 Hello, everyone. Welcome to this opening for our webinar. We are having a discussion with Sardinia Systems today and Kenneth Tan is with us. My name is Thierry Carras. I am the VP of Engineering for the Open Infrastructure Foundation. And I'll let Ken introduce himself and Sardinia Systems. Thierry, thanks a lot for having us today. Much appreciated. My name is Kenneth Tan. I'm the Executive Director at Sardinia Systems. So for those of you in the audience who may not be aware of us, Sardinia Systems is a cloud platform for a company. We were founded back in 2014. Our product, FishOS, built on OpenStack, Kubernetes and Cef, to enable enterprise to essentially turn bare metal servers into flexible cloud platforms that can be very easily consumed by developers and application operators. So with FishOS, the enterprise operator can very rapidly and very easily deploy a cloud platform that comes pre-integrated with automation to drive scalable and highly efficient operations as well as upgrading system in a reliable zero downtime manner. Well, so I've been involved with OpenStack since the creation of the project in 2010. Prior to that, I was working at Canonical on Ubuntu Server. The key behind Open Infrastructure, my main focus on Open Infrastructure is about making sure Open Source is used as a means to spread innovation globally. And today, if you look at the landscape for Open Source, everyone is open those days. And so what do we actually mean by Open Infrastructure? Open Infrastructure for me is Open Source solutions for providing infrastructure. So when you look at the modern application stack, you have basically two separate roles emerging. You have the application DevOps on one side who develops and deploys their application. And you have the infrastructure provider on the other side who maintains a programmable infrastructure for those application developers and deployers to deploy on. And that infrastructure provider can work for a public cloud company and sell infrastructure as a service or they can be in-house in charge of maintaining that infrastructure for the internal company needs. So Open Infrastructure is all about giving Open Source solutions to those infrastructure providers, whether they want it for private infrastructure or for building public infrastructure services. And eight years ago, we formed the OpenStack Foundation. And at that point, Open Infrastructure was not really even a concept. But today with the success of OpenStack, the ecosystem that formed around OpenStack, Open Infrastructure is very real. And we see projects like OpenStack or Kata containers or CEP or Kubernetes even evolve in that global Open Infrastructure space. And that's the reason why we formed the Open Infrastructure Foundation as a replacement for the OpenStack Foundation to better align with this Open Infrastructure movement. And in Sardinia Systems has been a corporate sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation for a very long time now. And naturally you signed up as a founding silver member of that new foundation. So it's great to see that Sardinia Systems is very involved in our community and participating in our global Open Infrastructure Summit, but also in all the local Open Infrastructure days that we've been running in Europe and around the world. Indeed. So Europe is very much the focus for Sardinia Systems. We are a European company started in Europe and most of our activities today are also very much in Europe. Though today we also have customer sites elsewhere in the world, an HPEC in Africa and North America. In one of the recent webinars that we had involving a customer, it was about how do we build large scale infrastructure. In discussions, it is certainly without doubt now that the most established, most mature solution for managing infrastructure as service is on OpenStack. Using OpenStack to help address some of the key infrastructure challenges that enterprises face. And these covers the areas such as reliability, complexity, system efficiency, scalability, or rather the limited scalability of the other solutions and problems of low performance. So what we are aiming to do with Fisher West is to take the full distribution of OpenStack, productize it. And by productizing it, what we mean is that we round it up with a full set of operations tools, deployment tools, as well as upgrade tools. So the overarching objective is to simplify cloud infrastructure deployment, operation and upgrade, so as to drive flexible, scalable and efficient clouds that ultimately improves the utilization, lowers cost and increases reliability for the users. And so now if we were to break the life cycle into three key parts, the deploy phase, operate and upgrade phases. Now in the deploy phase, operators are most interested in getting to a production ready system easily, quickly. It is not in the organization's interest to be spending multiple months, multiple quarters, to get to the point where users can use the system. And with Fisher West, our target is to take the bare metal servers into production within an afternoon. This is what we regularly see now. And once the system is up and running, we are entering the operate phase. And as a production system, this should be the largest part of the three phases of life cycle. So here the operator would benefit from having all the key infrastructure operations tools being pre-integrated. It works out of the box, ready for production out of the box, not having to again spend multiple months, multiple quarters to productize the system within the organization. And now six months later, there's a new release of OpenStack. Users love this, the rapid innovation, the new functionalities, new capabilities. They are simply unmatched and they're fantastic. But for operators, these are often seen as additional challenges. So with Fisher West Upgrader, we answer these challenges very simply. We provide a zero downtime upgrade solution. I recall