2018 recap - a year around OpenStack

What happened in 2018? Time for a review based on my Twitter timeline

Posted by eumel8 on December 29, 2018 · 17 mins read

What happened in 2018? Time for a review based on my Twitter timeline
The year began in St. Petersburg. The Russians celebrate a quite and nice Silvester on the river Newa, with … coffee! Fortunately, we bought champagne and vodka and were something like exotics. The year started almost with OpenStack: The Election Board of Directors. I applied again for I18n PTL, a kind of Open Source contribution with my low progam language skills.

DeCiX Partners with BCIX (Berlin Exchange Point) .

I have some ideas for a thriller, what I want to write about Internet backbone trouble and what happen when terrorists are takeover that kind of peering points.

Something in the same direction: Spectre/Meltdown hits us in 2018 - also on my home PC.

Also in the first month: Call for Presentations OpenStack Vancouver Summit. There are so much ideas to present, but also our own team session should be prepared. Decision has already been made: Visiting the Summit and for the first time Canada!

The Microsoft RedShirtDevTour visited us in Berlin. Some nice use cases from the Azure field: face recognition in AI, DevOps E2E tools like Visual Studio Team Service aka Azure DevOps

Thats the idea behind DevOps, what I’ve learned later the year. Don’t think about tools or technologies. Along hardware stores like OBI or Hornbach didn’t sell tools at it own. Hornbach tells always stories about projects with an customer end-to-end view

The January ended with AI Hackathon at Deutsche Telekom Hubraum in Berlin. My goals were many. First of all: AI technology. I have seen lots of blog posts and Youtube videos and had some ideas around AI. But how to take this in action on real projects with real people? To my surprise: most of the mentors are worked for Deutsche Telekom. I can’t believe that we really working on such hot stuff. Without deeper knowledge it was like a rocket science for me. Second objective was to find out how to organize a Hackathon. Later the year we’ll have the OpenStack Summit in town and the idea was to organize a Hackathon for that the weekend before.

Around that time we had also our Cloud Academy team meeting to renew the Cloud Camp, an internal event, take place every year with more or less success. Cloud is not a hype anymore, so a conference with that topic can’t be successful. It depends also on the people and the missing culture of sharing. We had one of three planned conferences later the year and also with participants from other countries (that wasn’t the case the years before) it was very unfrequented. Maybe we have to work on it next year.

A story with more success is ansible-otc. Version 3 was released in February with a complete rework of the code, following more standards and a clearer picture on the OTC API.

More hidden heroes are working at Canonical. In the February Product Spot are highlights like LXD, Snap Juju. At Fosdem 2018 were a full slot of containers without docker , very excited.

I went at the OpenStack PTG in Dublin, Ireland. All what I can remember was something with snow. Normaly you haven’t that kind of strong weather in Ireland. In Europa, also in St. Petersburg we didn’t have snow. Beside that it was again a nice event with the OpenStack developers. Version 17 of OpenStack was released (Queens) and we started to looking for S release name (which later fell to Stein).

The modern world arrived Berlin. I’ve got as a commuter the BVG FahrCard, an electronic chip card as a replacement for the monthly renewable paper card, to validate with an extra pass which should be validate by an id card with an picture.

I saw electronic pre-paid cards in St. Petersburg transport system. Now we have it also in Berlin and it’s valid until 2022 (it’s not written on the card).

In the spring Deutsche Telekom Hubraum starts with a series of 5G meetups. We’ve learned 5G already during the OpenStack Summit 2015 in Tokyo. SK Telecom talked a lot about 5G and had already some use cases on the agenda. Only 3 years later we start here in Germany with the explanation of 5G. And we have an antenna installed, unfortunatelly on the same tower, where the Nazis started 1936 with the radio transmission of the Olympic Games. Nevertheless I saw some interesting presentations during the year from some startups around Germany and Poland. Hubraum as a startup incubator has a second location in Krakow.

That was also one of my travel targets this year: Poland. I wanted to join the OpenStack Days in Poland and Hungary and applied a presentation to explain the work of our OpenStack I18n project. I was successful in Krakow and in Budapest. It was my first visit at one of the OpenStack Days beside the OpenStack Days in Berlin organized by OpenStack Dach e.V., which has a bit more community background as the OpenStack Day organized by B1-Systems.

In March we had also a bigger power outage in Berlin Charlottenburg. Terrorists sawed cables for economic damage. At the end a lot of private households were affected. Bigger economis like Tegel airport have their own power grid or emergency power systems. I had again the idea to write a thriller about that topic, but Blackout is already written by Marc Elsberg and there is nothing to add beside reality.

btw grid: I had some thoughts about API explorer and API monitoring this year. There are already some good services like https://apimetrics.io/. Performance monitoring and availability of APIs is the next thing which is worth to think about it.

In the meantime I released Version 4 of ansible-otc. That release focused on code quality (again). Code is checked by Codacy and Travis.

In the OpenStack world we upgraded our translation platform Zanata to release 4. That’s a major step with a new look and feel, and new features and bug fixes. The developer team in Down Under makes really a good job. I have some ideas taken from the AI hackathon with Machine Translation and how to integrate that in our translation project.

