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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: 4, Informative) by VLM on Thursday October 23, @02:35PM (1 child)
I will continue my OpenStack rant as I'm really happy I don't have an OpenStack cluster to admin anymore (woo hoo proxmox rocks) and the caffeine is hitting hard along with the up half the night on a maintenance window (thank god I'm paid hourly 1099 for life F W-2 employment)
The usual experience with an OS or a product is its smooth to an equal-ish level and internally compatible with itself. OpenStack is not a product, its a meme.
So you think of something cool that you had on VMware that would cost roughly a house mortgage to buy so we ain't using vmware at this employer (and its 10x worse now) and lets see what openstack has.
OH I see there's a project on the web page that sounds just like either an external non-integrated product (lets say, an ELK stack for logging) or a hyper expensive vmware product (lets say, LogInsight (c)(tm) from VMware)
Well OK I will install that on the dev cluster (we had four clusters for obvious reasons). If it works this will be added to the test cluster, which will become the prod someday, and someday after that, the prod will become the "old" as in "oldprod". So thats why we had 4 clusters. Wait there's little to no docs this is turning into more of a struggle than you'd think. WTF I don't think this is even installable. Hmm I research online and the last time this worked was on an OpenStack "release" that hasn't had security patches provided since 2017. OK send a flaming everything to the usual OpenStack forums/mailing lists/irc (did they have a discord/slack? I don't remember) and ask why this is still advertised as a project if it's obviously dead. "Well this is a vanity project by a guy who ragequit five years ago and he likes having it on his resume and we have no process to depricate a dead project... would you like to take the project over?" Naaah fuck you guys I just wasted three days trying to make an abandoned project work. I'll install, I donno, 10 VMs to run a large ELK stack (like 7 ES and a 3 server "Kibana" cluster) and call it good. Then, I kid you not, I fall for it again in a couple months. Oh hey why install K8S using RKE on VMs (back when there was no RKE2 IIRC it was a long time ago), how about this Magnum project. Oh bleep they got me again, see above.
So yeah, OpenStack, no good memories. Some software you have good memories even if it was a PITA sometimes. EMACS. Clojure. But something like OpenStack? The only good memory I have was installing Proxmox on top of those hosts. I vaguely remember shutting down the last server running Keystone before repurposing the hardware and breathing a sigh of relief.
(Score: 2) by FunkyLich on Friday October 24, @11:26PM
There is not much I can add to this OpenStack piece. But more or less it was the same thing for me as well. It felt like things would stop working if you spoke too loud, everything was glued with Python and a myriad of libraries it needed to do what it did. When you wanted to do something 6 months later after setting up finally what seemed to be working, it was like preparing to enter the Colosseum as a gladiator against 4 tigers and and a Cerberus while all the spectators were running away to safety... Everything about it felt like it was not worth the trouble to deal with it, like setting up a Space Shuttle to travel a couple of hundred meters distance and rejoicing that you did it, damned be if it was useful or not.