Summer has been anything but the usual summer in Europe. From heat waves to raging fires – one can only wonder where we are heading with climate change and what next summer will bring? In the north it was constantly warm and just about no rain – for months. In my many years living in Europe – I have never seen anything like it. Fantastic at the same time as we all could enjoy very warm waters and spend plenty of time at the beach. I hope all of you got some well deserved vacation and are ready to look forward!
The fall means lots of new activities – as it does for most companies. In our case we continue to build upon our services public-, compliant- and private cloud. OpenStack is at the heart of everything we do. However, as open infrastructure continues to evolve, the list of very important open source projects continues to grow. Specifically containers and Kubernetes is on just about everybodys mind. For us open is key. By that I mean flexibility for our customers. From open APIs to easily be able to run a multi-cloud operation.
I think this fall will be the real kick off for digital transformation for a lot of large enterprises. We have talked about it and planned around it – but time to make sure our organizations truly start moving in the right direction. Sure you need programmable infrastructure and automation is key – however the challenge is we – the people. A firm strategy to hold on to which is clearly communicated and with a good methodology in place (which is followed up on every month) we should all be able to take big steps. Higher degree of innovation awaits those that manage to change its organizations behaviour and ways of working (i.e. processes).
During the spring we launched what is called Magnum in OpenStack. You can say it is an orchestrator of the orchestrators of containers. Those specifically are Mesos, Docker Swarm and Kubernetes. As Kubernetes has been a run-away-success for the most of the last two years – we are also focusing on Kubenetes. We see containers as a key building block for the digital transformation on the tech side – and will continue to make it easier to fully automate and build solutions over multiple data centers using containers and Kubernetes.
During the fall we will go to the latest version of OpenStack – Rocky, https://releases.openstack.org/rocky/schedule.html. Rocky will be released end of August and we intend to have all our public cloud locations upgraded before the end of 2018. Magnum in particular takes some big steps in allowing for life cycle management of containers with this release. Another interesting component is also Octavia (load balancing). It is amazing to see all the companies get together for near perfect releases every six months. In the case of Magnum CERN is one of the major contributors. Last time I spoke with CERN – there was 6000 Kubernetes clusters running by various researchers. CERN combines interesting use cases with scale – in just about all they do.
We are also hard at work to modernize our cloud management system. We continue to add enterprise functionality and using the latest software tech we can now get a very modern and easy to use console. Of course the combination with automation and full access to OpenStacks APIs is key. An enterprise has very different use cases and therefore we find it important to also offer a console that every day users also can gain access to.
Global access to open programmable infrastructure is key to all organizations. We hope to continue to improve upon that offer and of course do so with the right regulatory compliance as well as security.
Welcome to another exciting fall where digital is moving faster than ever…
Johan Christenson, CEO