Yes, it’s a year gone, but Kim tells me people are listening, so here we go.
The technical nature of SUSEcon is pretty awesome. I’ve been to a few
conferences before, including some that are technical, but I think
SUSEcon’s focus on the really powerful technical stuff is superb. The
keynotes talk about how all of that power fits into the business world
which is a nice contrast, but the sessions are just great. Some examples:
A couple of years ago I attended a session on Btrfs; years ago. SLE 12 is
going to incorporate it so after two years of understanding in the public
and testing internally it’s finally here. I"ve been using it a lot since
then to get ready and, well, this is good stuff, and the session was all
about demos with laptops for everybody to tinker and try to cause
problems. Want to create ten thousand snapshots? Go for it (I did).
A couple of years ago, as well as last year, I attended sessions on
containers (LXC), which is basically a new way to do really lightweight
virtualization (similar to OpenVZ, or Solaris Zones for those in those
areas). The sessions were both great and the way that things were
explained, and demonstrated, made it all pretty clear and exciting.
A couple of years ago (this is a lot of 2012 stuff; sorry I’m distracted)
I attended a KVM session which led to my conversion to KVM for all VMs on
my laptop. I haven’t missed trying to do odd kernel stuff with Xen on my
laptop as a result, and have not needed to pay for things like VMware, or
try third-party stuff like VirtualBox. Just great technologies, and
again, this was two years ago.
Last year I attended a session on doing High Availability (HA) with the HA
Extension to SLE. Great session where we setup a cluster and, well, it’s
a bit too easy. Clusters were supposed to be hard, and confusing, and
full of new abbreviations and technologies that required magic or voodoo.
SUSEcon provided a quick intro in an hour or two and I’ve been able to
setup clusters on my own since. Not a week-long training (with a
week-long training’s expenses) and just enough information to show the
power and capabilities so you can run on your own. Conferences just don’t
seem to do this often anymore.
Other practical sessions included setting up Apache with LDAP as a backend
for authentication, complete with gotchas to avoid. For those trying it,
this will save you hours of work/pain/suffering/broken-keyboards-or-mice.
My feedback, then, for the organizers is to keep the technical stuff in
there as before, or expand it. SLE11 to SLE12 sessions would be nice.
How to create new systemd service startup files would be awesome. How to
take advantage of snapshots in the root Btrfs filesystem would really show
the power of what is coming.
November cannot get here fast enough…
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Good luck.
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