In 2018 one of the colleagues of Deutsche Telekom started with translation in Esperanto, the upper global language.

In May I had some maintenance in the garden of my home. Building a hedge was the name of the project and it continued the rest of the year.

In Copenhagen CubeCon appeared with 6000 attendees. All things about Kubernetes. Mention that in your session title and the room will be full.

In Berlin we had nearly the same experience with AWS Summit at Station. So many people were there, unbelievable. I just came back from Budapest which I visited two times this year (after 34 years of the previous trip). OpenStack CEE Day was well organized and I met our colleagues of the Hungarian cloud team. The other trip was for another internal event Deutsche Telekom Barcamp. It was co-located with a Hackathon, but I only attended the Barcamp, which was pretty nice to meet colleagues from Russia to Mexico, and Germany in Hungary.

Before I flew to Vancouver I attended as a sharefolder the Deutsche Telekom Annual General Meeting in Bonn. It was very interesting to see how money is concerned and what are the plans for the future so the shareholder (like me) will get more value. I think I will attend the meeting also in the next year and apply a speak contribution for Open Source.

Open Source and Open Infrastructure was the main topic at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver. The convention centre was located near the bay and with a fantastic weather we had a fantastic view from the venue and some roundtrips with small air planes or the mountains behind the see. I was a little bit nervous because Berlin, as the place for the second OpenStack Summit that year has nothing of that. Nevertheless I was in preparation and organization of the event since over a year and in Vancouver we were still in the planning phase for Berlin.

I could contribute something to the OpenStack Days. To Krakow I drove from Berlin by car. Stopover in Wrozlaw and Opole, also like Krakow nice cities, quiet different, but nice. Worth to visit a second time.

After the second visit in Budapest I attended a DevOps Training in Frankfurt. Now I’m certified with some knowledge which I already knew, read in the book The Phoenix Project. Travel Status

The summer passed quickly. The football World Soccer Games appeared very quick for Germany. The bad mood against Russia as hosts paid off. We left the games after 3 matches.

Meanwhile we had some Musicans in town: Billy Idol and Carlos Santana. Both played at Zitadelle Spandau, which is now renamed in Zitadelle Berlin, don’t know why. Billy Idol was quiet interesting so see him live for the first time. With his old songs and some of his come back album Kings & Queens of the Underground which is almost 4 years old. Santana is an example of Continous Delivery. He’s now 71 years old any plays every year on tour the old songs in new manner. Really interesting to hear, and really interesting to see so many younger people at the concerts. I think we will have a lot of them in the next years.

In August I had some recovery at a mining lake named “Beach Roetha”

Back to work, version 5 of ansible-otc released with 634 unit tests, that means API tests, in Travis:

We started with hot planing phase of OpenStack Summit Berlin and the Pub Crawl at 27.08.

Two other events I couldn’t attend: WriteTheDocs Conference Prague, and the OpenStack Project Team Gathering in Denver. I could only remember the PTG last year in Denver with all that train noices, because the T release of OpenStack would named Train. And the Oktoberfest season in Denver Downtown.

That’s what Americans mean with Bavarian style.

On the national holiday 3th of Oktober I visited Poland as the second time this year. The german name of the small city on the Baltic Sea was Kolberg.

One week later Huawei Connect took place in China. I only watched the keynotes but it’s clear again that Huawei enters the leadership in many technologies. It’s also clear this company becomes dangerous for US companies. Later the year we’ll experienced a crisis. One of the Huawei leader management get arrested in Canada. One of the (chinese) sub companies should have violated US embargos against Iran for years. Addionally Huawei hardware has allegedly built in backdoors, so the governance of other countries prevent Huawei hardware for their 5G networks. Unfortunatelly our 4G and 3G networks are full of Huawei hardware. I think we have also 3 cloud data center full of Huawei stuff. The world conspirators don’t accept security certificates like TUEV or DEKRA. I’ll expect a new wave of blaming in the next year.

But now we are in November 2018 in Berlin and the event train started:

On the 9th of November we celebrated the Fall of the Wall, like every year in the last 28 years. It’s a memorial day especially in Berlin. The city was divided in East and West and there a lot of stories from the 09.11.1989 and the time before. The short-sighted governance of Berlin county decided the World Womens Day (8th of March) as a new bank holiday (instead 9th of November), What a shame.

One day later began our Hackathon “Hacking the Edge Cloud”. We welcomed about 40 attendees around the world. With the help of some sponsors we could serve good drinks and food in the nice venue Deutsche Telekom Hubraum. On two days the teams worked on different challenges. But also gathering the people was a highly target of the event. We recognized it as a success on Sunday evening. Monday morning, 12th of November, I started the trip to Deutsche Telekom Representative Office.

That event and also the OpenStack Summit in Berlin I’ve already described here.

On 16.11. I had one day of work. Writing reports of the event, preparing vacation, which I’ll have three weeks along.

On 05.12. I’m back.

Looking back, it was a very successful and exciting year. In the last days the outlines of the new year appear.

Working with a new team, movement to a new office in Berlin, attending Deutsche Telekom AI Summit, organizing OpenStack Operator Meetup in Berlin. And all the other things what I mentioned before.

Wish a happy new year!

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