OSCAL is a local open source conference that is organized yearly in Tirana, Albania. The 2023 edition of the conference (the 8th one) was held on September 2 and September 3, 2023.

Due to being from Albania and the current developments in Europe related to cloud computing and sovereign cloud, I was extremely interested in attending the conference and networking with this group of people.

I proposed and was selected to present a talk titled “The Past, Present, and Future of Open Cloud Infrastructure.” During this talk I went through the major developments in cloud computing and especially the open source technologies that are powering today’s clouds, namely OpenStack and Kubernetes/OpenShift. I also discussed the challenges these open source communities are facing in the context of today’s cloud ecosystem dominated by a few major cloud providers and the current legal framework.

Slides for the talk can be found at the following link. I’m not aware whether the recordings will be made available publicly, but if so, I will link to them here.

The agenda for the conference was diverse, with a significant focus on open data and policy. The speakers were in large part Albanian, but there was also a significant presence from Europe and in particular the Netherlands.