Travelogue FrOSCon 2022

The preparations

My journey began at 10:30 a.m. on Friday, when I took the bus, subway and S-Bahn from home to Munich Central Station. Afterwards, I took the ICE directly from Munich to Siegburg/Bonn, where I used public transport (thank you 9-Euro ticket!) to get to the hotel and then to the Sankt Augustin campus. More about why I was the first to arrive later. Now first to our preparations.

In the office, we had completely set up and dismantled our booth once the week before, which turned out to be extremely helpful. So it was clear to us, that is Martin, Julian, Patrick and me, where what belongs and what has to be done. Packed was practically everything you can see at our booth: Wall, roll-ups, merch, notebooks, and more.

The trip

Now, of course, you wonder why the three guys here look so rushed. This was not due to the great organization by FrOSCon itself (thanks for this; you guys are great!), but because Martin, Julian, and Patrick came by car. While I went over my presentation again in the air-conditioned ICE and enjoyed the passing scenery on the upgraded railroad line with music, they were stuck in traffic in the car. In the end, it was no longer possible to record numerically how many times the traffic jammed, but in minutes it was then about 180, i.e. three hours. (Patrick claims 22) The arrival at the FrOSCon site was therefore not 5:00 p.m. as planned, but 8:00 p.m..

We quickly set up our stand and then went back to Troisdorf by bus and streetcar. Fortunately, the three of them were able to grab a bite to eat there before checking into the hotel.

The FrOSCon 2022

I am not on a diet, but had already eaten something earlier, around 5:30 p.m. after my check-in, and went for a short walk in Troisdorf. After consulting with them by phone, I left at about 7:20 p.m. to drive from the hotel to FrOSCon. There we arrived almost at the same time.

We had many great conversations with young students interested in ATIX as an employer: either because there were four young dynamic men at the booth; or, perhaps more realistically, because ATIX is a “Great Place to Work“. We were able to tell many private individuals, who often listened with one ear to their enthusiasm for open source software and the other to their employer, about orcharhino, our product for the automation of data centers. Many visitors at our booth were not only interested in the vendor independence of orcharhino (orcharhino supports several compute resources such as VMware, Microsoft Azure, oVirt, Google GCE, Amazon EC2, and more, as well as three configuration management tools in the form of Ansible, Puppet, and Salt), but also in the support of Debian and Ubuntu). The security rata offered by ATIX was particularly in demand, with which Debian and Ubuntu systems managed via orcharhino can be provided with security-relevant updates. For organizations with ARM-based systems, the orcharhino client for Ubuntu 20.04 on ARM, e.g. for Raspberry Pis, is a welcome part of orcharhinos. Check out our orcharhino datasheet for the list of highlights of orcharhino!

On Saturday evening we took part in the very entertaining social event of FrOSCon. The Greek buffet was just right after our long day. Saturated and also a little tired we finally went back to the hotel. The next morning, after a short breakfast, I went to FrOSCon again, where my day basically started directly with my presentation.

I introduced the open source project Foreman and Katello. After a brief introduction, especially to content management, we moved on to Foreman SCC Manager. This plugin was created by ATIX and is now continuously maintained and developed.

At 15:15 it was the turn of my colleague Martin.He talked about Terraform and especially about deploying to multiple clouds.If you enjoyed Martin’s talk and want to use Terraform, good news: You can get our Martin (and his colleagues) to join your team as consultants.The expertise of ATIX, whether in consulting projects or trainings, will help you get ahead!

On Saturday and Sunday, our booth was consistently well attended, even by the youngest visitors. The notebook with our self-developed game Flappyrhino was a great icebreaker to get into the conversation.

On Sunday evening, after we had dismantled our stand, I went back to Munich via ICE and Martin, Julian and Patrick started their journey again with the rental car. The two days were very intense for all of us. We are very happy that we could welcome so many of you at our booth and have already decided to be at FrOSCon again next year.

You can now watch our presentations, “Multi Cloud mit Terraform – Eine Einführung” and “Foreman SCC Manager: Rechenzentrumsautomatisierung von SLES” for free in the CCC’s media library (thanks to VOC!).

If you don’t want to wait 365 days, you are welcome to OSAD 2022, our “Open Source Automation Days”. You can also find free online tickets on our OSAD 2022 website.

See you!