Next month, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Paris 2024 will serve as a focal point for Cloud Native professionals, enthusiasts, and pioneers from all over Europe. We are excited to be a part of this great event, and we’re poised to make a significant impact through a series of engaging contributions.

The Cloud Native Dance: MLOps on Kubernetes

At the heart of VSHN’s participation is a presentation by our CMO, Annie Talvasto, titled “KubeDDR! A Dance of Predictive Scoring with MLOps, Step by Step”. Scheduled for Friday at 14:00, and presented together with Leigh Capili from Broadcom, this talk will mark the point where dance floors meet cutting-edge technology. Attendees will learn how AI-driven image recognition works, how to forecast dance scores, and how Kubernetes seamlessly orchestrates ML model deployments. Annie will offer invaluable perspectives for anyone vested in the future of MLOps and cloud infrastructure.

K8up: Our Kubernetes-Native Backup Solution

Our KubeCon adventure continues at our kiosk, where we will showcase K8up, our pioneering backup solution for Kubernetes, now part of the larger CNCF technology landscape. As an official CNCF project, K8up addresses the critical need for reliable, scalable backup solutions in a Kubernetes environment. This is a must-visit for attendees seeking to enhance their infrastructure’s resilience and efficiency.

The KubeTrain Journey: An Unforgettable Experience

Adding a unique twist to their journey, VSHNeers will be traveling to the conference aboard the KubeTrain, departing on the 18th of March from Zürich Hauptbahnhof at 13:34, calling at Basel, Mulhouse, and Dijon, finally arriving to Paris Gare de Lyon at 17:38.

That same evening, starting at 19:00, we will be sponsoring the exclusive KubeTrain Party at the Fitzroy Restaurant. This event promises to be another highlight of the conference! You’ll have unique networking opportunities, following our commitment to fostering community engagement. To join the festivities, the community is invited to use the voucher code INVITEDBYVSHN, securing a chance to network, learn, and celebrate with fellow DevOps enthusiasts.

Sponsoring Collaboration and Innovation

Our dedication to the DevOps community extends further through their participation to key networking events at KubeCon. We will attend the Isovalent Hive Mind Mingle on Tuesday 19th, and the following day we’ll be sponsoring the Swiss Apéro. Join us at those events to foster collaboration, share insights, and celebrate the vibrant Swiss community surrounding Kubernetes and Cloud Native technologies.

Join Us in Shaping the Future

KubeCon Paris is more than just a conference; it’s a meeting of ideas, innovation, and community. VSHNeers invite you to join them in this exciting journey. Whether you’re drawn by the insights of Annie, intrigued by the capabilities of K8up, or looking to engage with the community aboard the KubeTrain or through the sponsored events, there’s something for everyone.

Don’t miss this opportunity to connect with us VSHNeers! Visit the K8up booth, discover how we can support your Kubernetes and DevOps business, and engage with a team that’s at the forefront of shaping the future of cloud computing. Together, let’s explore the endless possibilities that Kubernetes and Cloud Native technologies have to offer.

See you in Paris!

In a rapidly evolving tech landscape, staying ahead of the curve is crucial. Join us for an event that will equip you with the knowledge and tools needed to navigate container operations effectively while keeping costs in check.

In this session, we’ll explore best practices, industry insights, and practical tips to ensure your containerized applications run smoothly without breaking the bank.

We will cover:

• Current Trends: Discover the latest trends shaping container operations in 2024.
• Operational Stability: Learn strategies to keep your containerized applications running seamlessly.
• Cost-Effective Practices: Explore tips to optimize costs without compromising performance.
• Industry Insights: Gain valuable insights from real-world experiences and success stories.

The event will also include a beer tasting, and an apéro. So don’t miss out on this opportunity to set a solid foundation for your containerized applications in 2024. Get your spot today!

Date: January 31st, 2024
Time: Talks 17:30-18:30 CET / Apéro 18:30-20:00 CET
Location: VSHN Tower, Neugasse 6, 8005 Zürich
Registration: click here to register!

