Reading · Techie Who Writes

The first-ever OpenInfra Days in Africa happened on September 6th, 2025, at West Point Building, 1st Floor, home to Angani Ltd.

A statement like this feels like being part of making important history because it is.

I had picked my entire outfit the previous day and intended to be there early. At 6.30 a.m. I got a call from one of the organizers who was at the venue already.

I got there an hour later. You could feel the excitement in the air. There’s something beautiful about seeing how a day that you put so much into was going to turn out.

By 8 a.m. the first attendees were arriving. We spent some time preparing and making a few schedule realignments. The speakers had also showed up on time.

Our volunteers, Marvin Muriithi, Linet Shammah, and Anthony Nyagah were already set to welcome them. This is what community is. Everybody showing up and doing what they promised they would.

Our day’s MC, Kevin Tuei, Cloud Tech Consultant, Community Builder, and Tech MC, ushered us in, ensuring we were ready to engage with the speakers and the day’s events..

Sharon Koech, a technical author at Canonical Ltd, who is one of the community co-organizers, and I started the day by speaking more about the OpenInfra User Group Kenya, our dream, and our vision.

Tytus Kurek, Product Manager (Cloud & NFV) at Canonical Ltd, kicked the sponsor sessions off, talking to us about the fact that any cloud infrastructure is essentially an app in his talk, “Cloud-native infrastructure: When the infra becomes an app.”

My highlight in this talk was learning about Sunbeam, which makes it easier to set up and work with OpenStack.

Despite the technical hitches, it was a fantastic session, now available on the community YouTube channel.

We took a much-needed coffee break and came back for the remaining sessions.

Next up was Duncan Njoroge, Infrastructure Engineer - Mobile Financial Services, Ericsson, sharing what he’s learned building a mini data centre in his home lab.

It was a practical session, including how much it would cost for a similar setup at home.

The most memorable part is, “If you can run it at home, you can run it at scale.”

Denson Ngumo, CTO of Angani Limited, then shared some of their product offerings that power private clouds for Kenyan companies. And yes, some of those run on OpenStack too.

Angani Ltd graciously offered their office space for us to use. And we are so grateful for this.

Alvin Ndung’u, DevSecOps Engineer, Shinrai Technologies, one of our community co-organizers, also shared his experience with Kata Containers, an open-source container runtime, and an OpenInfra Foundation project.

We then listened to the OpenInfra Foundation keynote, which Jimmy McArthur, Director of Business Development, OpenInfra, graciously recorded for us.

With Nairobi, Kenya, being a strategic point for UN affairs and offices, it was exciting to learn about UNIQCloud, the UN’s private cloud powered by OpenStack.

As the world moves toward more digital sovereignty, open-source cloud options will become more relevant, and Africans are ready to acquire the relevant skills to power private cloud and the infrastructure that supports it.

We wrapped up the morning with a panel session talking about “The Future of Open Infrastructure in Africa,” moderated by myself, Agnes, and five of our speakers: Dan Ndolo, Paul Mayero, Western Onzere, Loice Kivisi, and Felix Jumason.

The panel stirred crucial topics in the Kenyan tech ecosystem, including policymaking and how techies can get more involved in shaping policies around tech, as they can significantly impact us.

It was time for lunch and some networking. My favourite bit about this part is the fascinating conversations.

I spent some time with the speakers, most of whom are experienced engineers and leaders in their fields.

Loice Kivisi, Senior Software Engineer, Ex-AWS and Ex-Microsoft, shared her tech journey with us in the afternoon fireside chat, interviewed by our MC, Kevin Tuei.

It was now time for the more specialized sessions, where speakers would share their knowledge with audience members who were interested in their topics.

For the first time in a tech event, we go to have a hiring conversation. The nudge? It’s easy to do financial audits in companies. Do we ever contemplate doing culture audits, though?

Daniel Ndolo, Founder & Principal of Boma Talent, charged us to rethink culture, as it’s a silent killer of great companies, and why some of the best talent leaves.

Dan, as an expert in his field, has built frameworks that can help companies create better cultures and keep their best talent.

Cornelius Emase, a Fedora Project contributor, spoke about how Kenyans can contribute in the age of open infrastructure.

Taking us into the world of Terraform, Calvine Otieno, Cloud/DevOps Engineer Lead (Africa), Prudential PLC, showed us how to manage Secrets with Hashicorp Vault, Argo CD, and GitOps, using a thorough demo.

Felix Jumason, software developer, NOC intern, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, shared his monitoring experience within Telco, using Zabbix and Grafana.

Tatiana Ovchinnikova, Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat, and OpenStack Horizon Project Team Lead, then took us through how to set up a local development environment for Horizon via DevStack, beginning with setting up a VM.

The best part? You can clone the VM and use it to learn OpenStack, never touching the initial VM.

I had the pleasure of being mentored by Tatiana during my Horizon contributions via the Outreachy program, so I was particularly excited about this session. Enjoy the recording on YouTube.

Paul Mayero, Software Engineer, Guardian Project, discussed how to work with Ceph RGW and shared a QR code where we could try out F-Droid, a project he contributes to.

Paul was our very first speaker when we first launched the community. He spoke about setting up DevStack with Vagrant, VirtualBox, and Ansible. We were delighted to have him back.

Closing the breakout sessions was Western Onzere, an AI engineer at Minich Analytics. Western shared about the critical role infrastructure plays in multi-agent systems and showed a demo of various agents working together.

OpenStack turned 15 in July this year. One of the goals at the OpenInfra Day was to join the global celebration and have our own version in Kenya.

The birthday wrapped up the day's events, and as usual, the conversations and networking were always a highlight in any tech event.

The OpenInfra User Group Kenya is a young community, and this event served as our launch of a group of open source enthusiasts who can begin to make an impact in the open source field.

The day went well, and I hope that for many people’s careers, this will be a community where they can grow.

And that this can be a springboard for Africa’s contribution to infrastructure.

We are working on the next phase, post-event, so stay tuned.

Once again, we are grateful to everyone who worked really hard to make this event happen.

You can find all the OpenInfra Day event resources

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