openSUSE Conference – First Impressions of Day One

This is a guest blog written by Frank Sundermeyer, Project Manager Documentation (supported by photos from chabowski).

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2016. Long awaited openSUSE Conference (oSC) finally started. I arrived half an hour before the keynote to join an impressive crowd at the reception desk. Upon registration, like all attendees, I received the beautiful oSC 2016 T-shirt.

oSC 2016 takes place at the Z-Bau, one of the many former Nazi barracks you can find here in Nuremberg. Having turned into the US Merrel Barracks after the 2nd World War, the Z-Bau today is a center for culture and arts for roughly 25 years. History, architecture and atmosphere really makes it a very special location.

The keynote took place in the former ballroom, a huge hall that can accommodate several hundred people. The first keynote “SaltStack is more than just configuration management” was held by Thomas Hatch (CTO of SaltStack), who was joined by Dave Boucha (SaltStack Engineer) for a technical demo, and Joe Werner (the Product Manager for SUSE Manager) who shared some detail about SUSE Manager and SaltStack.

For me as a newbie to SaltStack this keynote was a real eye-opener. As a start, Tom gave an introduction of the history, evolution and concepts behind SaltStack.

Next, Dave demonstrated the event-driven features of SaltStack. The combination of autmation and monitoring capabilities he showed to the audience was pretty convincing. After the demo, Joe explained how the latest version of SUSE Manager, SUSE’s infrastructure management solution, leverages SaltStack. For the recently released version 3, SUSE Manager has been completely rewritten using SaltStack as a backend for the first time. The switch to SaltStack has dramatically increased SUSE Manager’s performance by being able to parallelize tasks rather than queuing them. What’s more, SaltStack’s monitoring capabilities combined with its event-driven handler adds significant functionality to SUSE Manager.

The first day here at the conference will continue with a track dedicated to Salt. In addition, a lot of talks are offered around the openSUSE project and its infrastructure.

And this is just the beginning – I am looking forward to the next four days of talks, workshops and – most important – of meeting friends, colleagues and members of the openSUSE community.