Open Infrastructure technology has become increasingly mature.
Nevertheless, high quality management and operations of open platforms
continues to require DevOps teams with significant skills. The
Sovereign Cloud Stack project has been created with the goal to significantly
lower the bar and with the concept of collaboration over competition
first results have been achieved on the conceptual as well as technical
side of things.
While the integration of a standardized operational stack helps the
platform operations teams, it is only an important first step.
The next step is to create strong communities that share operational
practices and make them openly available instead of 'cooking with the
secret sauce'. Documenting best practices, fostering an open root
cause analysis process just as much as publishing the little tools
to do cleanup jobs or the setup of dashboards that can be used for
capacity management are important contributions.
Being transparent about bugs, incidents, security responses may sound
disturbing to traditional operation teams at first -- yet it is key
to build up experience.
Only failures make us experts and embedding a healthy culture
towards errors has been proven to lead to less outages long term.
Furthermore it helps to create trust with users, especially when incidents
do occur.
With the 'Four Open' the community has been leading the way how open
source software is developed. Let's extend this by the adding the
'fifth paradigm': Open Operations.
