Senior Solutions Architect
for Cloud in EMEA at SUSE
Simon Briggs
Having nearly 20 years experience in the IT industry after starting out as a junior Unix system admin’s and then into software support. Initially focused on Windows and Unix/Linux systems management and ITSM.
Though, as I enjoy presenting and meeting people the lions share of my career has been in Pre-Sales roles, this background then affording me the opportunity to join SUSE over 7 years ago. Initially working as UK SUSE Solutions Architect but have now happily become the full time EMEA Lead Solutions Architect for SUSE OpenStack Cloud for a couple of years (which I had been doing part time for nearly two years before).
I am a keen advocate of Open Source and standards for what this offers to society as a whole and I am frequently involved in Meetups on related subjects, having presented at the London, Netherlands and Oslo OpenStack Meetup’s and more general Linux sessions. I was also able to speak at the Openstack Benilux, Paris/Austin/Barcelona/Boston conferences in 2014/17 and at many OpenStack days such as Benelux, Nordics, Hungry and Ireland.
As a family man I also feel passionate that we need to help educate our next generations and have spoken on these topics at some UK universities, hoping to keep the momentum Open Source has achieved going.
“Leveraging Open Source for Your Software-Defined Infrastructure”
Companies are becoming more and more software-centric. By using a software-defined infrastructure (SDI) to transform data centers, SUSE drives innovation and supports the adoption of DevOps methodologies and processes. Learn how to leverage the latest open source innovations for your SDI
“Learning to fly with Airship – SUSE’s voyage of discovery to make the control plane Cloud Native”
SUSE has always struggled with the fact that OpenStack is today mostly delivered as a traditional “Mode 1” application. So since when we gained so much experience with Kubernetes as an orchestration and management layer with our industry leading Containers as a Service Platform product we have been researching the best way to move the Control Plane of OpenStack to a Cloud Native containerised approach.
This will realise many benefits for customers, such as easier lifecycle management, better clustering reliability and more dynamic deployment techniques which ultimately offer higher Return on Investment for the services our customers need to deliver from the platform.
This has been done by others, but as SUSE’s primary value to its customers is delivering distributions that are fully tested and supported we could risk no short cuts.
So this session will explain our process, how we finally found the right vehicle in Airship to deliver the change whilst still offering Industry Leading Support and how we have worked with other projects, such as OpenStack-Helm to release the power of Airship’s sub projects such as Armada to now be in a position where we have an internal BETA running and expect to provide a customer technical preview soon.