This talk presents Scaleway’s journey in adopting OpenBMC at cloud-operator scale.
As a growing European cloud service provider operating more than 100,000 servers and thousands of GPUs, Scaleway is pursuing two strategic initiatives: adopting OCP Open Rack v3 (ORv3) to optimize rack-level power delivery, cooling, and modularity, and deploying OpenBMC as a unified firmware stack across server platforms to enable native Redfish support and greater firmware autonomy.
Bringing OpenBMC into production exposed several real-world challenges:
- Complexity of qualifying firmware on early hardware prototypes and pre-production platforms.
- Driving the organizational transformation required to integrate an entirely new firmware stack across multiple operational teams.
- Managing the coexistence of OpenBMC and legacy proprietary firmware within a heterogeneous infrastructure fleet.
To address these challenges, we established a close co-design relationship with hardware vendors through an iterative feedback loop and invested in developing in-house expertise. This approach enabled rapid internal adoption and progressively increased our autonomy over the firmware layer.
As we integrated OpenBMC into our infrastructure, we also explored how far we could go in developing our own firmware features to provide a consistent operational experience across OpenBMC-enabled platforms. During this talk, we will share practical examples related to hardware inventory management and monitoring, highlighting our efforts to harmonize firmware APIs across different server platforms.
Looking ahead, the focus will gradually shift from onboarding to long-term sustainment: keeping pace with evolving industry standards, maintaining firmware quality over time, and ensuring sustainable operational support.
Beyond Scaleway’s own experience, we advocate for cross-industry collaboration and co-design, leveraging communities and events such as Premday to align operator requirements and accelerate shared solutions. We also believe that building in-house expertise around open firmware is becoming a strategic capability for infrastructure owners seeking greater control, flexibility, and innovation.
PhD-level Systems Architect with 15+ years across Hardware, Firmware, and Software.
Currently working as Hardware team lead at Scaleway, a french Cloud Service Provider.
Uniquely experienced on both sides of the ecosystem: HPC HW manufacturer and neocloud operator.
Passionate about design and development of IT systems with a particular interest in embedded systems, firmware and hardware management.
Scaleway hardware system engineer