Brussels 2023- FOSDEM, CentOS, CfgMtgCamp

I recently had the privilege of attending three events in Belgium and would like to share my experiences.
The first event was CentOS Connect, which focuses on enterprise Linux. I gave a talk on Running Cloud Native Applications on CentOS on a Cloud Native Processor, specifically on setting up and running a Mastodon Server on Arm Servers in the Cloud. I was quite happy that most of the questions were about Ampere/AArch64 servers and not my presentation. For future talks, I will make sure that I have some additional slides to answer these questions.

Next was FOSDEM, a conference that defies description. Marcin’s article on How to Survive FOSDEM was helpful, but nothing can prepare you for the excitement and energy of this event. The open-source tables were packed, and I was thrilled to hear attendees’ interest in AArch64. While I was unable to have long conversations with each group due to the crowds, I hope we can participate in larger capacity next year. Maybe a dev room “AArch64 and open source”.

At night, there were a variety of events, including the FLOSS Foundations dinner and the Group Project Happy Hour. I enjoyed meeting community members from various open-source projects, including Neil from Rocky Linux, several people from Google, and the AlmaLinux team.

The third event was CfgMgmtCamp, which focused on open-source configuration, orchestration, and dev ops. I was particularly interested in learning more about Terraform, Ansible, and Puppet. It was eye-opening to see how much had improved since I first started working in dev ops, though software engineers still present challenges. As AI/ML projects continue to emerge, dev ops professionals will need to adapt to new challenges.

I had the opportunity to meet many community members, including those from Cloudbase and Dutch community members from AT Computing. I regret not having been able to go out to dinner with the guys from Cloudbase for Ramen.

The week was both very long, yet seemed to go by so quickly and completely overwhelming yet intimate.

BTW, would you be willing to help plan a DevRoom? If so, what would be the best name for it? My goal would be to many different projects talking about how different open source projects are using AArch64.

Did you attend any of these events or find a good write-up about them? Please share your experiences! What events are you planning to attend next? Let us know in the Events section.

1 Like