This is my first post on this blog. I’m setting up this space as Ambientia (my employer) decided to start over with our company blog. I’ve written a couple of things there that I think have some lasting value (and are linked to from various places). So at least I’m going to store them here. It is also my first attempt to run a personal blog. This also gives me a new space experiment with technology.

I had the privilege to attend FOSDEM in Brussels for the third consecutive year. While maybe the magic of the event has slightly vanished for me, I still do maintain the view that it still provides something that many other conferences can not. Not burdened by commercial drivers (as many vendor-led events like re:Invent, Red Hat Summit etc.), FOSDEM is able to provide very high quality content without any marketing fluff thrown into the soup.

A little less than couple of weeks ago I attended FOSDEM 2017 in Brussels, Belgium. Once again it was a great event packed with high quality content. I attended tracks about configuration management (Puppet, Ansible and friends), software defined networking and network function virtualization and containers/microservices. Maybe it was only due to my selection of tracks (there are quite a few: https://fosdem.org/2017/schedule/tracks/) but it seemed that a lot of the talks in some way or other touched on either Kubernetes, OpenStack or both.

I attended the Red Hat Partner Conference 2015 in Frankfurt a little less than two months ago. I think the dust has settled enough so that we can reflect on the event and what we learned from it. The biggest single thing that struck my eye was Red Hat’s strong future focus on containers. Red Hat has multiple products that are shifting technology-wise to a more container-based approach. OpenShift moves from Red Hat’s homegrown container format to Docker/Kubernetes in OpenShift 3.

Please note that this was written in 2014. I haven't updated the setup since. For the most part, it should still work. There is a major change in service management coming up in Linux, where traditional System V init will be replaced by a modern alternative, called systemd. With Red Hat moving to systemd in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and Debian finally settling on systemd as an init system the need to properly implement service management for Atlassian applications using systemd is becoming more substantial.