I am pleased to announce the next Xen Hackathon. The Hackathon will be hosted by the Ganeti team at Google and takes place on May 16-17, 2013 at Google’s offices in Dublin Ireland.

A few days ago, I had the privilege of attending SCaLE 11X in Los Angeles. And for me, it truly was a privilege. It had been over 5 years since I had the joy of attending a true Open Source conference of any real size, and what I found at SCaLE really excited me.

As machines are getting more and more powerful today, people want more from the powerful hardware. From a cloud user’s perspective, it is better to run more virtual machines on a single host. Xen currently supports running hundreds of guests on a single physical machine, but we plan to take it to the next magnitude – to run thousands of guests on a single host. To achieve this goal, we need to tackle several bottlenecks, ranging from the hypervisor to the guest kernel to the user space tool stacks.

It’s not often in life that you get a chance to do what you love — twice.

A few years ago, I was given the opportunity to spend my days working with and talking about Open Source software.  It was exhilarating while it lasted, but after a few years, I had to return to product-based professional services to make a living.

Fast forward another nine years and the opportunity to work with and talk about Open Source has returned — and I couldn’t be happier about it.