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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.
Get in touch
If you would like to get in touch we would love to hear
from you. Reach out to us via
LinkedIn,
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or directly via our contact page.