not sure if that makes sense. Yeah. Thanks again for the talk. Thank >> Mhm.