Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

When people sign up for Configuration Management Camp, we ask them what community room they are mostly interested in.
We ask this question because we have rooms in different sizes and we don't want to put communities with 20 people showing interest in a 120 seat room and we don't want to put a community with 200 people in a 60 seat room.

But it also gives us to opportunity to build some very interesting graph over the potential evolution of the communities.

So looking at the figures ... the overall community is obviously growing,From 350 to 420, to just short of 600 people registered now.

The Puppet Community is not the biggest anymore, that spot went to the Ansible Community room. And all but the CFengine communities are growing.

One more thing , The organisation team discussed several times if we should rebrand the event. We opted not to .. Infracoders.eu could have been an alternative name .. but we decided to stick with the name that already is known,
the content will evolve.. but Config Management Camp will stay the place where people that care about Infrastructure as Code and Infrastructure automation meet.

and with that almost a full week of side events.
For those who don't know FOSDEM, (where have you been hiding for the past 13 years ? ) Fosdem is the annual Free and Open Source Developers European meeting. If you are into open source , you just can't mis this event where thousands of likeminded people will meet.

And if 2 days of FOSDEM madness isn't enough people organise events around it.

Last year I organised PuppetCamp in Gent, the days before Fosdem and a MonitoringLove Hackfest in our office the 2 days after FOSDEM This year another marathon is planned.

On Friday (31/1/2014) the CentOs community is hosting a Dojo in Brussels at the IBM Forum. (Free, but registration required by the venue)

After the success of PuppetCamp in Gent last year we decided to open up the discussion and get more Infrastructure as Code people involved in a CfgMgmtCamp.eu

The keynotes for CfgMgmtCamp will include the leaders of the 3 most popular tools around , both Mark Burgess, Luke Kanies and Adam Jacob will present at the event which will take place in Gent right after Fosdem. We expect people from all the major communities including, but not limited to , Ansible, Salt, Chef, Puppet, CFengine, Rudder, Foreman and Juju (Free but registration required for catering)

And because 3 events in one week isn't enough the RedHat Community is hosting their Infrastructure.next conference after CfgMgmtCamp at the same venue. (Free but registration required for catering)

cya in Belgium next year..

Yesterday @beaker posted his ideas on the #devops movement ...

Apparently we haven't been stressing enough on the fact that it isn't just about Devs and Ops,
So let me repeat it's not just about Devs and Ops, it's about breaking silo's , about being good at our jobs, about getting conversation started, about talking to different stakeholders in the processes . We are absolutely trying to include all groups, not exclude some.

@beaker also seems to have seen many presentations where developers are shown to have evolved in practice and methodology, but operators (of all kinds) are described as being stuck in the dark ages. , is that a different point of view on another continent \, on this side of the Atlantic, it's mostly the Ops people that are already using agile methods spreading the word and it isn't about Devs talking about Deopvs yet. It's actually mostly the ops spreading the word because they feel most of the pain .

Hoff also wonders about routers switches firewall and all the other boxen where we aren't running puppet or chef on , the boxes that are left out of our fully automated environments .
Indeed, Puppetcamp Europe once again woke up the discussion on how to tackle these boxen, the lack of use of existing standards was covered .. and some mentioned that CIM and family are pretty much death or irrelevant for real life usage , both the Puppet and Chef communities are working on manifest, modules and recipes to solve the issues.

But the good thing is that we now have the security people involved too, maybe they'll figure out how to survive longer than 6 months in a CSO position if they talk to the others and come out of their Ivory towers :)

So about 4 monts ago there was the crazy idea to start a new FOSS event in Belgium targeted at sysadmins.

What started out as an event for local people to meet local people with some local speakers actually ended up being a small local event with some top international speakers on onfiguration mananagement and system administration mixed with a bunch of good local ones !

I had the honour to open the conference with an extremely short version of the Devops talk I gave earlier last year.. extremely short as I knew that over the course of the weekend the topic would reoccur a lot.

We had the first european talk on Chef, by Joshua Timberman, and we had Puppet talks amongst by Dan Bode from Puppetlabs and CFengine talks , devops was a frequently dropped word,

We had a book raffle where we handed out O'Reilly's .. we had a great free pizza party (got the idea from the saturday pizza event at LCA 2005) , and we had some free beer. Sounds like a good combination for a geeky weekend.

Apart from the regular talks there were plenty of Open Spaces where interesting topics were discussed ... we had spaces on Open Source vs Open Core , strong voices were heard when we discussed what we should do with the Open Core companies that claim to value Open Source , some people think we should actually list the fauxpensource ones somewhere and make sure the world knows about them

We had an awesome configuration management discussion session discussing Chef vs Puppet vs CFengine . And much much more ...

Some people owe me plenty of Sushi as I had to do my MySQL HA talk before their Managing MySQL talk , but other than that .. things just went fine..

When I tell people that the concept of copying VM's around as frequently done in the VMWare world is one of the most stupid ideas on this planet, I get the weirdest looks.

In my world it is, I want my infrastructure to be reproducible , I want to be able to throw any machine in my infrastructure out of the 10th floor of a building and be up and running again in no time. If I spread a bunch of VM copies around who knows what kind of life they start leading. Some will get upgrades, some won't ..
If I get an image from someone, how did he get there ? Nobody knows ..

To me Image Sprawl is more than not being able to to manage your Virtual Machines, it also matters for physical machines that are being deployed using a golden image.

Now rewind back about 4 something years.. back then I wrote a paper for LinuxKongress titled Automating Xen Virtual Machine Deployment which described a Hybrid way of Bootstrapping an infrastructure.
Quicly summarized, you use the benefits of images to quickly deploy a minimal image which
Luke today calls a Stem Cell then go on using centralized package management and a configuration management tool to keep them up to par. There are 2 things that changed in between,
we replaced CFEngine with Puppet , and the fact that today some people do care a bit more about the infrastructure side of the web, guess we have to thank Amazon and the Cloud Hype for that

But fundamentally .. not that much changed :)