perfSONAR and other GÉANT projects at FOSDEM

On the 1st and 2nd of February, the GÉANT project was present at the 25-year edition of the FOSDEM event at Université Libre de Bruxelles, in Belgium. We presented various open source software and services GÉANT has been developing, contributing and distributing for some time already : Argus, eduVPN, Filesender, Maat, nmaas, perfSONAR, RARE, the Workflow Orchestrator and more. A team of more than 20 took shifts in the stand during the 2 days of the weekend. Not far from us were colleagues from CERN, the R&E community was well represented.

We also had the opportunity to follow bits of the 75+ different tracks : Cloud Native Databases, Containers, Data Analytics, HPC & Data Science, Monitoring, Python, Social Web and Virtualisation to name a few. As well as getting the latest news and developments from many tools we use daily like Grafana, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL and various Linux distributions. It was not all geek and technical because topics like Governments and EU collaboration, funding of FOSS projects, open research and public policy were among the available tracks. Not to mention the second part of a very passionate talk titled "Where have the women of tech history gone ?" as one of the keynotes.

It was a very valuable and enjoyable weekend and a fun and good way to strengthen the bonds between the various GÉANT project participants.

Lætitia Delvaux, for WP6T3 and the GÉANT project.