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It’s time for the community to help determine the winner of the OpenStack Berlin Summit Superuser Awards, sponsored by Zenko. Based on the community voting, the Superuser Editorial Advisory Board will review the nominees and determine the finalists and overall winner.
Now, it’s your turn.
ScaleUp Technologies is one of five nominees for the Superuser Awards. Review the nomination criteria below, check out the other nominees and rate the nominees before the deadline October 21 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.
Cast your vote here!
Who is the nominee?
Team members: Frank Gemein, Christoph Streit, Oliver Klippel, Gihan Behrmann, Julia Streit.
How has open infrastructure transformed your business?
As ScaleUp is a hosting provider, we started offering a cloud hosting solution back in 2009. After issues with the cloud platform technology that we used back then (regarding licensing, etc.), we began using OpenStack for our cloud services in 2014.
This experience has showed us that it’s better for us to rely on an open-source project such as OpenStack with a very vibrant community, compared to a proprietary solution.
How has the organization participated in or contributed to an open infrastructure community?
We have also been very interested in giving back to the community, pretty much from the beginning, as we have ourselves received a lot of help and support from the OpenStack community. As we’re a rather small company and team, we do not have enough resources to contribute code to OpenStack. But we have talked about our learnings and experiences in running OpenStack at several occasions (OpenStack summits in Austin, Boston; local OpenStack conferences, etc.)
We have been running the OpenStack meetup group in Hamburg since 2017 and since 2018 we’ve also been also running the meetup group in Berlin. In addition, we have also started offering OpenStack workshops teaching the fundamentals of OpenStack (free of charge to local meetup groups). We have had several of these workshops in 2017 in multiple cities.
What open-source technologies does the organization use in its IT environment?
We use a lot of open source tools: Linux (mostly Ubuntu and Debian), for monitoring and analysis we rely on Check_MK (Nagios) and Elastic Search with Kibana and for communications we rely on tools like Postfix and Mattermost.
What’s the scale of the OpenStack deployment?
We currently have three production OpenStack installations in both Hamburg and Berlin, Germany. Together with another hosting partner we’re currently building a third OpenStack cloud in Dusseldorf, Germany. These infrastructures will soon be connected via a dedicated 10 gigabit backbone ring.
Earlier this year we started working on some edge related activities and are now building OpenStack based edge clouds on hyper-converged hardware for customers.
What kind of operational challenges have you overcome during your experience with open infrastructure?
We mostly struggle with having only a small team. Therefore we have worked on ways to involve our other system administrators not working on OpenStack yet, by breaking down tasks. As there are many known open source/Linux tools used in OpenStack, many issues/problems can be fixed by tackling these problems (such as database problems, problems with libvirt/KVM, etc). We have had a presentation about this way of working on one of the last OpenStack Summits.
How is this team innovating with open infrastructure?
Since we getting involved with OpenStack, we’ve also started working on other new technologies. For example, we are currently working on a managed Kubernetes platform running on top of OpenStack.
How many Certified OpenStack Administrators (COAs) are on your team?
None.
Voting is limited to one ballot per person and closes October 21 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.
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