Presentations

You may have heard of the pillars of observability: metrics, logs, traces, and, depending on who you ask, profiles. As systems grow in complexity, correlating these signals for rapid incident detection, root cause analysis, and performance optimization still demands knowing specialized query languages and complex toolchains, even with OpenTelemetry.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers give assistants and tools a secure, standard way to work with your telemetry using natural language; this session introduces MCP and demonstrates exploring real observability data with Grafana MCP, while showing how the same approach applies to other MCP compatible tools or custom servers.

The SCALE Exhibit hall will be open:

Friday 2pm - 6pm 
Saturday 10am - 6pm 
Sunday 10am - 2pm

Come meet our sponsors and our community of open source projects in the exhibit hall.

The SCALE Exhibit hall will be open:

Friday 2pm - 6pm 
Saturday 10am - 6pm 
Sunday 10am - 2pm

Come meet our sponsors and our community of open source projects in the exhibit hall.

The SCALE Exhibit hall will be open:

Friday 2pm - 6pm 
Saturday 10am - 6pm 
Sunday 10am - 2pm

Come meet our sponsors and our community of open source projects in the exhibit hall.

CNPG-I (CloudNativePG Interface) is an open-source solution for extending Postgres in Kubernetes through a powerful plugin system. In this talk, we will dive into how these plugins work with the CloudNativePG Project in Kubernetes and walk through the creation and deployment of Postgres clusters with a custom plugin. By the end of the presentation, attendees will have a foundational understanding of how to use CloudNativePG along with CNPG-I plugins to deploy and expand their Postgres database solutions in Kubernetes.

What happens when you’re a volunteer-run academic event with almost no budget, but need to support thousands of concurrent users? We decided to embrace the home-lab mindset and scale it to the extreme. In this talk, we’ll share how we transformed the home lab mindset into competition-grade infrastructure powering events like WRCCDC, PRCCDC, many others. Using second hand hardware and resources, we’ll walk through our migration from VMware and a SAN to an entirely open-source stack built on Proxmox and TrueNAS, and how we replaced Active Directory with authentik + LDAP to eliminate licensing and increase flexibility. Along the way, we’ll cover the planning, hardware challenges, licensing challenges, design tradeoffs, training, and scalability lessons learned while running production infrastructure in a purely volunteer environment. If you are an educator and trying to string together a learning space for students or if you’ve ever wondered how far you can stretch open-source tools this is the talk for you.

The Fedora Council recently approved an initiative to revamp the Fedora docs. The initiative aims to establish a support team to maintain a productive environment for writing docs, and to establish subteams with subject matter expertise to develop docs in specific areas of interest. We’ll present about some of the challenges the Fedora docs have faced, and present the progress so far in improving the docs. You’ll also learn how you can help Fedora have better docs.

The PROVES Five mission is a lean, low-cost, multi-satellite CubeSat program that developed and tested open software for five spacecraft in five months. We will walk through the development, management, and triaging process that enabled rapid development across many institutions.  Finally, we will present our lessons-learned and show how Open Source both enabled this project and is the result of this project. Attendees will learn about management, development, and testing of projects built on NASA’s F Prime and The Linux Foundation’s Zephyr Real Time Operating System bound for space!

You enter the call (or conference room) where you are greeted by some higher level executives and members of your Infrastructure team. They have been tasked with bootstrapping the company's IT Infrastructure and start building new resources with IaC. Luckily for you (or not), you have experience with this and are eager to prove your worth and show that DBAs can do more than yell at your poorly configured query or that you are using ORMs. While this situation happens to many of us, I rarely hear about the struggles folks have trying to implement a stateful resources (databases) in a stateless in environment consisting of stateless resources. 

For your pleasure and amusement, I plan to walk you through my experience implementing this exact task and align the different phases of the implementation with Dr. Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grieving. Sit back and enjoy a few laughs, memes, and positive outlook on how we continue to create more gray area in daily work.

Enter Flack, a Nix-based web router. Come learn about how the Nix Rust API works, and how you can use it to do something inadvisable like I did.

You've learned Nix. You know it's powerful. But at work? Back to apt, homebrew, and "works on my machine." Your coworkers don't have
time to learn Nix, even if they want the benefits. This workshop shows you how Flox lets you bring Nix superpowers to your team—without asking them to learn Nix. Just a simple TOML file.

No Nix experience required for attendees. Bring your laptop.

Learn what changed in FreePBX 17 and see what's in store for FreePBX 18 as we continue to enhance the code base for the premier, most widely deployed open source telephone system in the world. Highlights include more robust deployment methods, new configuration visualization tools, and several AI enhancements to make technical PBX administration tasks easier—freeing you up to focus on big picture problem solving within your organization.

Behind every uptime badge is a tired sysadmin. Eric opens up about the realities of burnout in IT and offers simple, practical ways to protect your time, energy, and love for the work you do.

