Presentations

This project attempts to present the capabilities of weaving the abilities of artificial intelligence, a Python based interface, and Arduino, to build a voice activated assistant with robotic capabilities and human-like reaction. Through analyzing and acting on the tone of the speaker’s command, the project showcases the power of utilizing multiple systems to achieve a complex output. People attending will learn about the design process of this machine, the integration of AI APIs, voice recognition, and open source software, to display how intelligent and conversational robotics can be achieved with freely available and accessible tools.

What happens when open source, cloud infrastructure, and AI collide? Join Kelsey Hightower, Stormy Peters (AWS), James Bayer (Flox, Ex-Hashicorp), and Ron Efroni (Flox & NixOS, Ex-Meta) to hear what the fastest-moving engineering teams are doing today and what that means for the rest of us. From infra to developer tools to OSS contribution patterns, this panel will surface the real shifts happening across engineering velocity, team structure, and software delivery.

Recent security updates to Linux, such as the new Systemd Unified Kernel Image rely on the discrete or firmware integrated TPM (Trusted Platform Module) to verify boot and release secrets securely. However, there are many known attacks against the TPM chip itself. We will discuss the newly upstreamed Linux Kernel TPM security patches, which not only provide a basis for securely communicating with the TPM but also provide a novel defences against a wide variety of TPM based attacks by using a unique (to Linux) null key scheme. This talk will cover what TPM based attacks are (including interposer attacks), how the Trusted Computing Group expects you to tell you're talking to a real TPM and how you can communicate with it securely and use its policy statements to govern key use and release. We will then move on to how the new Linux Kernel patches extend this and can be leveraged to validate the TPM on every boot and continually monitoring it for any TPM interposer substitutions in real time.  The new TPM trust verification tools are available under LGPL as ancillary tools in the upser space openssl tpm engine project.

From Red Hat to MongoDB, major vendors are increasingly adopting tactics designed to protect market power, limit competition, and restrict user freedom. This talk examines the strategies behind these moves and explores how they affect the broader open source ecosystem and the communities that rely on it.

We will discuss recent examples, the motivations driving these decisions, and the long-term risks posed to innovation, collaboration, and software freedom. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of the dynamics at play - and what the open source community can do to remain resilient.

This talk illustrates a novel use case for NixOS—a cloud-native deployment model that treats edge nodes as declarative, reproducible systems while preserving the flexibility required for real-world networking and hardware constraints. It uses Cloud-init to inject secrets, metadata, and environment-specific parameters; a startup shell script to generate a NixOS configuration; and a nixos-rebuild to transition the system into a fully persistent, self-managed state.

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 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.

PostgreSQL is widely recognized for its extensibility, but can we really build a NoSQL engine on top of it? In this session, we’ll explore how DocumentDB repurposes PostgreSQL’s storage engine, query planner, and extension system to support MongoDB wire protocol, dynamic schemas, and document-based operations.

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.