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. 🙂

Aarno had the pleasure of presenting his view of the cloud at the Glenfis Cloud Talk on Wednesday, 20 November 2019, together with other experts at the Clouds in the Prime Tower in Zurich.

Those who understand the cloud only as an IT topic have already lost

Many companies want to move their IT into the cloud, but how does that actually work? At the Glenfis Cloud Talk, visitors learned from three perspectives how to take advantage of the cloud and how to avoid obstacles. Daniel Wolf (Glenfis), Dominik Zemp (Microsoft), Aarno Aukia (VSHN) and Harald Häuschen (Helsana) gave inputs on the subject of cloud computing. (from left, Source: Network Media)

3 views of the cloud at the Glenfis Cloud Talk

Glenfis has invited to cloud talk in the Prime Tower. High above the roofs of Zurich, visitors learned from three perspectives how the promises of the cloud for more scalability and new business models can be implemented in everyday life.

Perspective one: the expert. After the welcome by Glenfis Managing Director Martin Andenmatten, the first speaker was Aarno Aukia. The CTO and founder of VSHN demonstrated the changes that the cloud makes necessary in a company’s IT operations. Read here how VSHN can offer data center services without a data center.

But first the basic question has to be clarified: Why actually go into the cloud? There are many advantages, said Aukia. But the main thing is that cloud IT can be used to obtain IT – when, where and how you want. Like electricity from the socket, a company can use the services it needs. The cloud operator makes sure that everything works. Usually better than you can do it yourself.
As simple as it sounds, however, the use of cloud services is not without its challenges. Aukia said that the cloud can only show its full strength with consistent automation. Security should not be neglected either. DevOps is the ideal operating model. But neither with this, nor with a wealth of tools, migration to the cloud is a sure thing. It also requires collaboration, less silo thinking, training and good leadership.

Read more

You can find the complete article in the netzwoche.

CNC meetup #5 2019

Our fifth Cloud Native Computing Meetup 2019 took place on November 7th at Ergon Informatik in Zurich. Many thanks to Ergon for providing the great premises and sponsoring the Apéro.

As always, the fifth CNC meetup 2019 was very well attended and after interesting talks we had an exciting round of talks in a great atmosphere, illuminated by several Philips Hue powered light bulbs. A dream for IoT and home automation fans. 

VSHN and CNCF

As official member of CNCF and first Swiss Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP) VSHN supports the Cloud Native Computing Foundation with the organization of the CNC-Meetups in Zurich and we sponsored the KubeCon & CloudNativeCon Europe 2019 im Mai in Barcelona.

Agenda and Talks

Andri Steiner, Ops One: “Our journey to persistent K8s storage with Rook”

Andri’s slides:

Robert Altnoeder, LINBIT: “High performance storage for cloud environments”

Zoltán Majó and Raphael Zimmermann, Ergon: “Cloud Computing at Ergon”

Bottom line

Many thanks to the speakers for the exciting talks and the sponsor Ergon for the great location and the Apéro, especially the great beer selection! 

We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did and we would be happy to see many of you again at the next Meetup.

Next Events

You can find our event overview at: https://vshn.ch/vshn/events/

Next CNC meetup Zurich

The next Cloud Native Computing Meetup Zurich will take place on Thursday 27 February 2020 at Swiss Life. We are already looking forward to it today and wish everyone a good time until then!

Thank you very much and see you soon.

VSHN at AWS Summit Switzerland 2019

As we previously announced, we are proud to have participated in the last AWS Summit Switzerland as Bronze Sponsors. The event happened on Wednesday, October 2nd 2019 in Trafo Baden.
It was a great opportunity to meet partners and customers, and to learn more about the thriving AWS ecosystem. It also shows the importance of Switzerland as a market, that Amazon / AWS decided to host a Summit here after starting their Swiss branch.
We hope to see more events like this in Switzerland and want to say a big thank you to all Amazon employees for the great organization of the AWS Summit.

VSHN was bronze sponsor at AWS Summit

It is pretty awesome that we were a sponsor of AWS Summit Switzerland 2019 at Trafo Baden among other big brands such as Intel, VMware, Datadog, Veeam, NGINX and many many more. 🙂

Thanks for visiting our booth!

The VSHNeers really enjoyed being part of AWS Summit 2019. Thanks everyone for stepping by our booth and for the nice conversations.
Take care and see you on the next event!
Your VSHNeers

About AWS Summit Switzerland

Join the AWS Summit Switzerland in Baden, meet our local team and learn how the cloud is accelerating innovation in companies of all sizes. During this free, one-day event, you’ll get to know the AWS platform in breakout sessions covering a wide range of topics from new services and architectures to performance and operations. You also have the opportunity to hear from Swiss customers about their journey to the cloud.
Whether you’re just getting into the cloud or an experienced user, come and learn something new at the AWS Summit Switzerland 2019.

Forum EPFL 2019

On Tuesday, October 8th, the VSHN team participated in the Forum EPFL 2019 in Lausanne, Switzerland. Forum EPFL is the largest recruitment event in Switzerland.
It was a fantastic opportunity to meet talented engineers in the French-speaking side of the country!

Start-Up Day

About Forum EPFL

The 37th edition of Switzerland’s largest recruitment fair took place from the 7th to the 11th of October 2019.