that we were the first to introduce zero downtime upgrade for OpenStack. It was during the Metaca upgrade cycle and we've consistently been providing zero downtime upgrade to our customers since then. And it's really great to see companies taking the open source code and turning it into a production-ready stack. The way I've been mentioning earlier that with the rename of to the new name Open Infrastructure Foundation, we are moving to support open infrastructure beyond OpenStack. But OpenStack is still at the very core of our efforts. And it's true that today it's well established. It's no longer like exciting, it's very stable. It's a very proven platform for delivering infrastructure as a service. And in 2021, it's still one of the three most active open source projects in the world in terms of number of changes merged. So there's a lot of activity, a lot of changes. And like you said, release every six months to account for that and push those new features and support for more hardware into the stack. It handles today more than 15 million CPU cores of computing power in production. So it has seen a lot of adoption, especially in the telecom industry worldwide, but also research or public clouds in Europe. Today we're seeing it used across every industry verticals. And in terms of the technical position, it sits above hardware and turns it into programmable infrastructure, which then cloud-aware applications and orchestrators like Kubernetes can leverage. But you're right in saying that it's a very powerful software stack, but at the same time it's also very complex. And so being able to productize this software into something that is easily operable is really key. And I'm actually interested in learning why your customers choose OpenStack for infrastructure as a service. Ken? So over the past 10 years, we've seen a number of different contenders in the infrastructure as service space. Some of them open source, some of them are not, and some of them try to be open source, but why could debate? But what we have seen is that OpenStack is today the most popular for building infrastructure as a service. It's provided flexibility that is simply unmatched. The code velocity in OpenStack is just unmatched. There isn't an alternative that is bringing innovation as quickly, as rapidly as OpenStack. And it allows the operators, like you said, to take bare metal into consumable cloud. And this allows the end-users to benefit from faster, easier, more flexible workloads. And ultimately for the organization, it's better cost efficiency. Yeah, the cost efficiency. The cost efficiency is really like the key driver today for more OpenStack adoption. And so I'm glad that you mentioned it. And organizations are not building toys. And there was a phase of experimentation, I would say at the start, but now it's really a rational business decision to adopt those frameworks because it makes economic sense for the company to have at least a significant part of their infrastructure being run with those kind of systems. Do you have specific examples of what your customers are doing using OpenStack? Sure, sure, sure. So our customers today are in domains such as finance, bioinformatics, telco, hosting service providers, as well as HPC research, academia and government. And these organizations, whether they are national scale systems or the enterprise clouds at publicly listed enterprises, the cloud infrastructure, they are invariably core to their business. This is not a side show. This is not a kick the tire system. This is core to the organization core to the business. So to mention a few of them, so one of our customer sites is the, is then the German national bioinformatics infrastructure, whereby they're providing national scale cloud infrastructure to enable bioinformatics infrastructure, research infrastructure for big data research in life sciences. Also in Germany, Cyber Valley Machine Learning Cloud, this is a premier AI and machine learning initiative in Germany. Here, VisualS powers the platform which integrates GPU accelerated systems, bare metal and VM based workloads as well as Kubernetes in both bare metal and VMs, ultimately to drive AI and machine learning workloads. And elsewhere, we power several clouds enterprise wide at Redcom and a leading 5G technology supply to major telcos. And perhaps less usual in another situation, VisualS powers the platform that hosts amongst other organizations a certain countries national orchestra. I guess you can't tell us which one. Not today. Okay. I also know that you have an offering around remotely managed private clouds, like a big telco company in Israel. So, Sardina, we position ourselves very much as a product player. And when it comes to providing services, we tend to engage services partners to enable remotely managed private clouds. But this particular situation in Israel, so the customer Redcom develops market leading network intelligence solutions for telco customers. And so if you look at the customers list, this includes a number of the tier one telcos in the world. Now, while the key value proposition for officials is that the system is very simple to deploy, operate and upgrade, Redcom still asked us to help operate a system. And we had a number of discussions with with Redcom. And whilst we normally engage partners to deliver remotely managed private clouds, we all agree that in this situation, we would remotely manage a system for Redcom. So we started with one system in Tel Aviv. And over time, we gained trust of Redcom. And we expanded to additional systems, replacing other systems that were then existing within the organization. Today, FishOS runs clouds enterprise-wide at Redcom. So for Redcom, the developers benefited greatly from having stable, reliable, flexible clouds with an enterprise and ultimately helping increase organizational productivity, accelerate innovation. We see the relationship between Sardina and Redcom to be a