After the US, I was really excited to visit Europe this time for fedora flock conference. A lot of preparation: air tickets, stay, documents for VISA and more. Unfortunately we got our VISA declined and everything hanged. We re-applied and got it approved in second time that to just two days before to the planned take off. Nevertheless did all of slides/demo, shopping & packing and was ready for cab pickup. This time Pune to Mumbai was really relaxing and we reached Mumbai Airport before time! With some flight delay, reached Frankfurt Airport landing was really smooth. By evening we reached the beautiful city - Dresden. Venue for the conference this year was - The Radisson Blu Park Hotel & Conference Centre at Radebeul.
The conference started with warm welcome by Brian Exelbierd and keynote by Matthew Miller. He took us on states of fedora. How fedora performed last year and how was the last year in comparison to last few years. Community involvement and usage, statistics graphs. Further discussions were around fedora modularity, rings, coreOS, atomic host etc.
Dusty Maybe discussed cri-o, kubernetes, container runtimes, podman, builddah and app-containers. Matthias Clasen from desktop team joined and discussed various aspects of the new silverblue project. Fedora Silverblue uses rpm-ostree and Flatpaks to create an image-based “git-like” operating system with easy rollbacks and workflows.
Post lunch, we had a talk on “Advanced Ansible: Extending with Plugins” by Adam Miller. Ansible is a radically simple IT agentless automation system. It handles configuration-management, application deployment, cloud provisioning, ad-hoc task-execution, and multinode orchestration - including trivializing things like zero-downtime rolling updates with load balancers. He discussed how to extend Ansible core functionalities with Plugins which can be a catalyst in solving problems.
Next morning, was my talk after Amitosh Swain Mahapatra’s State of SELinux in fedora desktop, modularity and containers. My topic was “Using Transtats to track translation string change”. Parag Nemade joined me to deliver the talk. I introduced Transtats Jobs. Here are the slides and demo. Transtats Jobs are flexible, YML based, which can solve many problems in i18n/l10n space! As-in tracking string change, inspecting SRPM for i18n/translation errors etc.
Post lunch on Day 2, we attended “Modularity Release Train” by Stephen Gallagher and Mohan Boddu. Followed by building “Fedora CoreOS” by Dusty Maybe. In the evening we head to the Dresden city center, to explore and sightseeing - Zwinger, Church, Opera House and Castle.
Next morning, of flock day 3, started with the session by Owen Taylor on “Building flatpaks from fedora packages”. Had joined Adam Miller’s session on “Jumpstart your fedora contribution by learning Ansible”. He touched upon using ansible-test module. Post lunch, we had our hackathon on “i18n development and testing”. Pooja and Pravin discussed i18n test automation using openQA and some plans to integrate test cases with fedora CI. This evening flock had dinner plans at the great Rollercoaster restaurant. An amazing experience!
The last day - day 4 - flock 2018. I was really interested in talks from fedora infrastructure team. First session was about migrating apps to new fedmsg architecture “fedora messaging” by Aurelien Bompard and Jeremy Cline. Its Python ZeroMQ libraries underline. fedmsg-migration-tools are really helpful here! Then we had a talk on “How fedora infrastructure is using OpenShift to mode 2 shift” by Randy Barlow and Patrick Uiterwijk. They use Ansible playbooks to push object definitions to OpenShift. And thus we came to the wrap up of flock twenty eighteen. Everyone gathered in the main hall for conclusion by fedora council members!
Each fedora flock conference is unique, which helps the vibrant community meet and greet!! With some hopes and plans for next year, boarded flight back to home.
thanks fedora :-)