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 is next week! And no less than 8 VSHNeers (around 15% of our company!) are going to attend the event in Amsterdam this year.

The complete list of VSHNeers attending KubeCon includes: Annie Talvasto, Elia Ponzio, Erik Harder, Liene Luksika, Robin Scherrer, Sebastian Widmer, Stephan Feurer, and myself, Tobias Brunner.

Not only are we impatient to learn about the latest Cloud Native technologies, we’re thrilled to be a part of the Project Pavilion where we’ll be talking about K8up, our beloved Kubernetes and OpenShift backup operator. Come join us at kiosk number K25 to learn how to use K8up to preserve your data in a convenient and secure way.

We can’t wait to attend KubeCon + CloudNativeCon next week and please, if you see the VSHN logo on our t-shirts, don’t hesitate to come and say hi! We’d love to meet you.

Join us at the Isovalent office for in-person talks and watching the eBPF Summit livestream!

eBPF is one of the most talked about technologies in our industry – enabling a new generation of networking, observability and security tools. eBPF Summit is for users and potential users of this groundbreaking technology, who want a better understanding of what it is, how it works, and the real world problems it solves.

We will kick off the event with in person talks from Liz Rice. Following that, we will have beer and pizza for networking while we tune into eBPF Summit Day 1. Join us for networking and learning about end users putting eBPF into production and cutting edge new projects.

16:00 – Doors Open
16.30 – Tobias Brunner (VSHN) – Cilium on APPUiO Cloud – a Multi-Tenant OpenShift Cluster
16.50 – Liz Rice (Isovalent) – TBD
17:30 – Start of eBPF Summit Watch Party (come and go as you please)
17.30 – Open end – networking, beer & pizza (outside on the terrace and inside in our living room)

When?

Wednesday, Sep 28, from 4:00 PM to 10:00 PM (CEST)

Where?

Isovalent & Puzzle ITC
Hönggerstrasse 65
8037 Zurich

The Swiss Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired (SBV), in collaboration with Red Hat, VSHN, and Tech Data, launched a hackathon for blind, visually impaired, and sighted people. Over 30 programmers and IT professionals met for two days in June 2022 at the Sheraton Hotel in Zurich. They worked on valuable solutions to supporting blind and visually impaired people’s everyday lives.

Luciano Butera, Head of the Technology and Innovation Department at SBV, and Dominik Wotruba, Head of TechSales Switzerland at Red Hat, welcomed the over 30 blind, visually impaired, and sighted technology professionals. Together, they developed new solutions that make everyday life easier for blind and visually impaired people. Five project ideas submitted in advance made it into the final selection: applications for recognizing the expiration date on food, obstacles on the street, arranging tandems for activities, reading out menus in restaurants, and querying the status of elevators and escalators in the train station, including indoor routing.

The participants from Red Hat, SBV, customers, and partners split into five projects. “Small communities developed around the ideas–quite similar to open source projects,” Dominik Wotruba notes. And he adds: “Everyone was able to contribute their skills and thus contribute to the projects’ success.”

The teams got a functional prototype up and running in only two days. On the technical side, VSHN provided each group with DevOps support and an APPUiO Cloud hosting platform based on Red Hat OpenShift. At the same time, Tech Data offered its AI solution Tech Lab. Red Hat programmers also prepared programming skeletons: basic framework templates for developing the solutions to make it easier for the participants to start the projects, followed by busy brainstorming and coding. “The work was completely focused–and practically non-stop. You could tell: people had a mission,” says Luciano Butera.

At the end of the hackathon, the teams had to present their solution to the jury of four: in addition to Luciano Butera and Dominik Wotruba, Jonas Janz, solution architect at Red Hat, and René Jaun, editor at the publishing house Netzmedien, were responsible for assessing the projects.

The jury was particularly enthusiastic about and awarded the winning “MENUista” project by Selamet Aydogdu, Dominique Hofstetter, Lars Jenzer, Alexey Loubyansky, and Erik Jan de Wit. They developed a smartphone app that displays and reads aloud the menu of nearby restaurants, making it easier for blind and visually impaired people to find a suitable restaurant nearby and be less dependent on sighted companions.