very symbiotic relationship. Our team is very much an extension to Redcom's team. And we succeed only if Redcom is successful. And our customers are not building toys. And that's definitely infrastructure for serious workloads in production. And it's another important focus for us is really that we build software that runs in production, not software that just exists in git repository for nobody else to use. Absolutely. I guess another question I would have is what kind of challenges and benefits has your customer faced, the Redcom customer? So when we started the journey with Redcom, we understood that whilst they appreciated flexibility that can be achieved with the cloud platform, there were multitudes of unsolved challenges around reliability. And there were existing systems in the environment. And we saw that those systems had unnecessary complexities, features that may look pretty in charts and diagrams, but certainly don't help in production. And we very quickly deployed FishOS in an initial system, rapidly delivered reliable, flexible and efficient environments for the organization. Users very quickly migrated onto the platform and they saw that, aha, this is stable, this is good. I'm not going to face unknowns working in this environment. Fantastic. And so over time, we worked with Redcom to grow the environment and to deploy additional systems that ran that today run on FishOS. And throughout the engagement, Redcom has also seen Sardina's support model ensures that problems are rapidly solved and always do. Okay, we're coming to you throughout the end of this interview. Is there any question you have for me? Yeah, Terry, what do you see as the future for OpenStack and OpenInfrastructure? That's a good question. I guess, so we basically launched the Open Infrastructure Foundation to build the next decade of Open Infrastructure. And for this next decade, I'm seeing two trends lately that will drive further adoption of Open Infrastructure in the near future. The first one is data sovereignty with Europe really needs to build a viable alternative to U.S. and China based public clouds if it wants to retain its sovereignty in the 21st century. And we don't really have giant companies like in the U.S., but we do have a vibrant ecosystem of smaller companies and Sardina is one of them. And by using widely available open infrastructure software and especially OpenStack, those actors can federate and interoperate. So I see this as a major driver for future adoption of open infrastructure in general and OpenStack in particular. The second driver is really the realization and I mentioned it earlier, the realization that while public cloud really makes sense at the start of a company, staying on the public cloud long term is really hitting your margins to the point where repatriation to the private cloud makes sense. There actually was a recent article by partners at Andrezen Orowitz on how that impacts company evaluation, outlining that repatriation results in one third to one half the cost of running equivalent workloads in the public cloud. And so as more and more companies and investors realize this, we'll see more demand for open source solutions to provide infrastructure in-house and OpenStack is a major actor in that space. So I'm really looking forward towards this next decade of open infrastructure. It's more relevant than ever and I actually invite everyone to join the Open Infrastructure Foundation. It's free for individuals to join. The URL is openinfra.dev slash join and it's really easy to join and be in the loop of future open infrastructure events. Maybe I have a question for you then in return, Ken. How do you see the Foundation, the Open Infrastructure Foundation helping Sardinas business and your users? Yeah, you mentioned about data sovereignty and the cost aspect in running private clouds. And certainly data sovereignty is a key issue, data privacy. Put it very simply, if you are an enterprise, can you answer to your customers where their data ultimately sits? And would your answer be one that your customers would be happy to hear? And in relation to your point about cost, we recently saw a customer's workload running in private cloud amounted to approximately 30% of what the same workload cost them in public clouds. It's a massive saving. And I think from Sardina, we can bring the voice of our customers and say that we're very grateful for the entire OpenStack community in supporting the evolution and the day-to-day performance. And this has allowed us to further build automated management tools on top of this powerful platform that our customers benefit from. And indeed, our customers' customers benefit from. And in Europe, data sovereignty simply isn't another choice, but to ensure data is where they are going to be secure, private for the customers. And in this regard, OpenStack is now the platform of choice for enterprises to rapidly, reliably deploy, operate, and manage their cloud infrastructure. So our mission is to help operators address these challenges in operating OpenStack, Kubernetes, and SAF, and scale and drive down TCO with Sardina VisualS. Yeah, and I agree that the main challenge, the main objection to this using more of private clouds in companies is really the difficulty of running the stack. And so I can see how an ecosystem of companies like Sardina Systems with distributions and services that help people bridge that gap in competency is really key to that next stage of Open infrastructure. So I think that's a good conclusion for our quick discussion. Do you have anything to add? No, and much appreciated for having us. Well, thanks again for joining us and thank you for sharing your insights on Sardina Systems and the Open infrastructure landscape in general. It was Ken and Thierry from the OpenStack community talking to you about Open infrastructure today. Thanks again for watching this and see you next time. Thank you. See you next time. Bye-bye.