Again, over 8.000 developers and enthusiasts from all over Europe have come to Brussels for the annual gathering of the European open source community! For 2 days, on February 3rd and 4th, we’ve had the opportunity to attend FOSDEM 2024. This is the event where you can discover and learn about everything related to open source, from cool programming languages to good practices, weird hardware, EU policy, and emerging technologies. And all that with an eye on what’s going on with the rise of Artificial Intelligence and its implications. 

This time, there were around 59 DevRooms, plus several lightning talks and the usual main track. Obviously, some of the discussions were around how open source will play a key role in regards to what the AI will bring. Apart from sponsoring the event for the second year in a row, we also participated in two DevRooms: one at the Software Defined Storage DevRoom and the other one at the Virtualization & Cloud Infrastructure DevRoom. 

Software Defined Storage DevRoom

In our presentation at the Software Defined Storage DevRoom, we explained our current integration with Ceph, and how to use this open source storage solution for deployments across the cloud-edge continuum. This innovative approach leverages the dynamic deployment of nodes through automated infrastructure provisioning based on Terraform, and the auto-configuration of Ceph and the virtualization subsystems through Ansible. Our presentation covered the integration of these tools within OpenNebula to automate edge management and provisioning in multi-provider environments, demonstrating Ceph’s efficiency as an edge storage solution. For those interested in this topic, the full session and demo are available online.

Virtualization & Cloud Infrastructure DevRoom 

This is not the first time we participated in the Virtualization and Cloud Infrastructure DevRoom. It covers various topics such as hypervisor technologies, cloud security, clustering, high availability, and scaling in hyper-converged deployments. Recently, with AIOps emerging as a new model for automating operational workflows in large-scale IT infrastructure, we showcased our latest AIOps framework developed for OpenNebula. This framework combines Prometheus with AI techniques, enabling workload optimization and smart infrastructure orchestration. Our presentation showcased the initial results of applying AI-based time-series forecasting techniques for predicting VM CPU usage and optimizing VM placement based on CPU usage predictions on an OpenNebula cloud. The full session and demo, based on some of the R&D we’ve been doing under the Horizon Europe project COGNIT, are available online for those interested in this hot topic.

Presenting the new €1.2B IPCEI-CIS

Right before the end of the event, and in front of more than 1,000 people, our final contribution to FOSDEM 2024 came as a closing session by our VP of Open Source Innovation, Alberto P. Marti, who presented the new Important Project of Common European Interest on Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services (IPCEI-CIS). Approved by the European Commission a few weeks ago, and with more than 1.2 billion EUR in public funding, it is called to become the largest open source project in the history of the European Union! Stay tuned because we are going to play a key role in all this, as the only open source cloud & edge computing developed in Europe!

Final thoughts

FOSDEM is a unique experience, and it has the special ability to gather very diverse communities and projects from all around Europe, giving them an opportunity to meet, discuss, and advance in a way that improves the whole ecosystem. This time we’ve met and talked with many other projects like OpenTofu, AlmaLinux, MariaDB, Grafana, Jenkins, Linux Foundation Europe, and even Mozilla, to name just a few. And in all those cases, the words that resonated the most were Standards, Sovereignty, and European open source.

Conferences like these are vital for open source communities to meet face-to-face and work together. Discussions around AI, for example, were present in many talks on the agenda, showing that developers are increasingly aware of the risks and threats that accompany this trend. AI will also play an important role in the new EU-funded IPCEI-CIS, where we’ll develop together innovative solutions to manage the thousands of new edge nodes that are expected to emerge around the EU in coming years. There will be lots of things to share with you all at FOSDEM 2025!

🇪🇺 This event has been co-funded by the COGNIT Project through the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, under Grant Agreement 101092711 – SovereignEdge.Cognit (2023-2025).