DEVCONF.cz 2019

This weekend, from the 25th until the 27th of January, the DEVCONF.cz took place at the Faculty of Information Technology Brno (Czech Republic) and I’ve got the chance to attend. As an Open Source addicted community driven conference, which is mainly sponsored by Red Hat there was no ticket charge, but a free ticket registration was required. Now, after the conference I know why, but more on that later. Red Hat is running a large office at Brno (around 1200 employees) and most of them are working in a technical area. Therefore there is an intense partnership between the technical university of Brno and Red Hat.

I got knowledge about this conference by colleagues who are working at Red Hat Vienna. A while ago they told me, that there is a large annual conference at Brno and if I would be interested to attend. I said yes, because the conference is free of charge, community driven, the schedule was very interesting and my company (STRABAG) payed the hotel expenses - many thanks for that at this point! ❤ 😃

My journey started on Friday morning at the company and after a 6 hour drive I arrived at my hotel at Brno around 3 pm save and sound. I checked in and went off to the conference venue immediately by tram. What should I say, there were lots of people there! As written above, now I know why a free registration is needed and recommended before the conference. The DEVCONF.cz used the system provided by Eventbrite, which worked perfectly!

The first track I listen to was Ansible Plugins by Abhijeet Kasurde which was very informative because it is possible to easily extend Ansible by plugging in filters for example. The second and last track on Friday was Convergence of Communities: OKD = f(Kubernetes++) by Daniel Izquierdo and Diane Mueller. This one was really interesting as it gave a cool insight how people are contributing to various open source project based on the GitHub repositories, commits and comments.

After that, I went back to the hotel and met with the colleagues from RedHat, Franz Theisen and Armin Müellner and after some chatting we went up to the dinner, which was really delicious! During the dinner I had the chance to talk to other colleagues who were with us.

On Saturday I got the chance to visit the Red Hat office at Brno and after a delicious coffer we went on to the conference.

I had a full packed day with a lot of sessions which are listed afterwards. The full schedule can be found here.

• COLIN
• Container Meetup
• Ansible to manage Desktops
• Visualized Workstation
• Containers without Daemons - Podman Internals
• Container pipeline for devs and enterprises alike!
• How OpenShift Builds Container Images
• Insiders info from the Masters of Clouds
• Managing a fleet of Linux desktops with Ansible
• Legacy Monolith to Microservices

All of the tracks that I have visited were great! But I would like to highlight two of them. The Containers Meetup with Daniel Walsh was super interesting because of the discussion about cgroups v2 which might cause a lot of problems for the container software. The problem herein is, that the cgroups v2 interface of the Linux kernel is not compatible with the v1 version. This means, that software which relies on libraries that are implementing cgroups v1, like Docker and others, will be broken. if the new Kernel interface is enabled. In the meetup it was discussed if the upcoming Fedora version should go this way. Well, we will see whats coming up…

The Insiders info from the Masters of Clouds is the second one I like to mention because there were lots of insight, how Red Hat manages their infrastructure. For me it was mega cool to see, that Red Hat is also using Zabbix heavily for system monitoring, like we on-premises too!

On Saturday evening we had a very nice dinner and the opportunity to continue our chats from Friday. On Sunday I went back to Austria early, as I have to drive 6 hours back. 🚗😃

In summary, I am very happy, that I’ve got the chance to attend to this conference and I will try to attend to it next year too! I meet a lot of cool people, like Akihiro Suda, the Docker Community Leader of Tokyo, which I am really proud of. DevConf.cz I will come back!