The most dangerous phrase in the English language is ‘We’ve always done it that way.‘” Grace Hopper spent 60 years fighting this mentality. Today’s developers sneering at “AI slop” and rolling their eyes at “vibe coding” are repeating history—the same engineers who said COBOL would never catch on. You’re about to find out why Amazing Grace wouldn’t hire them—and why you shouldn’t either.

In fact, every time you prompt Claude to write code, you’re witnessing the future Grace Hopper predicted in 1955 and throughout her career. Admiral Hopper carried 11.8-inch wires to make nanoseconds tangible. Today, she’d carry LEGO bricks to explain how AI transforms thoughts into code at light speed.

The progression is clear:

• Punch cards → Assembly → COBOL → Modern frameworks → Natural language

We’ve reached Hopper’s vision: human language as the primary computer interface.

For years, DevOps improved delivery speed, automation, and feedback loops, which were effective until they began to fail. As the stacks expanded into microservices and multi-cloud environments, the alert stream evolved into a firehose. While additional dashboards and stricter thresholds enabled teams to respond more quickly, they did not stop recurring problems or decrease the overall noise. The solution was not “more tools.” It was a playbook update. That update starts with the basics of clean data, consistent tagging, reliable telemetry, clear ownership, and real SLOs. Once the foundation is in place, apply AIOps where it excels.

This talk explores how to deploy workloads on Kubernetes using Nix without going through conventional OCI image builds. We'll start with a quick look at how containerd actually creates a container—interpreting metadata, preparing a rootfs, assembling a runtime spec. Once you understand that pipeline, it becomes clear that other methods of providing that rootfs are possible beyond unpacking image layers: assembling it directly from Nix store paths, mounting Nix closures as volumes, or modifying the container filesystem at creation time. This talk will explore some of those methods and their varying tradeoffs.

Managed services face unsustainable container bloat: images balloon to multi-GB artifacts with growth. Traditional "shift-left" approaches force an impossible tradeoff: bloated monolithic images or fragmented specialized images. Runtime package layering resolves this: containers provide isolation and security while remaining small; Flox environments deliver tool freshness without compromising security. This separation achieves stability through pinned packages and freshness through Nix/Flox.

PostgreSQL has had integrated full-text search since version 8.3 (and before that using the tsearch2 extension)… that's over 17 years of searching. New technologies have emerged since then to make searching a large corpus of text even more efficient, accurate, and useful.

This talk dives into new extensions and methods of doing full-text search: New algorithms like BM25, new approaches like pgvector, and how to combine them to create hybrid search methods.

Join your fellow SCaLE attendees for drinks, games, food and fun at our Game Night reception on Saturday from 7:00pm to 11:00pm. 

Sponsored by ARM

GenAI for the GenX guy is a talk about how being a member of the forgotten apathetic generation has led to a healthy distrust of GenAI. 

Are you new to the world of open source or looking to make your first contribution? This session will provide a guide for beginners interested in contributing to open source projects with a focus on the Fedora project. We'll cover a variety of topics, like finding suitable projects, making your first pull request, and navigating community interactions. Attendees will leave with practical tips, resources, and the confidence to embark on their open source journey.

From basics to advanced, this course will get you comfortable with SQL functions in Postgres.

It all started with a hacker. Years ago, a legendary build engineer wrote a collection of scripts so ingenious - and hilarious - that they lit a fire in my soul and changed my entire career trajectory.

In this talk we’ll explore how automation is a life hack that can transform daily drudgery into opportunities to learn, play, and make our lives more efficient. By using scripts to automate repetitive tasks we free our minds and to-do lists to tackle the complex challenges that attracted us to programming as both craft and career. I’ll share some of my favorite scripts, including a daily digest tool that integrates with AWS and Datadog, and imhungy.sh, a command-line tool that uses data, APIs, and a dash of whimsy to answer the age-old question: what do you feel like for lunch?

Attendees will leave inspired to turn their own most tiresome tasks into projects that spark joy. Whether you’re a sysadmin, developer, or hobbyist, you’ll walk away with fresh ideas and a new appreciation for the humble yet mighty Bash script.
 

Multi-tenant Kubernetes with GPU sharing can unlock serious efficiency for AI workloads—but only if you design it with security and performance in mind. In this session, we’ll walk through how to give multiple teams their own “cluster-like” experience while safely sharing GPU resources underneath. We’ll cover open source tools like KAI Scheduler and vCluster, plus how to plug in external systems for secrets and dynamic access control to keep the environment both scalable and secure.

Organizations have invested in GPU resources that can do all kinds of cool new things. And they learned from the last 10 years of security practice, right? Right!?! Oh, no.

This talk will cover the new threat landscape, real-world attack vectors, and practical approaches to securing GPU infrastructure before your expensive compute cluster becomes someone else's cryptomining operation. And this is why security professionals will have a job for the next 10 years.