Luciano Butera and the jury praised the solution’s benefits, the project’s progress, and the presentation. “The app is easy to use and does what it is supposed to. As far as the team was able to develop the solution at the hackathon, it brings the users the greatest benefit on balance,” says the co-initiator of the hackathon. He agreed that automatically collating menu cards from nearby restaurants is helpful. “The winning project is an excellent demonstration that software for blind and visually impaired people can also be practical for sighted people,” comments Luciano Butera.

The feedback after the hackathon was overwhelmingly positive. Aarno Aukia, Co-Founder of the sponsor VSHN, was on hand to advise the teams at the hackathon. He praised the successful integration of all participants: “When finding their way around the event location, the blind and visually impaired participants were happy to receive support. But as soon as everyone sat down at the laptop and started working, there was no difference.”

Christopher Schmidt from Red Hat partner InnoQ and a participant at the event particularly praised the “open, friendly atmosphere” on site. “Also, the opportunity to hear directly from the people concerned about their daily challenges and to work out solutions was one of the highlights of the two days,” is his summary. Dominik Wotruba has a similar view: “For the teams, the task was to develop solutions tailored to the users’ needs. Therefore, responding to the input of the blind and visually impaired participants was central. From that point of view, the hackathon was a prime example of customer-centric work.” 

Last August, Patrick Mathers, founder and board member of VSHN AG, spoke at the IT Procurement Conference 2021 in Bern about the topic of DevOps and our involvement in the LINDAS project, the Linked Data Platform of the Swiss Federal Archives.

Please check the video of Patrick’s session below (in German, auto-generated subtitles available).

LINDAS is the Linked Data Platform of the Swiss Federal Archives, which is used to publish Open Data. Linked Data is a technology that makes it easy to relate data to each other. Hundreds of millions of data sets from a wide range of topics and sources are used for this purpose, currently e.g. from the federal government, SBB, cantons and municipalities. The innovative Triplestore database is managed and operated using open source software. The latest cloud technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, Operators, Prometheus, etc. are used. The technology stack used as well as the LINDAS platform will be presented. The presentation will address the challenges of merging the culture of DevOps with the strengths of the HERMES framework. These experiences illustrate how other government agencies can benefit from software operating models such as DevOps using HERMES and its strengths such as planability and controllability. Furthermore, the steps taken from procurement to work on the project to operation are shown.

We are thrilled to announce that Tobias Brunner, founder and co-CEO of VSHN, will give a lightning talk at the Crossplane Community Day Europe on May 4th, 2021, titled “Self-Service Provisioning with the Crossplane Service Broker”.

Crossplane is a CNCF project which extends the Kubernetes API to manage and compose infrastructure from multiple cloud vendors and infrastructure providers.

This is the abstract of the lightning talk:

The Crossplane Service Broker exposes Crossplane primitives via the Open Service Broker API. Tobias will introduce the concepts behind the Crossplane Service Broker and demonstrate to the audience how it all works together. By leveraging the Open Service Broker API while coupling it with the powerful concept of Crossplane Compositions it’s very easy to enable users of a platform which exposes Open Service Broker API integration (like Kubernetes Service Catalog or Cloudfoundry) to provision services fully automated. In a demonstration a real use case will be shown how a MariaDB Galera service can be provisioned using the Open Service Broker API, leveraging the Crossplane Compositions, the Helm provider and the SQL provider.

The August 2020 edition of the Cloud Native Computing Meetup took place on August 27th. It was the first time that the event took place online, and we thank all our attendees and speakers for a successful edition!
You can watch the full video here or you can subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Many thanks to the speakers for the interesting talks! Please download all the presentation slides (in PDF format) right here:

• Adrian Kosmaczewski, VSHN, “Quick recap on KubeCon 2020 and update on Project Syn”
• Simon Krenger, Red Hat, “Operators and Operator Framework”
• Jürgen Etzlstorfer, Dynatrace, “Overcoming scalability issues in your Prometheus ecosystem”
• Roman Bachmann, Swisscom, “Cloud Native Buildpacks to unite PaaS and CaaS”

We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did and we will be very happy to see many of you again at one of our next events. Subscribe to the Cloud Native Computing Meetup group to stay updated, and see you soon!

