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One topic dominated the recent 2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe, and it wasn't AI:
Unlike any tech conference I've attended in the last few years, the top issue at the 2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe at the École Polytechnique Paris was not AI. Shocking, I know. Indeed, OpenInfra Foundation general manager Thierry Carrez commented, "Did you notice what I didn't talk about in my keynote? I made no mention of AI." But one issue that did appear -- and would show up over and over again in the keynotes, the halls, and the vendor booths -- was digital sovereignty.
Digital sovereignty is the ability of a country, organization, or individual to control its own digital infrastructure, technologies, data, and online processes without undue external dependency on foreign entities or large technology companies. In other words, Europeans are tired of relying on what they see as increasingly unreliable American companies and the US government.
Carrez explained: "We've seen old alliances between the US and the EU being questioned or leveraged for immediate gains. We have seen the very terms of exchange of goods changing almost every day. And as a response to that, in Europe, we're moving to digital sovereignty." That shift, in turn, means open-source software.
"The world needs sovereign, high-performance and sustainable infrastructure," continued Carrez, "that remains interoperable and secure, while collaborating tightly with AI, containers and trusted execution environments. Open infrastructure allows nations and organizations to maintain control over their applications, their data, and their destiny while benefiting from global collaboration."
Carrez thinks a better word for what Europe wants is not isolation from the US: "What we're really looking for is resilience. What we want for our countries, for our companies, for ourselves, is resilience. Resilience in the face of unforeseen events in a fast-changing world. Open source," he concluded, "allows us to be sovereign without being isolated."
[...] To make life easier for users -- and to turn a profit, naturally -- many European companies are now offering technology programs to help users achieve digital sovereignty. These programs include Deutsche Telekom, with its Open Telekom Cloud, and OVH, STACKIT, and VanillaCore. Each of these companies relies on OpenStack to power its European-based cloud offerings for individuals, companies, and governments. In addition, other European open-source-based tech businesses, such as SUSE and NextCloud, offer digital sovereignty solutions using other programs.
In conversations at the conference, it became clear that while the changes in American government policy have been worrying Europeans, it's not just politics that has them concerned. People are also upset about Microsoft's 365 price increases. Another tech business issue that's unnerved them is Broadcom's acquisition of VMware and its subsequent massive price increases. This has led to a rise in the use of open-source office software, such as LibreOffice, and its web-based brother, Collabora Online, and the migration of VMware customers to OpenStack-based services.
The sovereignty issue is not going to go away. As Carrez said in a press conference: "It's extremely top of mind in the EU right now, it's what everyone is just talking about, and it's what everybody is doing." Open source is essential to this movement. As Mike McDonough, head of software product management for Catchengo, a "sovereign by design" cloud company, said: "No one can lock you up; no one can take it away from you, and if someone decides to fork the code, you can continue adopting it anywhere in the world."
All in all, participants agreed that Europe's sovereign cloud movement is reaching critical mass as governments and enterprises move data back from the US-based hyperscalers. European organizations are realizing they need more private infrastructure capacity and local talent to run big cloud initiatives. So, they're turning to open source because, as Carrez concluded, "what makes us resilient is our open-source community."
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Thursday October 23, @02:11PM (2 children)
I have a lot of experience with OpenStack over the years as an admin of the cluster and as a mere sysadmin with sysadmin rights on the cluster and all I can say is "good luck"
The only upgrade path for the tightly coupled Nova/Cinder/Neutron/Swift/Keystone/Glance was to forklift upgrade, migrate everything off the entire cluster to another cluster, build the new cluster on new versions move everything back. This shows the value of IaaS where you can just run Ansible which runs Heat templates.
This brings up migration. I've had Nova nuke a VM trying to migrate it. That's the only time in all my years of vmware and proxmox that I've lost a VM while migrating.
Another hilarious one: Masakari would nuke HA VMs if it got jammed which it often did. You literally had higher availability if you didn't use Masakari because Masakari caused more damage than it prevented. Again, the only experience in ALL my cluster admin work ever where a HA system destroyed a VM.
