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NETWAYS Blog

OSDC 2018 Recap: The Archive is online


 
Open Source Data Conference| JUNE 12 – 13, 2018 | BERLIN
Hello Open Source Lovers,
as we know all of you are most of the time focused on the things to come: An upcoming release or a future-oriented project you are working on. But as Plato said, „twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.“

OSDC Archive is online, giving us the occasion to do so.

OSDC 2018 was a blast! Austria, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Czech Republic and the USA: 130 participants from all over the world came to Berlin to exchange thoughts and discuss the future of open source data center solutions.
„Extending Terraform“, „Monitoring Kubernetes at scale“, „Puppet on the Road to Pervasive Automation“ and „Migrating to the Cloud“ were just a few of many, trailblazing topics: We are overwhelmed by the content and quality of speakers, who presented a really interesting range of technologies and use cases, experience reports and different approaches. No matter what topic, all of the 27 high-level speakers had one goal: Explain why and how and share their lessons learned. And by doing so they all contributed to Simplifying Complex Infrastructures with Open Source.
Besides the lectures the attendees joined in thrilling discussions and a phenomenal evening event with a mesmerizing view over the city of Berlin.
A big thank you to our speakers and sponsors and to all participants, who made the event special. We are already excited about next year’s event – OSDC 2019, on May 14 to 15 in Berlin. Save the date!
And now, take a moment, get yourself a cup of coffee, lean back and recap the 2018 conference. Have a look at videos and slides and photos.

The Future of Open Source Data Center Solutions – OSDC 2018 – Day 2

The evening event was a great success. While some enjoyed the great view from the Puro Skybar, others liked the food and drinks even more and at least I preferred the networking. I joined some very interesting discussions about very specific Information Technology tools, work life balance, differences between countries and cultures and so on. So thanks to all starting with our event team to the attendees for a great evening.
But also a great evening and a short night did not keep me and many others from joining Walter Gildersleeve for the first talk about „Puppet and the Road to Pervasive Automation“. He introduced the new tools from Puppet to improve the Configuration management experience like Puppet Discovery, Pipelines and Tasks. What I liked about his demos about Tasks was that he was showing of course what the Enterprise version could do, but also what the Open Source version is capable of. Pipelines is Puppet’s CI/CD solution which can be used as SaaS or on premise and at least I have to commit it looks very nice and informative. If you want to give it a try, you can sign up for a free account and test it with a limited number of nodes.
Second one today was Matt Jarvis with his talk „From batch to pipelines – why Apache Mesos and DC/OS are a solution for emerging patterns in data processing“. Like several others he started with the history from mainframes via hardware partitioning and virtualization to microservices running in containers. After this introduction he started to dig deeper into Container Orchestration and changes in modern application design which add complexity which they wanted to solve with Mesos. Matt then has given a really good overview on different aspects of the Mesos ecosystem and DC/OS. This being quite a complex topic a list of all the topics covered would be quite exhaustive list, but just to mention some he covered Service Discovery or Load Balancing for example.
Michael Ströder who I know as great specialist for secure authentication by working with him at one customer in the past introduced „Æ-DIR — Authorized Entities Directory“ to the crowd. You already could see his experience when he was talking about goals and paradigms applied during development which resulted in the 2-tier architecture of Æ-DIR consisting of a writable provider and readable consumer with separated access based on roles. Installation is quite easy with a provided Ansible role and results in a very secure setup which I really like for central service like Authentication. The shown customer scenarios using features like SSH proxy authz and two factor authentication with Yuibkey make Æ-DIR sound like a really production ready solution. If you want to have a look into without installing it, a demo is provided on the projects webpage.
First talk after lunch was „Git Things Done With GitLab!“ by my colleagues Gabriel Hartmann and Nicole Lang about Gitlab and why it was chosen by NETWAYS for inclusion in our Webservices. Nicole gave a very good explanation about basic function which Gabriel showed live in a demo followed by a cherry pick of nice features provided by Gitlab. Also these features like Issue tracker and CI/CD were shown live. I was really excited by the beta of AutoDevops which allows you to get CI/CD up and running very easy.
Thomas Fricke’s talk „Three Years Running Containers with Kubernetes in Production“ was a very good talk about things you should know before moving container and container orchestration into production. But while it was a interesting talk I had to prepare for my own because I was giving the last talk of the day about „Katello: Adding content management to Foreman“ which was primarily demos showing all the basic parts.
It was a great conference again this year, I really want to thank all the speakers, attendees and sponsors who made this possible. I am looking forward for more interesting and even more technical talks at the Open Source Camp tomorrow, but wish save travels to all those leaving today and hope to see you next year on May 14-15.

