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FOSDEM 2016 Wrap-up: Bowling with Containers

Chris Kühl

Another year, another trip to FOSDEM, arguably the best free & open source software event in the world, but definitely the best in Europe. FOSDEM offers an amazingly broad range of talks which is only surpassed by the richness of its hallway track... and maybe the legendary beer event. ;)

This year our focus was to talk to folks about rkt, the container runtime we work on with CoreOS, and meet more people from the container development community, along with the usual catching up with old friends.

On Saturday, Alban gave a talk with CoreOS’ Jon Boulle entitled “Container mechanics in rkt and Linux”, where Jon presented a general overview of the rkt project and Alban followed with a deep dive into how containers work on Linux, and in rkt specifically. The talk was very well attended. If you weren’t able to attend however, you can find the slides here.

For Saturday evening, we had organized a bowling event for some of the people involved in rkt, and containers on Linux in general. A majority of the people attending we’d not yet meet IRL. We finally got a chance to meet the team from Intel Poland who has been working on rkt’s LKVM stage1, the BlaBlaCar team—brave early adopters of rkt—as well as some folks from NTT and Virtuozzo. There were also a few folks we see quite often from Red Hat, Giant Swarm and of course the team from CoreOS. As it turns out, the best bowler was the aforementioned Jon Boulle, who bowled a very respectable score of 120.

Having taken the FOSDEM pilgrimage about 20 times collectively now, the Kinvolk team are veterans of the event. However, each year brings new, exciting topics of discussion. These are mostly shaped by one’s own interests (containers and SDN for us) but also by new trends within the community. We’re already excited to see what next year will bring. We hope to see you there!