Takeaways from AsiaBSDCon 2018

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Hi, it’s Ruben here reporting on AsiaBSDCon 2018.  As I mentioned in my previous post, this was our first time participating. The event is held each year at the Tokyo University of Science, and showcases the latest developments in the BSD community, including FreeBSD and NetBSD – the BSD flavors that OrionVM supports as templates for partners to deploy.

Day One:

This year was a big one for virtualisation and automation. Day one featured Benedict Reuschling of the FreeBSD Foundation giving talks on Ansible and ZFS, with some great hallway discussions on the challenges people are facing with large storage arrays and using Ansible with the FreeBSD ports system. It was great to meet some of the people behind these technologies our partners and I deploy and use every day.

Day Two:

Bhyvecon took place on day two, with presentations and open discussions on the latest developments in BSD virtualisation, including Xen, bhyve, and vmm. It was particularly heartening to see the amazing work students from Bucharest have done with bhyve VM suspend and resume. And most importantly, Groff the BSD goat made an appearance.

Day Three and Four:

Days three and four were deep dives into BSD research and development; with talks ranging from building security appliances with FreeBSD and institutionalising virtual FreeBSD hosts, to kernel profiling and Linux rumpkernels on BSD. Henning Brauer’s presentation on x-ray machine networks using OpenBSD must have won the prize for most entertaining and original, right down to the required white gloves!

In the hallways, we saw Japan’s NetBSD teams running their OS everywhere, including seemingly each Raspberry Pi generation. This anime fan noted the re-appearance of Mikutter, and the best desktop backgrounds and mascots in attendance.

It was a fantastic, intimate event with bento lunches, Japanese beer, embarrassing photos with my BSD heroes and the best and brightest minds in the community gathered to talk about the world’s greatest operating system family, in this humble writer’s opinion.

Thanks go out to Hiroki Sato and the Programme Committee Members for all their hard work putting together this conference; to Michael Dexter for coordinating bhyvecon and to the OrionVM team for giving me the opportunity to attend and contribute. Here’s to a great year for BSD on OrionVM Wholesale Cloud.

Author: Ruben Schade, Solutions Engineer, OrionVM