Dirk Götz
Dirk Götz
Principal Consultant

Dirk ist Red Hat Spezialist und arbeitet bei NETWAYS im Bereich Consulting für Icinga, Puppet, Ansible, Foreman und andere Systems-Management-Lösungen. Früher war er bei einem Träger der gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung als Senior Administrator beschäftigt und auch für die Ausbildung der Azubis verantwortlich wie nun bei NETWAYS.

The Future of Open Source Data Center Solutions – OSDC 2018 – Day 1

Now for the fourth time OSDC started in Berlin with a warm Welcome from Bernd and a fully packed room with approximately 140 attendees. This year we made a small change to the schedule by doing away with the workshop day and having an additional smaller conference afterwards. The Open Source Camp will be on Foreman and Graylog, but more on this on Thursday.
First talk was Mitchell Hashimoto with „Extending Terraform for Anything as Code“ who started by showing how automation evolved in information technology and explained why it is so important before diving into Terraform. Terraform provides a declarative language to automate everything providing an API, a plan command to get the required changes before you then apply all this changes. While this is quite easy to understand for something like infrastructure Mitchell showed how the number of possibilities grew with Software-as-a-Service and now everything having an API. One example was how HashiCorp handles employees and their permissions with Terraform. After the examples for how you can use existing stuff he gave an introduction to extending Terraform with custom providers.
Second was „Hardware-level data-center monitoring with Prometheus“ presented by Conrad Hoffmann who gave us some look inside of the datacenter of Soundcloud and their monitoring infrastructure before Prometheus which looked like a zoo. Afterwards he highlighted the key features why they moved to Prometheus and Grafana for displaying the collected data. In his section about exporters he got into details which exporter replaced which tools from the former zoo and gave some tips from practical experience. And last but not least he summarized the migration and why it was worth to do it as it gave them a more consistent monitoring solution.
Martin Schurz and Sebastian Gumprich teamed up to talk about „Spicing up VMWare with Ansible and InSpec“. They started by looking back to the old days they had only special servers and later on virtual machines manually managed, how this slowly improved by using managing tools from VMware and how it looks now with their current mantra „manual work is a bug!“. They showed example playbooks for provisioning the complete stack from virtual switch to virtual machine, hardening according their requirements and management of the components afterwards. Last but not least for the Ansible part they described how they implemented the Python code to have an Ansible module for moving virtual machines between datastores and hosts. For testing all this automation they use inSpec and the management requiring some tracking of the environment was solved using Ansible-CMDB.
After lunch break I visited the talk about „OPNsense: the “open” firewall for your datacenter“ given by Thomas Niedermeier. OPNsense is a HardenedBSD-based Open Source Firewall including a nice configuration web interface, Spamhouse blocklists, Intrusion Prevention System and many more features. I think with all these features OPNsense has not to avoid comparison with commercial firewalls and if enterprise-grade support is required partners like Thomas Krenn are available, too.
Martin Alfke asked the question „Ops hates containers. Why?“ he came around in a customer meeting. Based on this experience he started to demystify containers in a very entertaining and memorable way. He focused on giving OPS some tips and ideas about what you should learn before even thinking about having container in production or during implementing your own container management platform. As we do recording I really recommend you to have a look into the video of the talk when recordings are up in a few days.
Anton Babenko in his talk „Lifecycle of a resource. Codifying infrastructure with Terraform for the future“ started were Mitchell’s talk ended and dived really deep into module design and development for Terraform. Me being not very familiar with Terraform he at least could convince me that it seems possible to write well designed code for it and it makes fun to experiment and improve with your own modules. Furthermore he gave tips for handling the next Terraform release and testing code during refactoring which are probably very useful for module authors.
„The Computer Science behind a modern distributed data store“ by Max Neunhöffer did a very good job explaining theory used in cluster election and consensus. The second topic covered was sorting of data and how modern technology changed how we have to look at sorting algorithm. Log structured merge trees as the third topic of the talk are a great way to improve write performance and with applying some additional tricks also read performance used by many database solutions. Fourth section was about Hybrid Logical Clocks to solve the problem of system clocks differing. Last but not least Max talked about Distributed ACID Transactions (Atomic Consistent Isolated Durable) which are important to keep data consistent but are quite harder to achieve in distributed systems. It was really a great talk while only covering theoretical computer science Max made it very easy to understand at least basic levels and presented it in way getting people interested in those topics.
After this first day full of great talks we will have the evening event in a sky bar having a good view of Berlin, more food, drinks and conversations. This networking is perhaps one of the most interesting parts of conferences. I will be back with a short review of the evening event and day 2 tomorrow evening. If you want to have more details and a more live experience follow #osdc on Twitter.

