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This week we have been hosting a gathering of technical teams from a number of prominent UK scientific institutions affiliated to the IRIS consortium, including the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, Manchester University, the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, Cambridge University, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the Diamond Light Source. We were also joined by our friends from Bristol is Open.

The group was gathered for a hackathon, aimed at helping to spread technical knowledge about Kolla, Kolla-Ansible and Kayobe, and how they can be used together to create OpenStack deployments optimised for scientific computing use cases - a concept we informally refer to as Scientific OpenStack.

Kayobe is a free and open source deployment tool for containerised OpenStack control planes, embodying current best practices. Kayobe is seeing broad adoption for research computing configurations and use cases.

Aside from helping make progress with many new OpenStack projects, a secondary aim of the hackathon has been, along with other users of Kayobe worldwide and the OpenStack Scientific SIG, to cement a strong set of inter-institutional technical relationships, enabling a self-supporting community to grow for this space.