Example42 attended FOSDEM in Brussels and will be at Configuration Management Camp in Ghent.

FOSDEM

You can have an idea of FOSDEM only when you attend it. Thousands of people, hundreds of talks, dozens of tracks, everything about Open Source and its multiple fields of application.

When you go to FOSDEM you have always the problem of picking the presentations that interest you and, then, manage to get inside the rooms, which are often full.

Among the presentations we attended, besides the “impressive as usual” demos from James Shubin with MGMT we were amazed by the demonstration of the forthcoming version 5 of Grafana. We are excited at the idea of integrating it in the psick module, so expect a psick::grafana profile soon with hopefully some out of the box dashboards and integrations with the managed applications.

Other tools we used in the past, or not, have grabbed our interest and, as it always happens, we left the conference with new ideas or inspiration on things to learn and do (and the latent frustration at the idea that we will hardly have the time to cope with all of them).

We take the occasion to send a great thank you to Toshaan Bharvani and Kris Buytaert for the car rides from FOSDEM / Brussels to CfgMgmtCamp / Ghent.

CfgMgmtCamp

This year, example42 is again sponsoring CfgMgmtCamp. We believe that the Ghent based event - celebrating its 5th year anniversary - is one of the most important ones to attend when being interested in Configuration Management.

It was clear from the beginning that this event will not focus on one technology only, but wants to be a place where all tools covering configuration management will collaboratively work together.

This year, the main stage will start with several, well known people - and we are very happy to see them again:

• Mark Burgess (CFEngine)
• Luke Kanies (Puppet)
• Adam Jacob (Chef)
• Mike Place (Salt)

Besides the founders or creators of configuration management tools, we will also hear from people directly involved with tools in the business.

As usual the agenda is split into general sessions covering DevOps and Configuration Management and tool specific sessions covering Ansible, Chef, CFEngine, Foreman, Juju, Kubernetes, Mgmt Config, Puppet, Rudder, Salt, Terraform.

We will be presenting PSICK at the Puppet room, if you want to have a direct reply on what you can do with it, check room B.1.015, Tuesday, February 6 at 15:40.

On Wednesday fringe events will start, covering

• Foreman Constructoin day
• puppethack day
• Habitat and InSpec Hackday
• Mgmt Hackaton
• Container Trouble Shooting Workshop with SysDig
• CFEngine and IoT hackaton
• Ansible Lightbulb Workshop

These are very tool specific sessions which run parallel. Choose wisely on where to head to.

Happy System and Configuration Automation,

Martin Alfke

Alessandro Franceschi