This year, it was again my task to organize the Birthday Event for the Foreman Project. A tradition we started with the 7th Birthday in 2016! The event evolved and changed over the years with ATIX helping us by sharing responsibility, it survived a pandemic, and this year it seems to come back stronger than ever.
So one big change you can already see in the headline. While I started planning the VoxPupuli community reached out to me asking about the option of co-locating another event and quite fast we agreed on having the first VoxConf earlier on the same day also at our place. So if you are interested in the future of Open Source Puppet OpenVox, they will have you covered.
The other big change was based on community feedback. Before the pandemic the event was simply held in Germany with always some guest from all over Europe and sometimes also the USA joining, so it was a great way of coming together and meeting in person a second time after Config Management Camp. During the pandemic, we moved online, opening up the event for many more people to join. Afterwards, staying online felt wrong as we missed coming together in person, but excluding all the people not able to travel to our play also felt wrong. So we played with the idea of going hybrid, and after some feedback and testing we finally announce it, hoping people will still come to Nuremberg. Shortly after, we had to establish a waiting list for on-site registration, so I do no longer fear to be alone at the event location.
But enough of general talk, let’s dive into the program.
VoxConf
So the VoxConf is organized by the VoxPupuli community. Here I want to mention Tim „bastelfreak“ Meusel who probably did the most work and betadots who also sponsor this event. On the day before, they also organized a guided tour through the beautiful medieval historic city of Nuremberg and a community dinner free for all to join.
On VoxConf itself, there will be 5 talks after a short Opening by Tim. Martin Alfke will start with „OpenVox – The new Puppet Open Source“ followed by Robert Waffen and „What is VoxBox and how to test your Puppet Code with it?„. Lennart Betz will talk about „OpenVox Container & automatic deployment with Terraform and Bolt for development environments„. Sebastian Rakel will introduce „OpenVox View – OpenVoxDB dashboard with some nice features (inspired by PuppetBoard)“ and last but not least we will hear about „What Your Infrastructure Can Learn from Accidents & how Open Vox can help prevent incidents“ by Simon Hönscheid.
Afterwards lunch will be provided in the NETWAYS office.
Foreman Birthday Event
The welcome for the Foreman Birthday Event will be done by me, afterwards we will start with the first talk.
We will start with Ewoud Kohl van Wijngaarden talking about „Containerizing Foreman and friends„. It’s 2025, and we still don’t have a containerized deployment model. But there is an effort to get this done. Back in December 2024 an RFC was submitted, Evgeni presented at Configuration Management Camp and Eric gave a community demo. This talk will look at where we are, where we want to get to, and how we’re planning to get there.
Second talk will be „Foreman Documentation: Year in Review & We Want Your Input!„. Aneta Petrova and Maximilian Kolb from the Foreman documentation team will provide a summary of the current state of the Foreman project’s documentation. They will share success stories from the past year and highlight ongoing projects that you could help shape with your input. The best documentation is built together, so come prepared with your questions, ideas, and feedback!
As third talk, Nadja Heitmann will talk about the „Foreman Resource Quota plugin„. When several users utilize a shared infrastructure, there’s a risk that some may overconsume resources. Resource quotas help administrators address this issue by restricting access to shared resources. The Foreman Resource Quota plugin adds these resource management features to Foreman. In this presentation, we will outline the main features of the plugin and recent improvements.
Then we will have the traditional cake break as we still have to celebrate a birthday!
Tim Meusel will then bring both communities together in „Migrating from Puppet Enterprise to OpenVox and Foreman“ talking about the changes to the license and EULA that came by Perforce led to a lot of companies looking for alternatives to Puppet Enterprise. In this talk he provides insights in what PE actually is, how people can migrate and how Foreman can benefit from it.
Followed by Quirin Pamp and Manisha Singhal with „Katello: Introducing Rolling Content Views„. The talk will introduce this new Katello feature, as well as how it was developed. Starting with a clear user need, through early community discussions and an iterative implementation, encompassing documentation, and testing, there was constant collaboration both across multiple contributors and with community maintainers. A prime example of how we imagine development in general, and open source community driven development in particular to work.
And I will close the event myself with „A new environment in 4 days?„. I read or hear quite often Foreman is too complicated, or its options are just overwhelming be it community, customer or even colleagues. And while I have to agree that you have to learn Foreman / Katello and need a good understanding of services like DNS, DHCP, configuration management and many others to get the full experience, I am still impressed what you can achieve with it even after using it over 10 years now. This talk is a customer story where I had the opportunity to start fresh. A new data center has to be provisioned, only some systems are prepared and in the end requirements from NIS 2 have to be met. My task to set up Foreman as a Proof of Concept in 4 days. So let’s see how far I came!
Time table
So let me give you a nice time table with the schedule:
| 08:00 – 08:45 | Check-in & Morning Snack |
| 08:45 – 09:00 | Tim Meusel: Opening VoxConf |
| 09:00 – 09:30 | Martin Alfke: OpenVox – The new Puppet Open Source |
| 09:35 – 10:05 | Robert Waffen: What is VoxBox and how to test your Puppet Code with it? |
| 10:05 – 10:25 | Break |
| 10:25 – 10:55 | Lennart Betz: OpenVox Container & automatic deployment with Terraform and Bolt for development environments |
| 11:00 – 11:30 | Sebastian Rakel: OpenVox View – OpenVoxDB dashboard with some nice features (inspired by PuppetBoard) |
| 11:35 – 12:05 | Simon Hönscheid: What Your Infrastructure Can Learn from Accidents & how Open Vox can help prevent incidents |
| 12:05 – 13:00 | Lunch |
| 13:00 – 13:10 | Dirk Götz: Welcome Foreman-Birthday-Event |
| 13:10 – 13:50 | Ewoud Kohl van Wijngaarden: Containerizing Foreman and friends |
| 13:50 – 14:30 | Aneta Petrova and Maximilian Kolb: Foreman Documentation: Year in Review & We Want Your Input! |
| 14:30 – 15:10 | Nadja Heitmann: Foreman Resource Quota plugin |
| 15:10 – 15:30 | Cake Break |
| 15:30 – 16:10 | Tim Meusel: Migrating from Puppet Enterprise to OpenVox and Foreman |
| 16:10 – 16:50 | Quirin Pamp / Manisha Singhal: Katello: Introducing Rolling Content Views |
| 16:50 – 17:30 | Dirk Götz: A new environment in 4 days? |
| Afterwards | Pizza & Beer |
Registration
Registration is still possible, but while I would be happy to have you all on-site in Nuremberg we are fully booked now, so please join the stream. I am looking forward to the event, meeting the community is always great, and I think we have a series of very nice talks not only but also thanks to the addition of OpenVox! If I got you interested, but you can not make it the day of the event, we plan to upload videos of the talk afterwards!
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