ATIX @ FrOSCon13

After the great experience at last year’s FrOSCon, we from ATIX were of course there again this year in Sankt Augustin. At FrOSCon13 we were in charge of the Open Source booth of the Foreman / Katello / Pulp projects. We ourselves are active members of the Foreman community and provide our help on the community board and also our changes to the Foreman source code to other developers.

Equipped with T-shirts, roll-ups and stickers from Foreman / Katello and Pulp we set off towards Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences at around midday on Friday, August 24, 2018. On the way, we were able to enjoy the German highway landscapes more than we would have liked – due to numerous traffic jams and construction sites, it took us a whole seven hours to get from Munich to Sankt Augustin. As a result, we were only able to set up our stand on Saturday morning shortly before the start of FrOSCon. Admittedly not the best start, but this didn’t dampen our spirits and motivation. Right from the start, we were delighted with the large influx of visitors to the Foreman / Katello / Pulp stand. We had many interesting conversations with interested visitors and used a demo system to show them the supported features and current developments of the Foreman / Katello and Pulp projects.

But it wasn’t just the community stand, which we from ATIX looked after, that was very popular. The talks given by the ATIX crew were also always well attended. We were represented with a whole series of talks in the FrOSCon13 program. Bernhard Suttner kicked things off on Saturday. He spoke about the (secure) distribution of software packages with Foreman / Katello. Also on Saturday, Dr. Jonas Trüstedt asked “Puppet, Salt or Ansible – which tool is the right one?” in front of numerous participants, some of whom even had to sit on the floor of the lecture hall. The third ATIX colleague was Manuel Bonk, who took Ansible to the “next level” in his talk.

Of course, such a successful first day had to be celebrated in style. That’s why the ATIX crew brought cool beer from their Bavarian homeland and toasted the good conversations with visitors to the stand. We continued these discussions at the barbecue organized by the FrOSCon team and brought the evening to a pleasant close.

In addition to the stand support, another presentation by one of our colleagues was on the agenda on Sunday. Dr. Bernhard Hopfenmüller introduced Apache Kafka to a large number of eager listeners.

At around 6 p.m., we finally set off again towards Munich with two fully packed and occupied cars. Even though one or two colleagues came into the office a little tired the next morning, everyone agreed that they had had a great weekend in Sankt Augustin. So the question of whether we will be there again next year does not even arise.

We are therefore already looking forward to FrOSCon14!

To FrOSCon
Free Software and Open Source – these are the topics of FrOSCon. Every year in late summer, with the help of FrOSCon e.V., the Department of Computer Science at the Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences organizes an exciting program of lectures and workshops for visitors of all ages who want to use, get to know or develop Free Software themselves. (Source: https://www.froscon.de).