Xen Spring Meetup 2026: a look back at the community in motion
The Xen Spring Meetup 2026, held in Grenoble on April 2-3, brought together developers, users, and contributors from across the Xen ecosystem.
More than just a series of talks, the event reflected what makes the Xen community unique: a mix of deep technical expertise and a strong focus on real-world usage.
A community-driven event
Inspired by the Xen Summit format, the Spring Meetup keeps things intentionally smaller and more focused. This creates the right conditions for meaningful exchanges, whether during technical sessions or informal discussions between talks.
Participants included contributors to the Xen Project, infrastructure engineers, researchers, and companies building solutions on top of Xen.
That diversity showed in the conversations: from low-level hypervisor topics to broader infrastructure strategies, including cost control, flexibility, and long-term sustainability.
Photos by Jérôme Deduytsche
Talks grounded in real-world usage
Sessions covered real-world deployments, performance considerations and ongoing developments across the ecosystem.
What stood out was how closely connected the discussions were to actual usage. This is not a community talking in theory, but one continuously refining a technology stack used in production worldwide.
Watch the recap
Dive into the talks
Beyond the atmosphere, the real value of the meetup lies in the technical content shared by the speakers.
Several sessions from the Vates team highlighted ongoing work, real-world feedback, and how the ecosystem continues to evolve in practice.
Xen Orchestra and platform evolution
This session explores how Xen Orchestra continues to evolve to meet real-world infrastructure needs.
From usability improvements to automation and day-to-day operations, it reflects a broader effort to make virtualization platforms more accessible and efficient without sacrificing flexibility.
Open virtualization in practice
A closer look at how open-source platforms like XCP-ng are deployed and operated in production environments.
The talk highlights how organizations balance performance, cost, and control while moving away from proprietary stacks.
Infrastructure challenges and real-world feedback
This session focuses on feedback from the field: it illustrates how real-world constraints, whether related to storage, networking, or scaling, directly influence how the platform evolves over time.
Why these events matter
Conversations during breaks, spontaneous whiteboard discussions, and the evening event all contributed to the same goal: sharing experience and aligning on what comes next.
Events like the Xen Spring Meetup are not just checkpoints. They are part of how the ecosystem moves forward, they help validate real-world needs, share feedback directly with maintainers, and align contributors on priorities.
In an open-source project like Xen, this kind of interaction is essential. It ensures that development stays connected to actual usage and that decisions are informed by those running the technology daily.
We are already looking forward to the next event!
