Review: OpenInfra Summit 2025

The OpenInfra Summit 2025 was once again held in Europe last month. Just outside Paris, developers, operators and decision-makers from all corners of the world came together to discuss the latest developments in cloud-native infrastructure, edge computing and sustainable IT architectures. The three-day event offered not only in-depth technical sessions, but also several keynotes, live demos, hands-on workshops and opportunities to interact with maintainers of the various projects under the umbrella of the OpenInfra Foundation, touching on virtually every facet of the modern infrastructure world.

In this short review, Achim, Justin, Kleon and Daniel take you behind the scenes: What highlights got them excited? And which announcements foreshadow exciting developments? Read on to find out about their impressions.

Of OpenStack Watcher, Keystone and Managed Kubernetes

Achim chose his sessions at the OpenInfra Summit 2025 primarily from the perspective of an OpenStack operator:

• Lessons learned from replacing Magnum with Gardener on OpenStack dealt with the successful migration of Kubernetes-as-a-Service setups on OpenStack based on Magnum to Gardener, an open source project from SAP. The necessary steps along the way were mentioned, as were the motivations behind the move. The presentation ended with live insights into the resulting Gardener environment.
• Getting the most out of your OpenStack infrastructure: The benefits of using OpenStack Watcher was about fine-tuning OpenStack environments: How to optimize hardware utilization, identify bottlenecks in the platform and tackle plans for optimization. The presentation featured practical examples to show how these scenarios can be implemented with OpenStack Watcher.
• Keystone: native federation support, advanced auth security, Rust picked up on a meme often heard in recent years: Rewrite it in Rust! One of the motivations for this seemed to be the lack of integration with other IDPs, and so the presentation addressed current and future planned authentication scenarios such as OIDC, SCIM and passkey support.

OpenStack at CERN, networks with BGP and Yaook for versatile OpenStack management

Justin took a deep dive into the network worlds of the OpenInfra Summit 2025 – several of his favorite talks were about OVN, Neutron and Co:

• Migrating Neutron from Linux Bridge to OVN provided the audience with insights into OpenStack operations at CERN, particularly their network architecture and migration. As Justin and the rest of the team just completed a similar migration earlier this year, the experience from CERN was of course particularly valuable to him.
• External Networks with native BGP in OVN was another topic that directly affects us – it was logical that Justin didn’t miss it. This session from STACKIT was about the possibilities and design of OVN, and how OVN works in comparison with L2 networks.
• In addition to many exciting talks, the opportunity to talk to Yaook maintainers at the OpenSource Pavilion was particularly valuable in order to gain insights into this tool for simplified and automated OpenStack operation on Kubernetes.

Operator nightmares and lots of Ceph

For Kleon, the OpenInfra Summit 2025 was his first tech conference, and so he chose a wide variety of presentations here and there. Daniel had set himself a clear goal for the weekend: to learn as much as possible about Ceph and storage solutions for and on OpenStack:

• Operator Nightmares: In the Trenches of CERN’s OpenStack Cloud was another talk from CERN, in which they discussed 12 years of experiences, adventures (and nightmares) with their OpenStack platform. Some scenarios were familiar to Kleon – others he is keeping in mind for the future.
• Leveraging Ceph Rados Gateway for Scalable and Resilient Object Storage was about different architectures in the use of Ceph for provisioning of object storage. Since NETWAYS Web Services has also recently started offering S3-compatible object storage, the topic and the possible applications were naturally of great interest to Daniel!
• Even before the deep dive into Ceph RGW, there was a suitable refresher on “Ceph Basics” in the session Ceph: Open Storage for VMs, Containers, and the Future Cloud – the perfect basis for building on this knowledge in many other presentations about Ceph.

All in all, we can look back on a successful weekend trip, full of new impressions, confirmations and food for thought on running our own OpenStack environment. There was even time for sightseeing in Paris in the evenings!

To conclude with the words of Kleon:

It was great to be there and see the open source community come together again at the OpenInfra Summit 2025 to discuss current challenges and new ideas. There were often several talks that interested me – unfortunately it’s not (yet) possible to be present in two places at the same time, so next time I’ll bring my AI agent with me 😉.