State of the OSU Open Source Lab

The OSU Open Source Lab is a free vendor-neutral colocation hosting facility that provides a variety of hosting services for FOSS projects from around the world. This session will cover the current status of what the lab has been up to and other new services we’re planning on releasing soon. Some of the interesting technologies we’ve been working with include OpenStack, OpenPOWER, GPU+OpenStack integration, Ceph storage, Open Compute hardware, GCC Compile Farm, Chef, Packer, Docker, and Kubernetes to name a few.

If you’ve ever wondered about all the services we provide and what we do, this is the session for you. We’ve been improving our services quite a bit and also have been expanding on a few other fronts as well. In addition, we’ll cover how we hire and mentor students who work at the lab and where they end up after graduating. In addition, we’ll cover some other ways we try and mentor other students beyond those who work at the lab.

We’ve entered a new age in FOSS hosting where most of the newer projects have a wider variety of options for providing services for themselves. Some projects even have strong corporate backing, while others still rely on a group of volunteers. With the expansion of cloud services and other SaaS platforms, much of what the OSL provided initially isn’t needed as much anymore. However, there are still many areas that we fill a niche that cannot be filled (easily) elsewhere. We’ll cover what some of those areas are and how they’re impacting those projects.