OSAD 2019: Behind the Scenes of the Open Source Automation Days.

Monday, 14.10.2019, early morning at Hilton Munich Airport: after months of preparation, the Open Source Automation Days 2019 started —this year with one workshop day and two conference days. Going through the feedback from the 150 attendees, Munich’s largest manufacturer-independent open-source conference was a complete success! We want to take you on an exciting journey behind the scenes with our colleague Emiri:

While more than 40 workshop participants learned about Kubernetes, Puppet, Ansible or Foreman, the ATIX crew were in the conference rooms , setting up the goody bags, hand packed with love, as well as the newly designed ATIX booth and “Candy Bar”.

But it didn’t go smoothly (of course) : Our Candy Bar presented us with unexpected challenges. It was meant to be a shelf with various types of sweets to fulfill the childhood dreams of the OSAD participants and the ATIX crew. To realize this dream, we sought out a beloved Swedish furniture store. Problem: An assembled shelf that is 147 x 147 cm big does not fit in a car. So everything was dismantled and rebuilt at the event – and many wooden dowels were broken off during disassembly. But thanks to spare parts we had to go and get, “Dowel-pocalypse”, was overcome and after an hour or two the Candy Bar came to life. It was in these moments where we thought, “Now we could use some automation here…”

Since there were no major disasters on the first day of the conference, the 15th, (and after everyone had enough coffee), the ATIX crew alongside the 150 OSAD participants could relax and listen to the keynote speech of AI expert Steven McAuley. In the break that followed, the conference room was separated, and two different lecture tracks – the strategy and technical tracks the participants could visit the booths and receive goodies from the sponsors: uib, Confluent and Cumulus Networks . Our own booth had a lot to offer as well, for example an exclusive preview of orcharhino 5.0.0 and our popular click’n’run game “Flappy orcharhino“. It sparked competition among the attendees, but even the toughest, hardcore-est of gamers drowned in frustration after a mere dozen attempts.

We concluded the day in the palm garden of Hilton Munich Airport, where we were able to enjoy a fine dinner. The winners of the raffle, in which the OSAD participants were able to participate, were also announced here. The winners received great prizes like “Apache Kafka” books (sponsored by Confluent), a Lego Starwars Fighter from Cumulus Networks, an ATIX foosball table, or a ticket for the OSAD 2020 (and we welcome our first OSAD 2020 attendee from the ING)

For some of the participants (and me personally), day 2 started with a little shock: Where was the fully automatic coffee machine?!? It turned out that this was not intended for 150 people and so we had to make do with the second conference day with filter coffee – but due to the exciting presentations, no problemo – there was no reason at all to get tired

Unfortunately we had to change our agenda at short notice, because we received a cancellation of a speaker due to illness. But thanks to the flexibility of conference participant Hannes Schaller (APA-IT) we were able to fill the slot quickly.

For me personally, it was my first OSAD and I am looking forward to organizing and participating in OSAD 2020 .

The thanks of the ATIX crew go to the kitchen of the Hilton Airport Munich for the excellent catering (especially for the Macarons 😉 ), our audio technicians (Great Job!!), our one-man film and photo company Danilo, and of course our sponsors Hitachi, uib, Cumulus Networks and Confluent – thank you for being actively involved.

In the end, I would like to feature a small personal highlight of mine – there was a lot of buzz on Twitter at #OSAD, and here are some of my favorite tweets: I’ve put together my favorite tweets: