After the Summer, the SODALITE Consortium met in Milano on its second General Assembly. In short, the meeting was a great success, as there were breakthroughs in the understanding of the common concepts, user-side requirements and presentations and of course, of everything that is under the hood of SODALITE platform.
What we noticed in previous projects, the GAs are good to have before and after the general vacation periods (i.e., Summer). Namely, the Summer period is usually the one where the normal working mode is a bit more scattered. This partner is on vacation, the other is at the conference, so joint work, in general, is slightly suboptimal. Having the meetings before Summer, enables the consortium to agree on the direction of work, while after the Summer, we check if, directionally, we are still on the same page.
In our case, there was a lot of work done in the area of understanding of the user input. We were not entirely sure if the job done in simplification of the user input would be adequate. Within this GA, we accepted some refinements and actually had a breakout meeting to address this particular issue. The result has been commonly accepted by all partners, and we are now able to proceed in this direction.
Another major point was the technical progress in understanding and development of the processes for deployment of software using IaC principles on the heterogeneous infrastructures. Here, we agreed on standards and APIs to be used.
Finally, we checked the status of our use cases. We noticed a nice development (despite the Summer break), so we can now practically guarantee demo sessions to be available by the end of the year. Of course, we went through the administrative bits and bobs. These are important to ensure the smooth operation of the project and to guarantee further funding.
What are then the key takeaways from this GA? Technical progress is excellent, understanding of the tasks, their connections is improving rapidly and contributes to a unique, excellent and attractive collaborative team (see the photo).