Schlomo Schapiro

Last week, I attended the Univention Summit 2025 in Bremen , and it was a very pleasant surprise. I didn’t expect much, and it turned out to be an event with about 750 participants and a lot of interesting talks and vendors to meet. In the shadow of Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace , there is a vibrant and active community of companies, government agencies and schools who use OX App Suite , Nextcloud , Opentalk , Samba and even Linux Desktops, to name just a few. Univention’s own UCS ( Univention Corporate Serve r) also serves as the core of the internet IT setup for many organizations who don’t want to run a Microsoft Active Directory , or it complements it with additional functionality. One of the big news items that everybody talked about was of course the foundation of Opencloud , a spin-off based on Owncloud , by Peer Heinlein . I can only hope that this will ensure the continued success of Open Source file sharing and collaboration solutions. Let me share some personal hig...

Triggered by a provocative announcement for their The Cuckoo in the Tendering Process: When the vendor loses to itself panel discussion by Peer Heinlein  ( Heinlein Support ) and Johannes Loxen  ( Sernet ) on LinkedIn, I attended the 10th Bitkom Open Source Forum  in Erfurt . This free one-day conference on open source in a business context has become a highly informative event - that is well worth attending. This year's motto of  The future of open source - fair, regulated, intelligent was exactly what I needed at the moment, and I spent the whole day in the Open Source - regulated  track. Cockoo or What Is My Business Model? The panel discussion was about the challenges Peer faces in marketing OpenTalk , the open source videoconferencing software that Heinlein Support has developed over the last few years. Competitors seem to be offering OpenTalk hosting packages in public tenders, even though they don't contribute to the code or fix bugs. In the end, Peer c...

DevOps is not a title, not a box to buy, nor a software to install - how can you explain DevOps in 5 minutes, e.g. as an elevator pitch riding up to the top floor with your boss? DevOps is like a driving license for running code in production In my opinion, this is the easiest and best explanation, that everybody can understand. Specifically, it is like a motorcycle driving license and this analogy carries surprisingly far, e.g.: motorcyclists pass a theoretical exam → Engineers should know about their obligations before working in production motorcyclists drive on their own, the instructor drives behind and gives instructions via radio → Engineers should work in production and a DevOps coach should accompany them with expertise motorcyclists are fully accountable for their mistakes (e.g. hitting a tree) while they learn driving → Engineers working in production are fully acc...

Attending the 2024 Foss Backstage was again a real pleasure, my last one was in 2022 . I enjoyed participating in a conference in Berlin, in person and about Open Source. The only thing I don't understand is, why not more people come to it, there where only about 200 attendees on-site and another 60 online. Corporate Open Source Open Source in the business and as a serious business practice is clearly growing up. Most larger companies who sent representatives to this conference already have some sort of Open Source governance framework in place. It was also a nice meeting of many old acquaintances from the German corporate Open Source community. Has Open Source outgrown the OSPO   (video) , since SUN defined the role 25 years ago? - asks  Per Ploug Krogslund  who established Open Source Program Office (OSPO) teams at Zalando and Spotify. By my own observation it clearly has not outgrown it: Outside this Open Source conference, most companies I...

I talked about this at the GitOpsCon EU 2021 and at Berlin DevOps Meetup 2021-11: The GitOps Journey Video The GitOps Journey Slides I also talked about this in a more expanded version at Enterprise Code 2021 and Continuous Lifecycle 2021: The Role of GitOps in IT-Strategy Slides And if you understand German, please watch this full features recording of my talk: GitOps is most definitely one of the hype words of 2021. No self-respecting tool fails to market itself as a "GitOps tool, even if is only remotely related to the GitOps principles defined by the CNCF GitOps Working Group . But where does GitOps fit into an IT strategy? In my opinion GitOps should be the centerpiece of every modern IT strategy! The GitOps journey takes the hype surrounding GitOps to build a solid, automation-focused, long-term sustainable IT strategy. A strategy that uses standard "GitOps" tools together with o...

" Culture eats strategy for breakfast " is a well known quote that applies especially well to DevOps (good  example ). The two DevOps events in Berlin couldn't be more different and prove this idea: The DevOpsDays Berlin 2018  (a 2 day conference) was focused entirely on culture and delivered a solid collection of inspirational talks and success stories. Tooling was limited to a few ignite talks and the afternoon workshops, that happened at the same time as the open space sessions. The DevOps Berlin Meetup 09.2018  (an evening event) was all about tools. 3 talks about specific tools gave new and specific ideas about how to improve: automated database schema management with Flyway , Open Source CI with Concourse CI , Clickhouse the best backend for Graphite metrics collection. At both events I gave an ignite talk about Compliance DevOps  that shows why it is important to extend our DevOps approach also to the automation of non-functional requirements like IT ...

