ghent

Jun 01 2010

PuppetCamp Europe 2010

Last week was pretty heavy on conferences for me. On wednesday I had to give my Building Virtual Appliances talk at the at the Sizing Server event on Advanced Virtualization and Hybrid Cloud Computing , but the most important part of the week was the first edition of Puppetcamp Europe.

When the first ideas about PuppetCamp Europe started I asked Luke when and where it'd be held. He replied that I should know as I was supposed to organise it... I thanked for the honour , he went on to ask Patrick , he accepted ... I hope I helped him out enough :) I even handed out a personal invitation to some of the most famous configuration mgmt people on this planet and Inuits sponsored the event too

Luke started with the opening talk, talking about the future and past of puppet , about version numbers, 2.6 does sound familiar and stable doesn't it, about forge.puppetlabs.com
During @puppetmasterd 's talk @kartar played Bugmaster which was great and almost realtime

The real fun started with the Open Spaces ... after everybody presented themselves, a mix of usual suspects, first timers and oldskoolers from irc #puppet that finally got faces, different sessions were proposed, ranging from Puppet 101, Alternative Puppet Architectures, Puppet HA, MultiMaster Puppet to Dating for PuppetMasters

Over the 2 days spread the open space different ideas came up on e.g how to scale puppet. Different people are letting their puppetclients run from cron in batches, but probably the weirdest idea I heard was to run Puppet in Jruby in order to speed it up.

Lots of talk on certificates and how to solve the pains with them .. e.g like in a HA setup .. you need to create an authority chain .. there was also talk about having a
--trust-my-network feature that would disable certificates, Luke was open to accepting such a patch, or a patch that would make the whole certificate setup more pluggable
That would for sure be a feature a lot of people would want to use ..

The thurday evening conference dinner was "Stoofvlees met Frieten" for most of us .. but for me it was a London Devops Curry in Gent, with @unixdaemon @ripienaar and some others ;)

But with lots of interesting chatter, free beer and free icecream there's for sure going to be another similar event in Europe next year ..

May 10 2008

This week in Gent

On Wednesday Gent hosted the IBBT Brokerage event, some usual crowd, lots of unusual crowd .. but mostly trying to figure out what's the difference between the startups I usually run into and the ones I saw at the IBBT event. The weirdest part .. the language .. Dutch...

Thursday was the Fireside chat with Seth , again some usual suspects , but also some unexpected people .. Seth gave an interesting overview of the current Java Content management platforms , Daisy, Magnolia,

Obviously the language debate came up , I really need to finish that blog post :)

The format, 1 presentation followed by 2 shorter group brainstorm sessions where one member of the group presented the findings was really interesting, you ended up speaking to people you don't always run into. Altough the 25 minute brainstorm sessions migyt be a bit longer. Definitely worth another version. Just the food afterwards... 3 times spare Ribs at Amadeus in 4 months time is just too much .. next time Gekroonde Hoofden please :)

Then Friday, Matt and I spent the day in Gent brainstorming about that undead project :)