Kurt Garloff
Open Source developer since mid-90s. Linux kernel, gcc, dd_rescue, openSUSE, OpenStack, k8s cluster-api. Building and leading OSS teams and projects. Currently CTO of Sovereign Cloud Stack.
Kurt Garloff has spent his professional life with Open Source projects. Educated as physicist (in Dortmund and Eindhoven), he has a desire to fundamentally understand things. Applying this to computers made chosing Open Source a natural consequence. In the end, the global collaboration with smart people and the contribution to democratizing a technology that's becoming more and more important became the most fascinating driver in contributing to open source. He developed from a Linux kernel developer to someone who loves working intensely with people that do such work. From time to time, he still loves touching code himself.
Leading the growth of SUSE Labs, he had the opportunity to forge successful teams from brilliant individuals. He later complemented this with technical, strategic and business leadership functions in SUSE and received training at the Harvard Business School to hone the needed skills. Since 2011, his focus is on cloud technology and is an active particpant of the Open Infrastructure Community. As VP Engineering at Deutsche Telekom and later as chief architect of the Open Telekom Cloud, he has been involved with building quite some open source cloud infrastructure.
Since early 2020, he is working with an increasing number of co-workers on defining and assembling a standardized, open, modular technology stack that enables a large number of operators to jointly provide large, federated, open cloud & container infrastructure. This is the Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) project of the Open Source Business Alliance. It participates actively in Gaia-X and has received a significant grant from the German ministry for economic affairs, has already released R2 of the reference implementation in March 2022. Three public cloud providers are in production with it currently, more are upcoming.