2025 Superuser Awards Nominee: CIR team at Télécom Paris

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CIR team at Télécom Paris is one of the 4 nominees for the Superuser Awards 2025. Check out why its team is getting nominated:

Who is the nominee?

CIR team at Télécom Paris : Nicolas Bouché, Marc Jeanmougin

How has open infrastructure transformed the organization’s business?

We are a public university, so we don’t have usual “business” metrics: we use OpenStack to provide infra to our students and host services for research and education in a very agile fashion with a small team, which enabled the creation of devops and project-based courses and facilitated services deployment.

How has the organization participated in or contributed to an open source project?

Researchers at Télécom Paris contribute to a variety of open source projects listed here and in particular we have people working on Software Heritage (archiving all open code from the internet), Rocq (theorem prover), Inkscape (vector graphics), YAGO (knowledge base) and more. We of course also report bugs when we find them (or “+1” existing reports) from projects we use.

What open source technologies does the organization use in its open infrastructure environment?

We have an production OpenStack cluster with:

Keystone
Nova
Neutron
Barbican
Cinder/Swift/glance/heat/octavia/magnum/horizon including a few gpus VMs (with PCI passthrough), and a few K8s clusters managed by Magnum + a “test” OpenStack cluster to test upgrades and configurations. Our monitoring is based on Prometheus, Grafana, and Nagios.

What is the scale of your open infrastructure environment?

20 computes : 3 ARM hosts (768Threads) , 2 GPU hosts (12 GPUs / 56Threads) ), 15 CPU hosts (1080 Threads)
4 LVM-based cinder pools, some with nvmeof, ~10TB
4 Swift hosts ~ 70TB
286 VMs, 11 k8s clusters

What kind of operational challenges have you overcome during your experience with open infrastructure?

We try to do rolling upgrade with live migrations to ensure our services are always up and running. Additionally, we are able to offer minimal operational latency and best performance, in particular on the networking side. Maintaining operational K8s clusters with Magnum across versions also sometimes proves a bit challenging.

How is this team innovating with open infrastructure?

We use our OpenStack cluster to teach OpenStack with DevStack VMs in a university setting, which we find kind of cool 🙂

Tags: China Telecom, Superuser, Superuser Awards

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Allison Price

VP of Marketing & Community at OpenInfra Foundation

Allison is the VP of Marketing & Community at the OpenInfra Foundation (previously the OpenStack Foundation). Her mission is to continue the storytelling of the global community by building relationships with the developers, operators and ecosystem around global open source communities. In her free time, she likes to listen to Celine Dion, rank local margaritas, and travel.