About

A sovereign cloud is not a label on a brochure. It is being able to rebuild, from source and verifiably, the system image that boots on thousands of servers. That is the work I have been doing for thirteen years, and it is the project I publish as open source.

The ground

For five years, at Infomaniak, I operated and evolved OpenStack environments of more than 5,000 servers: version upgrades, scale-up, level 3 incidents, multi-cloud clusters driven by Terraform and Ansible. At that scale the official documentation describes the procedure; it does not describe what happens when the procedure meets what is already there. That gap is what interests me, and it is where nearly everything I know comes from.

I also designed the system images those machines boot on. It is the layer almost nobody looks at, and precisely the one that decides: whatever it contains, everything above inherits.

I am now an N3 Cloud and Managed Services engineer at Cheops Technology Switzerland, in Geneva.

What I publish

Open Image Cloud is the logical continuation of that work: ready-to-use cloud images for OpenStack and Proxmox, built reproducibly on GitHub Actions, signed with keyless cosign, and shipped with their provenance embedded in a MANIFEST.json. Eight Linux distributions, plus Octavia amphorae pinned to each OpenStack release.

The goal fits in one sentence: you can verify what you boot without having to trust me. That is the whole point, and it is also the only honest way to say the word sovereignty.

Upstream

Fixing a problem locally fixes it once; fixing it upstream fixes it for everyone. I have recently started contributing to OpenStack under the Gerrit account kallioli: modernisation and security fixes on Horizon, the OpenStack dashboard, and on openstacksdk.

It is recent, and the contributions register says so plainly: merged changes, changes in review, and abandoned ones, each with a link to its review.

Getting in touch

By email: kevin@stackops.ch. Code on GitHub, reviews on Gerrit.