On Wed. Jan 29 2020 the Red Hat Forum Austria 2020 took place in Vienna at the Messe Wien Congress Center. Partners, end customers and people interested in technology met to talk about future topics of the IT industry: container, hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, interoperability, flexibility, agility and security.

The Red Hat Forum is the ideal place to learn how to successfully meet these challenges. It is a place to learn, network, and experience open source. It’s a combination of inspiration and action to build on what already exists, and it connects business and technology.

VSHN in Vienna as Red Hat CCSP

As Red Hat Advanced CCSP (Certified Cloud and Service Provider) Business Partner, of course VSHN couldn’t miss the opportunity to be on site in Vienna as well.

Impressions from Red Hat Forum Austria

We were there to see for ourselves, meet familiar faces and make new contacts. The forum included exciting talks, workshops and breakout sessions.

Horst Thieme Head of Sales Specialists Cloud, Middleware, OpenShift and Storage DACH, Red Hat

Erfolgsfaktoren für High-Availability Setups mit OpenShift 4.x, Guido Greber und Sebastian Eidner von Accenture

The team of our partner cloudWerkstatt was also on site with a booth, thank you again for the delicious espresso! 🙂

APPUiO was also indirectly represented! 🙂  

Wrapup by Udo Urbantschitsch, Managing Director Austria Red Hat.

Conclusion from Red Hat Forum Austria

The Red Hat Forum is always a great place to exchange ideas and experiences and simply to make contacts. The Vienna Edition was no exception.
In any case, we had a lot of fun, were able to take some of it with us and are already looking forward to the Red Hat Forum Switzerland 2020 in Zurich.

After winning the Digital Economy Award 2019, VSHN was invited by the swissICT association to the ICT networking party on January 23 2020 in the Kursaal Bern.
As a new member of swissICT, we were able to experience a very nice evening with interesting guests and speakers. The first speaker of the evening was National Councillor Marcel Dobler, President of ICTswitzerland. Electronic identity (E-ID) in particular was one of his topics, followed by more flexible labour laws. Afterwards, things got a little more humorous with columnist Rolf Dobelli, cabaret artist Florian Schroeder and comedian Regula Esposito, better known as Helga Schneider

More impressions in the media

https://www.computerworld.ch/business/veranstaltung/kunst-kampf-an-ict-networkingparty-2020-2459452.html

https://www.netzwoche.ch/news/2020-01-24/die-ict-branche-startet-heiter-ins-neue-jahrzehnt

VSHN takes part in all DACH Red Hat Forums 2020

To celebrate our Red Hat Advanced CCSP (Certified Cloud and Service Provider) business partnership, VSHN is participating in the Red Hat Forum 2020 in Germany and Austria. Meet us in Darmstadt and Vienna!

Red Hat Forum Germany 2020

Red Hat Forum Germany on January 14 2020 in Darmstadt.

The Red Hat Forum presents the latest and greatest open source technologies in cloud computing, platform, virtualization, middleware, storage, and systems management. Visit us in the digital city of Darmstadt and learn how open source can change your business.

Red Hat Forum Austria 2020

Red Hat Forum Austria on January 29 2020 in Vienna.. 

The Red Hat Forum is the ideal place to learn how you can successfully meet these challenges. It is a place to learn, network, and experience open source. It’s the combination of inspiration and action to build on what you already have. Choose from exciting sessions with Red Hat experts as well as our technology partners and many other professionals with whom you can share your experiences. Visit the Red Hat Forum in Vienna and learn how open source can change your business.

Let’s meet

Let us know if you are there and we will meet you for a coffee. 🙂