Individual Member Profile

Being a long time member of various open source communities (Linux kernel, openSUSE and others), I have a personal interest in seeing OpenStack becoming a leading cloud infrastructure. In my professional life, I ran an engineering organizations that are in charge of developing, building and running cloud infrastructure. (See the keynote at the Folsom Design Summit at http://vimeo.com/41449373 and http://de.slideshare.net/laurabeckcahoon/deutsche-telekom-12607469 for some details.) I built the OpenStack platform behind DT's Business Marketplace, worked with Huawei to build and run an OpenStack engineering team in Europe, built Open Telekom Cloud, ran the Cloud & Storage Engineering departments at SUSE.

I have been working on a building a European Cloud initiative - Sovereign Cloud Stack - for the past 5 years. This is a best-of-breed LOKI stack, and our contractors and employees have been contributing significantly to OpenInfra projects, mainly OpenStack.

Dec 2018 - Dec 2019, I was responsible for the Cloud and Storage Departments in SUSE R&D.
SUSE was a platinum member of the Foundation and a strong upstream contributor back then with good products - I failed to prevent it from changing course, which is why I left.

Before SUSE, I was leading the architecture, community and consulting teams in Deutsche Telekom's Open Telekom Cloud Team.

DT has been a vocal supporter of OpenStack since I joined in early 2012 -- we have been able to run several OpenStack projects. I personally supported the InterOp Workig Group, a key area for OpenStack's success given the centrifugal forces in such a large project. DT has become gold member of the OpenStack Foundation in 2016 and has been headline sponsor for a few summits.

, Before joining DT end of 2011 I was a long-time contributor to the Linux kernel, which also gave me the privilege of building up and leading SUSE Labs and work with a number of great engineers in- and outside my company, contributing to the success of the Open Source technology.

I have been serving on the Board of the OpenInfra Foundation as Gold Director for DT and as individual Director 2020-2023, 2025 and on the OpenInfra Europe Advisory Board.

• S7n Cloud Services GmbH - From 2025-01-01 (Current)
• Sovereign Cloud Stack OSB Alliance - From 2021-04-01 To 2024-12-31
• Huawei Technologies Düsseldorf GmbH - From 2014-09-29 To 2015-04-30
• Deutsche Telekom - From 2011-11-01 To 2014-01-15
• SUSE Linux GmbH - From 1999-07-01 To 2011-10-30

I'm involved in the following OpenStack projects: Nova,Kolla-ansible,Openstackclient,Openstacksdk,Keystone,Octavia

• Together for Europe’s Digital Future – Open Source by ALASCA and SCS
• Together for Europe’s Digital Future – Open Source by ALASCA and SCS
• Digital Public Infrastructure - Government Clouds based on Open Source

• Welcome and Housekeeping Updates

• Sovereign OpenStack
• Forum on Loadbalancer-as-a-Service - fostering Octavia and taking LBaaS to a next Level
• Open Operations: the Fifth Open paradigm
• An Open Operations concept

• Digital Sovereignty - Why Open Infrastructure Matters
• Back to the original mission: an open cloud operating system
• SCS: Large federated infrastructure for sovereignty

• Does My App or Tool Work on OpenStack Cloud X? Use RefStack to Find Out
• Image Build as a Service: Why It Makes Sense to Build Your Own Cloud Images
• The Past, the Present, and the Future of "OpenStack Interoperability"

• Energy Efficient VM Placement