Bernhard Suttner, our head of software development, reports on his visit to the Config Management Camp 2018 in Ghent:

Of course, last week the Superbowl was also a highlight for us, but the focus was more on another event: the Config Management Camp 2018 in Ghent (Belgium).

The FOSDEM follow-up event is the ideal meeting point for anyone interested in the topics of Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Terraform, Kubernetes and of course Foreman / Katello. So we (three members of the ATIX crew) were exactly right here.

Since each of us was represented at the conference with a presentation, it started on February 4th. off to Ghent. There we got to know the organizers and the other speakers at the Speaker’s Dinner. In a great atmosphere we were able to make new contacts, for example with the people from Rudder. We will definitely take a closer look at their project as part of an ATIX #CrewDay. We were also happy to see familiar faces like Martin Alfke, our lecturer for the ATIX Puppet training courses. Due to the lifecycle management tool we developed, orcharhino, our focus was primarily on Foreman / Katello. Therefore, it was only a matter of time before our table filled with other Foreman contributors and we philosophized together about new ideas, features and how to intensify our collaboration.

The next day we started and we wrote diligently in our program diary:

Monday, February 5th:

It’s finally starting! Right at the beginning, the configuration management luminaries Mark Burgess, Luke Kanies and Adam Jacob gave exciting lectures in the crowded main track of the Hogeschool Gent that went far beyond the respective main topics. Each of us then put together our own program. But we didn’t want to miss the lecture “Ansible Modules for Foreman” by our colleague Bernhard Hopfenmüller and so we all met again. We spent the evening with good conversations, burgers and Belgian fries together with the Foreman Project team.

The nice thing about a specialist conference like this is, in addition to the interesting lectures, the personal exchange. Many people are often only known from mailing lists or IRC. But we were able to talk directly with Greg Sutcliffe, Foreman’s community coordinator, Ohad Levy, Foreman project initiator and some developers like Marek, Daniel and Timo, among others, about current projects and upcoming changes to The Foreman. We are now even more excited about this and definitely want to make our contribution to it.

Tuesday, February 6th:

At first everyone started with their own program, but of course we support each other again at our ATIX lectures. First of all, we listened eagerly to what our colleague Matthias Dellweg had to say about “Debian support in Katello/Foreman”. Afterwards, I was pleased that, in addition to numerous listeners, Matthias and Bernhard also heard my talk “Using Foreman / Katello and Docker containers to build foreman packages” closely followed.

At the end of the day we networked extensively with some Foreman developers and users.

Wednesday, February 7th:

Foreman Construction Day took place on Wednesday. There we dedicated ourselves in different groups to different topics such as Hyper-V/Forklift or Pulp 3. We decided on a session in which we found out about the new Pulp 3.0 platform. We had a great introduction to the codebase and looked at the new plugin infrastructure.

At the end of the day, however, it was time to say goodbye! But we are sure that this was not the last visit to Ghent and we are looking forward to the Config Management Camp 2019!