Many members of SCS team and community gathered at Cloud Expo Europe in Frankfurt. As my company, Syself, joined the community only a few months ago, we have not seen anybody in person before. For us, the CEE was not only about listening to interesting talks and meeting new people.

It was also about finally talking to the other members of the SCS community in person. We have worked together a lot in the past weeks using video conferences, but seeing someone in person is a whole different thing. I am sure that many people can relate to that after more than two years of the pandemic.

Team Building in Frankfurt

A lot has happened in the SCS community, so there were many current and future projects to discuss. Fortunately, the expo and the evening/night program brought plenty of opportunities to talk about SCS business and even left room for personal stuff.

In order to get to know each other better and to grow as a team, we had a really nice dinner at an Indian restaurant. Some team members spotted an Irish pub in which we went for some alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks afterwards.

Sovereign Clouds Play a Major Role at CEE

At Syself, we focus on modern, European cloud infrastructure that can be managed easily by our clients. In the earlier stages of our company, we did not even know about the theoretic concept of digital sovereignty. However, the products that we build for our clients have always been fully aligned behind this concept.

The CEE showed us that we are not at all alone. There are a lot of companies and projects that aim for European IT infrastructure where end users are truly sovereign. It is great that many of them are collaborating in projects like SCS or GAIA-X.

Alexander Wallner and Christian Berendt (here and here) from plusserver and OSISM - the two companies who run the SCS-based commercial cloud services pluscloud open and Betacloud - indicated in their talks the importance of SCS in the European cloud world. They stressed the importance of open-source, of active collaboration between cloud providers, and modern IT infrastructure.

The talks of Kurt Garloff and Peter Ganten from the OSBA and SCS were inspiring to me. They formulated many thoughts I had in my head already and put them down in a structured manner on their slides.

Among others, they pointed out the different dimensions of a sovereign cloud and the importance of it. I am sure that we can use these ideas in projects of both the SCS community and Syself.

Sovereign Clouds Are Not Only a Theoretic Concept

The collaboration of SCS with Eco, the association of the German Internet industry, was another major topic.

Kurt Garloff mentioned in his speech that the cluster infrastructure for the testing and staging environments of the Gaia-X Federation Services will be on SCS infrastructure. The CEE provided room for meetings where the details of this project were discussed.