On 22 January, Kindred’s Main hub in Stockholm opened its doors to external visitors for the 8th instalment of the popular meetup group OpenInfra. The group focuses on spreading information and knowledge about open source cloud-related technology and is run by Daniel Byström. The group, which originally consisted of just 18 people, saw 100 participants sign up for its 8th event.
OpenInfra’s 8th event featured presentations from Kristoffer Grönlund, Senior Software Engineer at SUSE, Christian Nilsson, DevOps Engineer at Redpill Linpro, as well as Gauvain Pocentek and Antonio Pezo, Infrastructure engineers at Kindred Group - all experts in their respective fields. The topics focused on open source technological infrastructure to create a forum with a clear emphasis on knowledge exchange.
“I started OpenInfra in Oslo a few years back and it grew bigger and bigger,” says Daniel Byström. “So, when I returned to Sweden, I brought the forum with me. There is a clear interest in these kinds of forums, and it is getting more and more difficult to find the right speakers for the events as they grow bigger.”
Sharing is caring
Kristoffer Grönlund kicked off the day by introducing Ceph, a storage solution, and explaining how it can be brought to Kubernetes through Rook.
“I find the discussed topics great because infrastructure development is something that has traditionally been separated from other forms of development. But since more and more services are moving to the cloud today, the people who develop those services, are often the ones to maintain them afterwards. I see an increased demand for cross-competence in these fields, and that’s why it is important that we use such opportunities to share our knowledge. There is so much to gain by sharing what you do, and I think a lot of people are underestimating the value of it.”
Christian Nilsson agrees and says that this is particularly relevant today, as different groups get more and more segregated.
“Sharing code is a way of bringing people together across both, national and cultural borders,” says Nilsson. “These ideas are now beginning to seriously make their way into our governmental bodies and my hope is that it doesn't just stop at the programs and applications, but that the culture of knowledge-sharing also spreads. I imagine this to be something that contributes to a less segregated society in the long run.”
Spreading ideas and generating new ones
Nowadays, sharing code is part of being involved in the tech community, as well as building your own technology. At Kindred, OpenStack has been used in constructing our own cloud platform, The Kindred Cloud, on which our engineers Gauvain Pocentek and Antonio Pezo based their compliance and security presentation on, in OpenStack.
“OpenStack is a set of projects that you can use however you want, to deploy a private or public cloud platform,” says Kindred Infrastructure Engineer Gauvain Pocentek. “What we've done here is improved aspects of the deployment tool in order to better suit our needs.”
“We decided to push these changes back to the community, to prevent others from running into the same issues we did,” says Antonio Pezo, Linux infrastructure engineer at Kindred. “Sharing with the community is not just about the purely technical side of things. It's also about spreading ideas, generating new ones and getting a good discussion going.”
