About me

Namaste! 🙏

My name is Ish Sookun. I am a passionate blogger and an open source software advocate who lives on the beautiful island of Mauritius. I work as a Systems Architect for La Sentinelle Ltd.

I have been a member of the Linux User Group of Mauritius (now defunct) and an active contributor to the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community. I am a co-organiser of the annual Developers Conference in Mauritius and a frequent speaker at the Google DevFest Mauritius.

I was a panelist at the IT Summit 2024, photo courtesy of Axiz Mauritius

I have contributed to the openSUSE Linux project since 2010 and I currently serve on the openSUSE Board. In the past, I served as an Election official and volunteered in the Membership committee. I maintain the youki package for openSUSE. Youki is a container runtime written in Rust. I speak at openSUSE Conferences.

I am co-organiser of the Cloud Native Community Group (Mauritius) which is the local chapter of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

I manage the mirror infrastructure (in Mauritius) for several Linux distributions — AlmaLinux, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and openSUSE. The full list is available at mirror.cloud.mu.

I participated in the AFRINIC meeting in Hammamet, Tunisia, in December 2018, photo courtesy of AFRINIC

I was recipient of a fellowship by AFRINIC in 2018 and I attended the AFRINIC-29 Meeting in Hammamet, Tunisia.

I continue to participate actively in Number Resources Policy Discussions within the AFRINIC Community and I currently volunteer in the technical committee of the Mauritius Internet Exchange Point (MIXP) – doing some Mail, LDAP and DNS stuff.

Public Speaking
My journey in public speaking began in 2010 at the openSUSE Installfest, where I delivered my first talk in the open source arena at the Lecture Theatre II of the Faculty of Law & Management, University of Mauritius. Since then, I have spoken at numerous meetups, summits, and international conferences, sharing insights on Linux, open source, and cloud-native technologies.
Some of my best memories are from:
Panel Discussion – How much of Cybersecurity is enough?, Developers Conference 2025, The Voilà Hotel, Ébène, Mauritius
Building openSUSE Mirrors in Mauritius, openSUSE Conference 2025, Nuremberg, Germany
2 cents on improving openSUSE Membership (Management), openSUSE Conference 2025, Nuremberg, Germany
Panel Discussion – Cloud Native Strategies for Mauritian Businesses, Developers Conference 2024, Caudan Arts Centre, Port-Louis, Mauritius
Moving a Monolith Application to Kubernetes Using Rancher, SUSE Summit, 10 September 2024, Bryanston, Johannesburg, South Africa
openSUSE Elections — How are they organised?, openSUSE Conference 2023, Nuremberg, Germany
openSUSE MicroOS in Production, openSUSE Conference 2019, Nuremberg, Germany
openSUSE MicroOS Workshop, Africa Internet Summit 2019, Kampala, Uganda
openSUSE MicroOS Workshop, openSUSE Asia Summit 2019, Bali, Indonesia
openSUSE Presentation, Linux Festival, 25 November 2013, Octave Wiehe Auditorium, University of Mauritius
openSUSE Installfest, 2011, Lecture Theatre II, Faculty of Law & Management, University of Mauritius
A complete list of my public speaking engagements is published here.

The blog entries on SysAdmin Journal represent my opinion and not that of my employer, neither any group to which I am a member of, unless I specify otherwise. Some of the images I use are available from the Internet. I do not own them. I provide due credit to the owner if I’m aware of the source. You are free to contact me to provide proper credit or ask for removal of an image.

You can reach me through ish.sookun@opensuse.org.