Speaking of destruction, again, Openstack Nova is the only system I've ever used where a UPS/power failure (UPS are less reliable than wall power where I live, obviously a red state LOL) would jam up or damage a VM making it unable to restart on power on. Yeah sure fsck is normal, I'm talking about being jammed up at the VM level. Very exciting in an unwanted way.
Most of this stuff is a thin reskin of "real technologies". The best way to run Docker on OpenStack in my experience is to set up a Nova VM of Ubuntu or something and run docker like its real metal instead of a VM. There is Zun but you're better off (in my years of experience with it) just running real docker in a VM. Yes, its cool that Zun is basically like K8S in that imagine it has a driver to talk directly to Cinder/Swift/Neutron but it's generally not worth it. When it doesn't work, good luck figuring it out because all errors and logging is utterly totally opaque. Also the OpenStack "product" for log gathering was uninstallable and didn't work (again, just install an ELK stack in VMs...)
Likewise Glance (Swift?) is just an object store like S3. It actually works well. Its not optional this is where your ISO files for VM installs live. Its a PITA to use and you're better off scripting the loading of ISO install media. From what I remember from 3 years ago Glance is an app for ISO images that stores raw data into Swift the object store. I messed around with Swift, the idea of an object store is nifty, if essentially useless if you can't think of any system-wide applications. It would be useful at the application layer if it wasn't working at the infrastructure level.
I never got into Ironic I was more of a Kolla-Ansible installer guy. Its a BIT complicated to install the moving parts its not like pop in the install ISO usb key for proxmox or vmware and hit enter like twice and everything just works, oh heck no. Installing OpenStack will put hair on your chest or gray hair on your head at least.
I never got into Manila which seems to boil down to a wrapper for a FreeNAS (Well TrueNAS now) vm installer to create a NFS partition. Just skip Manila and install TrueNAS in a VM. About the same deal for Octavia (WTF) and Designate. Designate is a cool idea if you've never used K8S, imagine a cluster wide distributed DNS server (if you've used K8S you don't need to imagine this) its cool and works but a bit tedious to use. Hope you use IaaS tools to automate or enjoy nightmarishly complicated API calls from scripts, its not as simple as "just edit a bind file" LOL. I never got into Barbican IIRC for most of the couple years I was actively admin-ing two OpenStack clusters it was uninstallable although theoretically a feature. This situation was a common occurrence in OpenStack. I never got Freezer to work the entire time I was an OpenStack admin, Freezer was literally uninstallable, yeah I kid you not there was no internal backup system (your wildest dream of one is basically Proxmox's backup server which works and integrates beautifully). Aodh was also like that.
Some of it is WTF. Zaqar: Why? Mistral is like Cronicle, I guess, I don't see the point of installing Mistral if you can install Cronicle. Blazar: Why? Magnum: Why do I need something to get in the way of installing K8S, its easier to just install RKE2 in a VM. Trove: Why, just "docker run" a mysql container like a normal person. Kuryr: This never worked for me and was essentially uninstallable and seems to be what Zun wanted to be when it grows up although Zun actually worked whereas Kuryr did not. Setting up Neutron to work with load balanced failover trunks having multiple VLANs is (or was...) challenging.
Probably the only thing I used that I was impressed with was Heat which is a NIH reimplementation of something like Ansible. I know you guys will laugh but I used Ansible to automate Heat templates because Heat was just SO nice and all the internal tools that Ansible also automated are obviously unavailable in Heat. If you know/get Ansible you'll pick up Heat templates in about half a day. They are genuinely pretty nice.
My advice if you use OpenStack is you better have your IaaS up to date with EVERYTHING scripted and you better have your backups working. Also I have about 1000 billable hours on OpenStack as an admin across a couple years of clock time and OpenStack is EXACTLY like owning a sailboat the two best days of your life are they day you get it (get it installed) and the day you get rid of it (the day you say F it, it would be easier to install Proxmox, so you start installing proxmox and moving workload to the new proxmox cluster)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by krishnoid on Thursday October 23, @08:38PM (1 child)
Considering it's politicians making these decisions, I suspect their considerations run along the lines of "Probably better luck than we'll have with US companies under Trump."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday October 23, @10:53PM
And there is a chance the OpenStack will become less awful under the pressure of the users.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford