May we live in interesting times

The year ahead looks to be an interesting one for many reasons – one of which, and possibly the most obvious given where you’re reading this, is the acquisition of SUSE by growth investor EQT. But while that’s very exciting for us all, it’s not the reason for this blog.

Things to do in Denver when you’re (not) dead

This year in May we see the first of the newly branded Open Infrastructure Summits hitting the Mile High City, Denver. Open infrastructure technologies such as OpenStack, Zuul, Kata Containers, StarlingX, Ceph, Kubernetes and many more will be discussed, demoed, and dealt with under one roof. This bringing together of some of the finest minds and vendors in the open infrastructure community is very exciting indeed – new friendships and collaborative working relationships will be forged, and the open source community as a whole will be a better place for it. Working in high altitude will be interesting for us all, but luckily the Denver Tourist Board have tips on how best to cope with this.

Shanghai Surprise

In addition to the anticipation of this new event, we also learnt this week that the autumn, or fall Summit, depending on where you are in the world, will be in Shanghai. This is also very exciting, as when you look at the most recent OpenStack User Survey, there was a significant increase in responses and deployments in Asia, with 48% of global responses coming from the region. This will give some of the global community members that haven’t yet experienced Chinese culture the chance to experience something new, and to hear from some of these users about why they are investing in OpenStack and other open infrastructure technologies. Personally, I’m very excited by this opportunity to learn from those Chinese users and operators and to explore a new country.

Cold mountain

Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting Provo in Utah for my team’s regular team meeting. Being part of a global team that operates throughout the US, Canada and UK, we don’t get to meet up face to face as often as we’d like, so this was a great opportunity to get together, build bonds and plan for the year ahead. While we were there a week too early for the famous Sundance Film Festival, we still had the opportunity to visit Park City and see the famous Egyptian Theatre before the meetings started. Surrounded by snow and mountains in temperatures hovering around and below freezing, it was a glorious, if cold location, and one I hope to return to again. One of the highlights of the trip though was sitting down with our Global Director for Strategic Events and planning SUSE’s presence at the Denver Open Infrastructure Summit. Needless to say, we’ll be there in force armed with plenty of chameleons as well as a new version of SUSE OpenStack Cloud, and plan on standing out from the crowd as usual – watch this space for more details on just how we’ll be theming the event as it gets closer.

An inconvenient truth

In 1966, Robert F Kennedy gave his famous Day of Affirmation Address in Cape Town, which included the allegedly Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times”. This has been widely used since, but is it really an ancient Chinese curse? Much research has been carried out into the origins of this phrase, and while it can be traced back to a speech given by Sir Austen Chamberlain in England in 1936, it has been generally confirmed and accepted by many to not be of Chinese origin. As a result, I’m quite happy to live in interesting times – preferably working in an interesting role, in an interesting company, in an interesting industry and surrounded by interesting people. Working at SUSE, as part of the OpenStack industry, I get to tick all of these boxes daily! Incidentally, at the time of writing this, there were 155 roles open on the SUSE careers page – why not take a look and see if any are interesting to you?