Meet CanaryBit, one of the 11 nominees for the Superuser Awards in 2022

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Who do you think should win the 2022 Superuser Awards? The annual Superuser Awards is to recognize organizations that have used open infrastructure to improve their business while contributing back to the community.

This year, the Superuser Awards winner will be announced at the OpenInfra Summit Berlin, June 7-9! Join the global community for its first in-person Summit in over two years and collaborate directly with the people building and running open source infrastructure using OpenStack, Kubernetes and 30+ other technologies. Get your Summit tickets before the price increases on May 17!

CanaryBit is one of the 11 nominees for the Superuser Awards 2022. Check out why its team getting nominated:

Who is the nominee?

CanaryBit

Stefano Cucchiella, CTO & Co-founder
Cloud Solutions Architect with hands-on experience in designing cost-effective and scalable cloud-based solutions for a wide range of corporate customers and public authorities. He holds a double-degree MSc. in Software Engineering and has extensive experience in product & service management, facing customers and turning requirements into concrete business value.

Nicolae Paladi, CEO & Co-founder
Computer security expert with 10+ years of experience in applied cryptography and cloud security. He has a PhD in computer security from Lund University, Sweden in 2017 while working with applied industrial research.

How has open infrastructure transformed the organization’s business? 

CanaryBit solution (Confidential Cloud PaaS) is intended to be Cloud agnostic.

However, thanks to Open Infrastructure and open-source projects we have been able to cope with complex multi-cloud integrations and support. This helped us reduce time to production from 72 hours to 4 hrs, keep the development scope small and support multiple customers based on their strict requirements on data compliance and data protection.

Our business is built from the very start on open infrastructure and this is reflected throughout our organisational culture. Reliance on open infrastructure allows us to easily scale in datacenters running OpenStack throughout the world.

How has the organization participated in or contributed to an open source project?

Nicolae is the founder of the OpenInfra Meetup Group Sweden since 2013. Today, the group lists 30+ events and was attended by 700+ members.

Nicolae and Stefano got to know each other during an OpenStack meetup in 2015 when Stefano reached out to Nicolae to organise a meetup at one of his previous companies.

Later that year, Stefano became one of the organisers and Head of Content for the OpenInfra Days Nordics https://openinfranordics.com/ events: four (4) events with 300+ attendees, supported and participated by the OpenInfra Foundation

Today, Nicolae and Stefano are founders at CanaryBit thanks to that first OpenInfra meetup 🙂

Our latest presentation was featured by the https://superuser.openinfra.dev/articles/openinfra-user-group-sweden-open infra-forum-11/

What open source technologies does the organization use in its open infrastructure environment?

CanaryBit was founded in 2020 and it’s building a data collaboration Platform (as a Service) with Confidential Computing. This is a greenfield for many players in the infrastructure business.

The OpenInfrastructure community is investigating Confidential Computing within the Kata Containers project. Once we have valuable deliverables and enough capacity we will contribute to the open source community. Furthermore, we are using the latest support for confidential computing in the Linux Kernel.

Our solution uses storage solutions for data encryption at-rest, like Ceph and Swift.
Deployments are made via Terraform and Ansible and governed by Git workflows, and evaluating Zuul.

What is the scale of your open infrastructure environment?

We mainly work with single bare-metal VMs at the moment as we are in the exploratory phase.
However, the environment can scale up to multiple VMs on needed-basis thanks to the available Terraform configuration.

What kind of operational challenges have you overcome during your experience with open infrastructure?

As CanaryBit, we are not there yet! 🙂

How is this team innovating with open infrastructure? 

CanaryBit’s main focus is on Confidential Computing and enabling confidential ML and secure digital collaboration between businesses and public authorities. This implies that organizations need to have good data governance and understand the quality of their data. We are working together with them to solve this initial problem and allow them to fully utilise our product for a fully secure 3rd party collaboration.

Open Infrastructure allows to build deployments with a cutting-edge level of security and transparency that cannot be matched by proprietary solutions. Moreover, open infrastructure enables CanaryBit’s platform to be deployed in any datacenter in the world running the appropriate stack.

The Superuser Editorial Advisory Board will review the nominees and determine the finalists and overall winner after the community has had a chance to review the nominees. Stay tuned!

Superuser