ATIX @ Config Management Camp 2026
Once again, a larger delegation from ATIX attended Config Management Camp in Ghent. The event takes place every year in early February in Ghent, Belgium, directly after the FOSDEM weekend in Brussels. Each day starts with plenary sessions in the morning, followed by presentations and topic-focused sessions in the afternoon.
Between waffles, beer, and fries, we connected with the broader configuration management community.
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Key Topics for 2026
After a long period of glory and recognition, open source needs to reinvent itself. The cloud with software as a service and the resulting change in distribution models on the one hand, and artificial intelligence, more specifically generative AI, on the other hand, are challenging open source, according to Joe Brockmeier.
Richard Fontana was also focused on this direction. He referred to the four fundamental freedoms of open source, “the freedom to run, study, modify and share code,” and presented his draft for modernization. We should have the freedom to reproduce open source projects, to verify them, to participate in them and to leave them. In addition, free and open source software today requires stewardship.
Despite these thoughtful tones, especially regarding the role of AI, clear enthusiasm for AI dominated at least the plenary sessions and many of the Ignite talks.
Ansible
Other topics were more directly related to our work. Ansible was certainly the dominant theme in the program, and on Wednesday the Ansible Contributor Summit took place with discussions about improvement plans for 2026.
Worth mentioning here: how can trustworthy collections on Ansible Galaxy be identified more easily, for example through badges similar to those on Docker Hub, and how can the operators communicate better and faster in case of problems? The latter question referred to the Galaxy outage one week before ConfigManagementCamp.
Puppet / OpenVox
OpenVox is slowly growing up and moving further away from Puppet. Apparently, communication between the OpenVox community and Puppet’s parent company Perforce has not been going well one year after the fork.
The main issue was that Perforce restricted access to Facter under the same disputed EULA as Puppet itself. OpenVox responded with openfacts. Since Facter is the central link between the agent operating system and the OpenVox server, working on it together had ensured that Puppet and OpenVox would continue on the same path. In the future, more modules may appear in the Forge that work only with Puppet or only with OpenVox. Everyone seems confident that OpenVox will come out ahead.
Digital Sovereignty and ATIX.
On Tuesday, there was a panel on digital sovereignty. Admittedly, it was somewhat unfocused and not clearly structured, and the participants disagreed on several details. However, there was agreement that it is better to start implementing paths toward digital sovereignty sooner rather than later.
ATIX was also able to contribute to this topic. First, with a new Foreman plugin, foreman_opentofu, which extends the supported compute resources to include the cloud providers and VM solutions already supported by OpenTofu (Terraform). This significantly increases the available options and allows users to work with smaller or local cloud providers and VM backends, as long as an OpenTofu provider type exists for them.
Second, bootable containers were a new topic in the Foreman and Katello context, also known as bootc hosts or image mode hosts.
They are also relevant for EU-OS, which Jonas presented in his talk. The slides can be found toward the end of the article.
Workshops
The third day consisted of workshops on various topics. A general Foreman and Katello workshop formed spontaneously, where bootable containers (bootc), containerizing Foreman, Smart Proxies, and more specifically DHCP proxies were discussed.
In the afternoon, the official workshop on further development of the Foreman UI took place, with the modernization to Patternfly 5 as the main focus. There were also discussions about redesigning the UI for host creation and, finally, a search for feedback on a fundamental revision of the OpenSCAP plugin.
At the same time, the Pulp Community Meeting took place again this year, and as maintainers of the Pulp Debian plugin, we were happy to participate. Ideas for supporting new repository types were discussed, as well as general exchange between users and developers.
Talks by ATIX or with ATIX participation
Ottavia Balducci: Building CI/CD Pipelines for your Ansible code
Markus Bucher & Manisha Singhal: Foreman Plugin to Provision Hosts via OpenTofu for Diverse Compute and Virtualization Platforms
Jan Bundesmann & Thorben Denzer: The Director’s Cut: A new role for Ansible in Foreman
Thorben Denzer: From ‘undefined’ to ‘I Told You So’ – TypeScript for the Foreman Frontend
Robert Riemann, Stefan Bogner & Jonas Trüstedt: EU OS use case study: bootc-based laptop fleet management with foreman
Bernhard Suttner: Agama? How SUSE SLES16 Provisioning works with Foreman
Gergely Szalay & Amir Zahirovic: It Doesn’t Always Have to Be Caviar: Enterprise Alternatives and the Challenge of Default Stacks
Thanks to the Organizing Team
A big thank you goes to the entire organizing team and the volunteers of Config Management Camp. From the high-quality program to the smooth organization, everything was excellently prepared and created an open and welcoming atmosphere.
For our team at ATIX AG, Config Management Camp 2026 was a valuable and inspiring experience. We returned with new technical insights, stronger community connections, and fresh motivation for our open-source work.
