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Linux, OpenStack and Kubernetes Infrastructure (LOKI) is a combination greater than the sum of its parts. The OpenInfra Summit last week in Suwon, Korea emphasised how the combination of these technologies has been transforming technology-driven business around the globe.
See the Open Infrastructure Foundation white paper here - including contributions from StackHPC's Michal Nasiadka.
For twenty years, stepping stone AG has been serving the Swiss IT market with technology expertise and consultancy services. The company operates stoney cloud, a public cloud hosted in Switzerland and built on OpenStack and open infrastructure.
stoney cloud, amongst other things, offers Infrastructure-as-a-Service, providing clients with a cost-effective service of virtual machines and cloud resources. The stepping stone AG team were planning to extend the functionality with on-demand Kubernetes platforms, and selected OpenStack Magnum to deliver this additional capability.
StackHPC is a long-time supporter of the Magnum project, and recently led the contribution of a new Kubernetes driver to the upstream code base that takes advantage of cloud-native technologies Cluster API and Helm. Development of the new driver has been underway over the last year and was announced by StackHPC in February 2024. The first official release was announced at the CERN OpenInfra Meetup in June 2024. The driver is already in production use with many StackHPC clients.
The stoney cloud team saw an opportunity to deploy Kubernetes the modern way, and a partnership was formed with StackHPC to add Magnum and the new Cluster API Helm driver to stoney cloud. Over the summer this ambition has been realised and the new Kubernetes service was launched in August.
Open Source, Open Sesame
StackHPC and stepping stone AG are both believers of the benefits of open source contribution. Deploying the new driver to a new cloud, deployed in a new way, combines components in new configurations, which can expose new problems. After resolving those problems, improvements have been fed back into the open source community. The driver, its test framework and its deployment methods are now generalised with versatility for a wider range of environments.
For example, a very Swiss problem: a cloud with umlauts in the names of its regions needed additional consideration in the interfaces between Kubernetes and OpenStack. This joint contribution is now reviewed and accepted upstream, for the benefit of everyone.
Customer Event
The stepping stone AG team held a customer event in Bern, Switzerland to launch the new service and present it to their clients. Stig was honoured to be invited to speak at the event and present our partnership.
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