Next week, I’m going to attend the Open Source Datacenter Conference (OSDC). Conviently for me, the event will take place in Berlin now after Netways, the company behind the conference, decided to move it there from its traditional location in Nuremberg.

The OSDC takes place on Wednesday and Thursday and is packed with sessions about the newest developments in Open Source technology. Some of my personal highlights:

• Jordan Sissel: “Find Happiness in your Logs”
• Andreas Schmidt: “Testing server infrastructure with serverspec”
• Martin Gerhard Loschwitz: “What’s next for Ceph?”
• Mike Adolphs: “How we run Support at GitHub”

On Thursday, I’ll give a talk myself, titled “Dynamic Infrastructure Orchestration”. My goal is to point out possible next steps after getting configuration management solutions like Puppet or Chef in place. I’ll cover two different approaches:

• using central key-value stores like etcd for service discovery and
• configuration, and
• decentralising system automation with tools like serf.

OSDC always is a fun event and I’m excited to meet old colleagues and talk to fellow IT professionals.

Hm. I wonder if the city has changed much since I last visited Berlin in 1987…