The 2 days of " The Microservices Conference in Berlin - 2018 " where packed with talks that clearly demonstrate that the world of micro services is based mainly on two topics: Serverless computing and containers. Users either go to the public cloud providers and use the existing frameworks there, e.g. Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB etc. on AWS , or users build their own platforms on top of Kubernetes (or a Kubernetes variant). The videos are available on the microXchg YouTube channel , my own talks: The slides for my own talks are available via SlideShare: Root for all - measuring DevOps adoption - microxchg 2018 - Schlomo Schapiro , see also Root for All - A DevOps Measure? blog article Kubernetes - Shifting the mindset from servers to containers - microxchg 2018 - Schlomo Schapiro , see also  Using Kubernetes with Multiple Containers for Initialization and Maintenance  blog article.

The CloudNativeCon + KubeCon North Europe 2017 in Berlin was sold out with 1500 participants. I learned really a lot about Kubernetes and the other new and shiny tools that start to become main stream. To get an introduction into Cloud Native, watch  Alexis Richardson  in the keynote on " What is Cloud Native and Why Should I care " ( slides , video at 12:27). He explained the goal of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation  (CNCF) as avoiding cloud lock-in , which is much more to the point than the official charter  (which talks about "the adoption of a new computing paradigm"). Alexis chairs the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) of the CNCF. The Foundation is " projects first ", set up similar to the Linux Foundation and already sponsors various Open Source projects . Linux Lock-In His remarks got me to think about the question, especially in comparison with Linux. To me it seems that modern IT in the data center already has a pretty strong ...

I had the honor to attend a new (for me) conference: The spring meeting of the German Unix User Group , this time hosted by the Cybersecurity department of the Darmstadt Technical University . The conference had about 115 participants and orients itself mostly towards admins. The former emphasis on Unix is long gone, all talks except one (about Solaris) where about Linux and Linux-based technologies. Two days of tutorials where followed by 2 days of talks in 2 parallel tracks. Noteworthy talks where the keynote about Jailbreaking WiFi Firmware by  Matthias Schulz , Architecture Pattern for Container and Kubernetes by Thomas Fricke and several talks about software defined storage. Especially the ensuing discussion between the speakers representing competing approaches helped many attendees to sharpen their own opinions. Jailbreaking WiFi Firmware Impressive walk-through of the effort it took to turn Broadcom Wifi chips into WiFi monitors suitable for WiFi hacking. The c...

The CoreOS Fest 2016 in Berlin impressed me very much: A small Open Source company organizes a 2 day conference around their Open Source tools and even flies in a lot of their employees from San Francisco. A win both for Open Source and for Berlin. And CoreOS also announced that they got new funding of $28M : Alex Polvi , CEO of CoreOS More interesting for IT people everywhere is the message one can learn here: Container technologies are ready for production. There is a healthy environment of Open Source solutions: Kubernetes , Mesosphere DC/OS , containerd , even OpenStack and others. Commercial editions with vendor support like Tectonic  (CoreOS), Mesosphere Enterprise or Hashicorp Atlas 3rd party tools solving common problems like persistent storage: StorageOS  and  Quobyte In fact, choosing the "right" platform starts to become the main problem for those who still run on traditional Virtualization platforms. On the other hand, IT companies who don't ...

The Open Source Data Center Conference 2016 is a good measure for how the industry changes. Compared to 2014 Cloud topics take more and more space. Both how to build your own on-premise cloud with Mesos , CoreOS or Kubernetes but also how to use the public Cloud. Maybe not surprising, I used the conference to present my own findings from 2 years of Cloud migration at ImmobilienScout24 : After we first tried to find  way to quickly migrate our data centers into the Cloud we now see that a hybrid approach works better. Data center and cloud are both valued platforms and we will optimize the costs between them. Hybrid Cloud - A Cloud Migration Strategy Do you use Cloud? Why? What about the 15 year legacy of your data center? How many Enterprise vendors tried to sell you their "Hybrid Cloud" solution? What actually is a Hybrid Cloud? Cloud computing is not just a new way of running servers or Docker containers. The interesting part of any Cloud offering are mana...

