FOSDEM is the largest open-source conference in Europe. It is held every year in Brussels, Belgium at Université Libre de Bruxelles. The conference is divided in tracks, called Devrooms. It lasted for two days, Saturday and Sunday. 

This year, in collaboration with Thorsten Schwesig (Operate First) and Felix Kronlage-Dummers (Sovereign Cloud Stack) we organized the Sovereign Cloud Devroom. That meant selecting the talks that would be accepted and rejected, making sure the presentations went through smoothly, moderating any discussion, and running around passing microphones for questions.

The Sovereign Cloud Stack is a project whose goal is to build a standard operationalized platform, filling in the currently missing gaps that deployers face when desiring to deploy a cloud solution and the knowledge and experience to operate it. The reference includes OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Keycloak and in a lot of ways looks very similar to what we are trying to accomplish at the MOC Alliance so there is a lot of potential for collaboration during future development.

My key take aways from the talks and discussions during the Devroom were:

• There is a rising awareness and urgency about the lack of control that people, governments, and businesses have in Europe as a result of the vertical integration and centralization that results from a few proprietary cloud providers and their lock in.
• A lot of investment from European governments is going into open platforms to try to address the above issue.
• There is a misguided protectionist sentiment in those investments favoring local European projects, even compared to global open source projects.

The list of accepted talks with respective recordings and slides can be found at the schedule.

Attendance at FOSDEM was significantly higher than I anticipated. Most Devrooms were at full capacity, including ours, and the hallways were full of people.

On the Saturday evening of the conference weekend, the Open Infra Foundation had organized a meetup where I caught up with other OpenStack contributors.