Common Europe Congress 2024

The report

During you get the newsletter, I am driving from Milan back to home. But now I am sitting at my laptop and trying to express my thoughts and feelings in words. Common Europe Congress 2024 is over.

Should I say it was another great event? Yes, it was.

Should I say that I meet many interesting people here? Yes, I did.

Should I say I learned a lot from the best IBM Power speakers? Oh, yes, I did.

After the event’s end I always sad that it is over. I think how many sessions I missed or couldn’t visit, because I was at another sessions. I think that many people I’ve met I will see again only next year at the next Common Europe Congress.

Maybe I simply didn’t finish my learning curve to take things as they are. That’s why I start by saying thank you to the guy on the picture below:

He is well known as El Presidente. Thank you Juan Manuel for continuing and expanding Common Europe Congress to be the largest IBM Power event in Europe!

I don’t have pictures with Roberto who was responsible for venue and the whole organization behind the scenes. My huge thanks for the very good organization!

Of course there is a third guy I was very missing at this Common Europe Congress. Torbjörn, if you read the lines thank you very much for all you did for me and I wish you strong health and I wish to have so much optimisim as you have! Get well and we will meet in Sweden!

My Congress started on Monday with the AI workshop of my friend Mirza Ćutuk. It was a really good structured workshop with the full walkthrough how to create a customer care application using watsonx.ai. It was my first practical attempt to create something useful using AI and it was successful. The only missing part was some introductory information about watsonx.ai. But it was not a fault of Mirza. It is usual Common Europe Congress schedule. The workshops are always on the first (or pre-congress) day and the presentations start after the workshops. Later during the congress Mirza did the presentation about watsonx.ai, explained the basics of AI for people like me, who never did something with AI, and how to apply these basics practically.

After the Mirza’s workshop I had my own - Starting with Ansible on IBM Power. I had a lot of attendees at the workshop and they were very engaged and tried to do each exercise. Unfortunately the performance of the network connectivity was not always very best and we couldn’t do it till the end.

The Congress started on Tuesday with the opening session and IBM keynote. Yes, you can find me at the picture below shown during the opening session. I still have a chance to be featured on IBM keynote slides 🤣 Other guys with Juan Manuel are Mirza, who did the workshop on AI, and Ann-Kathrin, who did a session on user experience on IBM i. At the table you see additionally Hugo, the great AIX and Linux specialist, and Ines, who helped a lot with the organization.

After the keynote the “normal” sessions are started. As you see David shows the brilliant future of IBM AIX. Yes, if you were there, you would know that AIX business is not dead as many think, but it is even growing.

Of course AIX development has plans far over 2038:

Frederic Dubois shows VMRecovery Manager in action with Oracle databases:

and when to use which solution:

Thomas Barlen convinces everybody to use Trusted Execution on AIX to prevent ransomware attacks:

As you can imagine the day finished late at the night in one of the Milan’s restaurants.

The next day I woke up at 5am and couldn’t sleep anymore. I decided to use the time to check my presentation and ouch! The final version of the presentation has gone! As fast as I could I recreated it from the latest draft version and my memory. At 8am I was ready to present!

Then we had another IBM keynote with Jonas Ullberg and Daniel Goldener. Jonas presented last numbers of IBM’s Power business. Did I tell you already that IBM Power grows, including IBM AIX and IBM i? Jonas proved it from the stage with the numbers of the growth. Sorry I didn’t do a picture for you, but I think you will be able to find it in the Internet.

Daniel presenting the brand new IBM Power S1012.

The day continued with the lively discussion how to build AIX community. No, it was not in the plan. According to the plan we had “Ask me anything” session about AIX and Linux on Power. It was one of the questions - how to bring AIX community to be community? We have many business partners and IBM-ers which don’t understand the value of the community and have fears, that their beloved customers will move to another business partner if they would go to community events like Common Europe Congress. At the end customers don’t know and use the newest features or even the older features as they could use them. The result is unsatisfied customers, their managers and they are lost for the platform. This is very sad because AIX is a very modern and full featured operating system built to reliably manage enterprise critical workloads.

I continued my sessions marathon with another two sessions on automating PowerHA for AIX and Virtual I/O Server. Sorry I don’t have any pictures for you from my sessions! Next time I’ll do it better, I promise!

Do you know the guy on the picture?

Of course you do! Everyone in the AIX world knows Nigel. He shows the right direction how to analyze AIX performance. I think it was the first Nigel’s session after he retired from IBM. I am very happy that he came to Common Europe Congress 2024 in Milan!

In the evening we had the traditional Common Europe Congress dinner with the party afterwards.

No, don’t ask me for the pictures from the party! I don’t have them, because I was busy 😂😂😂 The “official” part of the party finished at midnight and then we talked with Bart, Ann-Kathrin and later with Marcin till 2am when the hotel bar was officially closed.

If you didn’t know it till now - the day at Common Europe Congress starts with sessions at 8am. Till that time it is good to have breakfast. I will not complain that many attendees were not ready at 8am to be on sessions 🤣

I personally started my day with Michael Perzl’s presentation on how to configure storage in Linux on Power LPARs and continued with Toshaan Bharvani’s presentation on how to use Icinga to monitor IBM Power envrionment.

In between I had a very lively discussion with Juan Manuel about the number of AIX experts during the “Ask the experts” session.

The day and the Common Europe Congress was finished for me by another Nigel’s session on how to do presentations. The AIX legend can tell real stories about his own (and not only his) mistakes presenting technical sessions.

As I promised, this is the list of the most popular sessions during the Common Europe Congress in Milan:

It looks like other 300 participants didn’t want to get a lunch or drink a coffee.

Time to go back to the work and implement everything I learned during this 4 days!

Have fun with your new knowledge!

Andrey

P.S. Special tribute to Artur Studzian.