At the microXchg 2016 last week Fred George - who takes pride having been called a hand grenade - gave a very inspiring talk about how all the things that we do right now have one primary goal: Go Faster Reducing cycle time for deployments, automation everywhere, down-sizing services to "microservices", building resilient and fault-tolerant platforms and more are all facets of a bigger journey: Provide value faster and find out faster what works and what not. DevOps DevOps is seen by most developers as beeing an Ops movement to catch on with developers before their jobs become obsolete. Attending various DevOps Days in Germany and the USA, the developers who where also there always complained about the lack of developers and the lack of developer topics. They observed that the conference seems to be by and for Ops people. Consequently, DevOps conferences usually have two tracks: Methods and Tools. Methods teach us how to do "proper" software develop...

Is Amazon good for DevOps? Maybe yes, maybe no. But for sure the new Berlin office is good for a Berlin DevOps Meetup . Jonathan Weiss gave a short overview over the engineering departments found here: AWS OpsWorks, AWS Solution Architects, Amazon EC2, Machine Learning. Michael Ducy (Global Partner Evangelist at Chef Software ) talks about DevOps and tells the usual story. Michael uses goats and silos as a metaphor and builds his talk from the famous goat and silo problem . He sees the "IT manufacturing process" as silos (read  History of Silos  for more about that) and DevOps minded people as goats: Multi-purpose, versatile, smart and stubborn at reaching their goals. The attendees of the DevOps event probably did not need much convincing, but the talk was nevertheless very entertaining. Michael has an MBA and also gave some useful insights into how organisations evolve into silos and how organisational "kingdoms" develop. The talk is available as video...

This week was my Meetup Marathon: Microservices Meetup Berlin about  Software Memories and Simulated Machines by  William Louth . Berlin DevOps about Scaling Logstash: A Collection of War Stories  by  Pere Urbon-Bayes and "Continuous development with Nix" by  Rok Garbas . Sadly there was no time for the traditional fish bowl discussion. AWS User Group Meetup about  STUPS tools & components platform by Henning Jacobs and Distributed Log Refinement Discussion  by  Christian Kniep . Software Memories and Simulated Machines was above my head. Scaling Logstash made me wonder how many engineers you actually need to run that "properly". Nix is something we hopefully don't need, Rok actually said that if you package everything you don't need it. STUPS  is the "Cloud Ops" stack from Zalando , nicely published on GitHub : The STUPS platform is a set of tools and components to provide a convenient and audit-compliant Platform-...

Yesterday was the first OpenTechSummit in Berlin, a new conference that came partially in place of the LinuxTag . The conference squeezed a large amount of talks into a single day. The talks where either 10 or 20 minutes long and covered many non-technical topics related to open knowledge or open technology. One thing impressed me especially: All day long there where workshops for children and youth. While some kids took their first steps in coding, others came to work together on advanced programming or hardware projects. The date (a German state holiday) made sure that children had time to attend, many IT people came together with their children. The organizers where actually surprised by the large amount of children who registered for a free kids ticket. I gave my " DevOps, Agile and Open Source at ImmobilienScout24 " talk and put up some ImmobilienScout24 posters for our sponsoring. Tweets about @schlomoschapiro #ots15

Last week I attended the Multikonferenz Software Engineering & Management 2015 in Dresden hosted by the Gesellschaft für Informatik : My topic was Test Driven Development, but I had to rework my original talk to fit into 20 minutes and to be much less technical. As a result I created a completely new  fast paced talk which draws a story line from DevOps over Test Driven Infrastructure Development into Risk Mitigation: SE 2015 DevOps Risk Mitigation - Test Driven Infrastructure from Schlomo Schapiro The conference is very different from the tech conferences I usually attend. First, I really was the only person in a T-Shirt :-/. Second, I apparently was invited as the "practitioner" while everybody else was there to talk about academic research, mostly in the form of a bachelor or master thesis. As much as the topics where interesting, as little was there anything even remotely related to my "practical" work :-( I still find it interesting to bet...

After many years of abstinence I went back to visit the CeBIT today. And actually enjoyed it a lot. It is funny to see how everything is new but nothing changed. From the oversized booths of the big players like IBM and Microsoft to the tiny stalls of Asian bank note counting machine vendors. From the large and somewhat empty government-IT-oriented booths to meeting old acquaintances and friends. But there are also several notably new things to see: For example Huawei shows itself being an important global player with a huge booth next to IBM. I managed only to visit a third of the exhibition but it was more than I could absorb in a single day. Nevertheless, my missing was accomplished with giving a talk about “ Open Source, Agile and DevOps at ImmobilienScout24 ”. The talk is much more high-level than my usual talks and tries to give a walk through overview. There were about 60-80 people attending my talk and the questions showed that the topic was relevant for the audience...