Max Roeleveld and David Visscher - From Complexity to Simplicity: Our Cloud Infrastructure Redesign

Abstract

The University of Groningen recently celebrated 60 years of computing at the university. A lot has changed in that time, but a constant factor is running calculations and analysis on our own hardware. Currently, this involves two clusters in two data centers and several petabytes of storage, built entirely with open source technologies. With this, we provide 2300+ researchers with computing power that matches their specialized needs without the prohibitive costs of commercial clouds, enabling research ranging from medical science to space exploration.

We want to show you what’s behind the blinkenlights: discover how we build and manage the foundational infrastructure under our compute clusters. We’ll cover our philosophy, the difficulties along the way, and our ambitious new project to redesign our entire infrastructure from scratch.

Key terms: configuration management, OpenStack, Ceph, software defined networking

Biography

Max Roeleveld

Max Roeleveld has worked with computers since the 1980s and, after a long streak of web and software development, is currently a cloud engineer in the High Performance Computing team at the University of Groningen.

Everyday Linux user, Vim connaisseur, free and open source advocate, Big Tech distruster, blogger of 20+ years, fediverse enjoyer, user (and builder) of weird keyboards.

David Visscher

David Visscher is the architect of the Cloud4 project at the University of Groningen. With a background in cloud infrastructure for government, he is now part of the university’s High-Performance Computing team. A strong advocate for open-source technologies, European technological autonomy, and the public sector’s role in driving innovation. Science communicator, educator, and resident MOTD artist. Believes in reducing complexity, getting back to basics, and — by the way — runs Arch.

Sprekers