FOSDEM 2012 feedback

I'm back from Brussels, where happened the coldest FOSDEM ever. It started on Friday night with the traditional beer event. Since the Delirium was a bit small to host those thousands of frozen geeks, the FOSDEM organizers had enlisted the whole block as approved bars !

On the Saturday, I spent most of my time in the Cloud and Virtualization devroom, which I escaped only to see Simon Phipps announce the new membership-based OSI, and Paolo Bonzini talking about the KVM ecosystem (in a not technical enough way, IMO). My own OpenStack talk was made a bit difficult due to the absence of mike to cover the 550-seat Chavanne auditorium... but the next talks got one. The highlight of the day was Ryan Lane's "infrastructure as an open source project" presentation, about how Wikimedia Labs uses Git, Gerrit, Jenkins and OpenStack to handle its infrastructure like a contributor-driven open source project. The day ended with a good and frank discussion between OpenStack developers, with upstream projects and downstream distributions.

On Sunday I tried to hop between devrooms, but in a lot of cases the room was full and I couldn't enter, so I spent more time in the hallway track. I enjoyed Soren's talk about using more prediction algorithms (instead of simple thresholds) in monitoring systems, introducing his Surveilr project. The highlight of the day was Dan Berrangé's  talk about using libvirt to run sandboxed applications, using virt-sandbox. There are quite a few interesting uses for this, and the performance penalty sounds more than acceptable.

Overall it was a great pleasure for me to attend FOSDEM this year. Congratulations to the organizers again. I'll be back next year, hopefully it will be warmer :)