Dirk Götz
Dirk Götz
Principal Consultant

Dirk ist Red Hat Spezialist und arbeitet bei NETWAYS im Bereich Consulting für Icinga, Puppet, Ansible, Foreman und andere Systems-Management-Lösungen. Früher war er bei einem Träger der gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung als Senior Administrator beschäftigt und auch für die Ausbildung der Azubis verantwortlich wie nun bei NETWAYS.

Open Source Data Center Conference – Speakers 2018


We are happy to announce our Open Source Data Center Conference 2018 Speakers line-up. We are impressed by all the expert knowledge proposals from across the various countries.
With the main subject “SIMPLIFYING COMPLEX IT INFRASTRUCTURES WITH OPEN SOURCE” for discussion, we have selected a variety of expert proposals from renowned speaker for you.
As OSDC 2108 head speaker Mitchell Hashimoto, CEO of HashiCorp, who will enlighten us on “Update on Terraform”.
We proudly announce our OSDC speakers list of 2018 ! Amongst others the conference program will be enriched by:
Akmal Chaudhri | GridGain System | Apache Ignite: the in-memory hammer in your data science toolkit
Juaristi Alamos | Senior Security Researcher | Hitchhiker’s guide to TLS 1.3 and GnuTLSAnder
Max Neunhöffer | Developer – ArangoDB | The Computer Science behind a modern distributed data store
Cornelius Schumacher | Engineer – SUSE Linux  | Highly Available Cloud Foundry on Kubernetes
Mike Place | SaltStack | Introduction to SaltStack in the modern data center
Gianluca Arbezzano | InfluxData | Distributed monitoring
Jan-Piet Mens | Independent Unix/Linux Consultant and Sysadmin | Introducing Ansible AWX, the Open Source “Tower”
Look also forward to excellent talks with topics as Modern Data Center, Data Science Toolkit, Highly Available Cloud Foundry on Kubernetes, Providing Supporting Docker Images, From Monolith to Microservices and many more.
To listen and learn from experts we welcome you to be a part of international OSDC 2018. Get your seats booked. We are looking forward to seeing you in Berlin.
Don’t miss it!

Keya Kher
Keya Kher
Marketing Specialist

Keya ist seit Oktober 2017 in unserem Marketing Team. Nach ihrer Elternzeit ist sie seit Februar 2024 wieder zurück, um sich speziell um Icinga-Themen zu kümmern. Wenn sie sich nicht kreativ auslebt, entdeckt sie andere Städte oder schmökert in einem Buch. Ihr Favorit ist “The Shiva Trilogy”.  

Monthly Snap January > OSDC 2018, MySQL Cluster Configuration, Firmware version 1.07, Icinga Camp 2018, OSBConf 2018


Hello Two Thousand Eighteen!! It‘s been one month already and lot had happened. Michael shared some information on Modern open source community platforms with Discourse, Thomas took us security tour of Generational change for GnuPG/ PGP keys, Keya discussed 5 reasons why you should be a speaker at OSDC 2018 in Berlin.
Georg said SSL made easy – set up forced forwarding of HTTP to HTTPS, Marius’s A plea for the daydream, Johannes analysed the Galera MySQL Cluster configuration, Martin introduced NETWAYS Monitor – The New Firmware version 1.07.
Keya welcomes you to be a speaker at OSBConf 2018 in Cologne, Gunnar talked about Userspace – Tracing with DTrace, Julia shared upcoming Icinga Camp Berlin 2018 #Monitoringlove, Ufuk talked about server administration with ISPConfig 3. In last Keya introduced the First speakers of OSDC 2018! Happy February!!

Keya Kher
Keya Kher
Marketing Specialist

Keya ist seit Oktober 2017 in unserem Marketing Team. Nach ihrer Elternzeit ist sie seit Februar 2024 wieder zurück, um sich speziell um Icinga-Themen zu kümmern. Wenn sie sich nicht kreativ auslebt, entdeckt sie andere Städte oder schmökert in einem Buch. Ihr Favorit ist “The Shiva Trilogy”.