This upcoming February I will be making the trip to the bitterly cold cobblestoned streets of Brussels, Belgium for FOSDEM 2012, one of the most fantastic open source conferences of the entire year.
I’ve been to FOSDEM once before, but as a timid young lad who barely spoke to anybody. I distinctly recall walking down a hallway past Theo de Raadt thinking “ZOMG IT’S THEO” then in the most sauve fashion, I turned around and walked back down the hallway in the opposite direction making sure I got a good look at Theo.
What a damn nerd.
This year will be something special in that I will be speaking in the Configuration Management Devroom on the subject: “Open Source Infrastructure - Running the Jenkins project with Puppet and more.
If you’re not familiar with the structure of FOSDEM, there are a two main tracks which are held in amphitheaters which can hold hundreds of people at a time. The only one of these I remember from my last visit was watching a talk by Alan Cox, to give you an idea of the scale of those sessions.
Concurrent to the main tracks there are a number of topic-oriented “devrooms” where developers of common interests (Mono, MySQL, Open source virtualization, etc) congregate for talks, panels, etc.
My talk is structured as a hybrid technical/case study talk, the abstract of which is below:
In early 2011 the Jenkins project became the Jenkins project, leaving behind an organically grown but Oracle (formerly Sun) operated infrastructure. An open source project with thousands of users had to grow an infrastructure practically overnight, initially doing things “the wrong way” by hand crafting machines. That was until a costly mistake forced us to reconsider and migrate to managing our infrastructure with Puppet from a publicly available shared Git repository.
Besides Puppet, the Jenkins project also uses a number of other tools to help manage access control on GitHub, parts of JIRA, etc, all carrying on the very transparent and welcoming tradition the project prides itself on.
In this talk I will discuss the ups and downs of switching an established infrastructure to Puppet, all within the public eye and with volunteer time and energy.
If you’re in Europe next February, I highly recommend making the pilgramage to FOSDEM, and be sure to come up and say “hi!” I promise I don’t bite.