Impressions from the openSUSE Conf 2022 – Day One: openQA and BCI

After two years of only virtual events, on this warm but not too warm Thursday, June 2, the openSUSE Conf 2022 started with a full load of talks.

First I have been busy saying hello and salute to all my dear SUSE colleagues coming from Czechia, Italy, Spain and of course Germany. I have not seen them all for a long time. Finally, Doug deMaio, the openSUSE Community Manager, welcomed all open source enthusiasts in the Z-Bau in Nuremberg and directed us through the options that are offered by the rich and diversified program. A lot of really good sessions were offered, many of them in parallel.

I am a big fan of openQA and of course I listened to Oliver Kurz’ talk about the newest highlights of that open source testing framework, the heart and soul of the automated QA behind the openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise and Fedora distributions.

The highlight of the day was the talk “SLE BCI: Container Images for development and production” from SUSE’s BCI Release Manager Alex Herzig. He explained what BCI is: a drop-in replacement for unsupported images on Docker Hub, a secure and stable base with latest toolings that works out of the box. It ships everything that a user needs for development, testing & deployment.

Most important features are the latest language stacks on top of a stable SLE Base, security audits, a permissive EULA  and FIPS compliance on a host in FIPS mode.

In the afternoon the QE department organized a QE meet-up for all members of the department and then, finally in the evening, Santiago Zarate, Product Owner for QE talked about “Shortening the feedback loops between R&D and the real world with openSUSE and openQA”.

With that a full day of valuable technical input as well as social interaction closed.