Configuration Management Camp 2025

Configuration Management Camp is the event for technologists interested in Open Source Infrastructure automation and related topics. This includes but is not limited to: Open Source Configuration Management, Provisioning, Orchestration, Choreography, Container Operations, and many more topics.

It is all about pure Open Source!

Every year, just after Fosdem a small(er) configuration management conference is organised in Ghent, also in Belgium. It has the impossible name CfgMgmtCamp. As a frequent speaker and currently co-organiser, I was attending this conference again (of course).

CfgMgmtCamp is free to attend, which is achieved through sponsoring and a large group of volunteers, that make this happen.

Tools presented

  • Ansible
  • Puppet
  • Mgmt Config
  • Pulp
  • Foreman
  • Icinga
  • Nix OS
  • System Initiative
  • Pckl
  • …

Videos

All videos of CfgMgmtCamp 2025 are on https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpA21lcgp3jxulD-_dTWj55eoMvWZ8ZuN

Trends seen

  • Open Source communities seem to be fed up with companies first using the Open Source way of live to gain momentum and collect a lot of community contributions to their code, after which they change their licenses and close down the community. Often these license changes happen before or just after a company being taken over. (Puppet, SaltStack, HashiCorp)

    This results in a lot of forks, where the software is still open.

    • Chef => CINC
    • Hashicorp Vault => OpenBoa
    • Hashicorp Terraform => OpenTofu
    • Puppet => OpenVox

  • This buy-out and license switch contributed heavy to the demise of SaltStack. Once a huge community at conferences, now not even a single presentation.

  • The hostile actions to the community (Perforce has forcibly seized control of the #Puppet Community Slack and has banned Ben Ford (community lead) and removed the Community team and all moderators) will add to the downfall of Puppet, once a large force in configuration management. These actions resulted in the founding of the Overlook InfraTech company by Ben Ford and Nick Burgan, that delivers and supports the OpenVox tool.

  • It seems that Red Hat is doing a better job. Ansible is still Open Source and community additions are still welcomed. This also shows at CfgMgmtCamp, where Red Hat is a sponsor. The Ansible track now even has two day-filling tracks. Red Hat is also still sponsoring and supporting all kinds of communities, which is welcomed a lot.

Day 1

There where very interesting talks about all kind of Open Source configuration tools, like Ansible, Puppet, Mgmt Config, Pulp, OpenBao, OpenTofu, Open Vox, Pkl, Instructlab and a lot more. The focus in on Open Source and configuration management.

The complete schedule is at https://cfgmgmtcamp.org/ghent2025/schedule/

With key notes of Hazel Weakly Working Configs, Humanity, The Real World, Joy and Happiness: Pick Two(ish) and Laura Nolan How we troubleshoot difficult problems: cognition and understanding causality in distributed software systems

As a long time Ansible user and contributor, my main focus for the conference was, of course, on Ansible.

All main tracks and all Ansible tracks are recorded and will be available soon.

After John “Gundalow” Barker told us about the “State of the Community”, the Ansible Forum and a lot of statistics, it was time for real techie stuff. https://cfp.cfgmgmtcamp.org/ghent2025/talk/RY9YZU/

An improvement, extension, better way to use secrets with Ansible could be SOPS, Felix Fontein did a wonderful presentation, and life demos, on how to implement this. https://cfp.cfgmgmtcamp.org/ghent2025/talk/HSDKVH/

After Felix it was time for some security stuff. A lot of companies use the CIS standard for hardening systems. Maintaining the standard over all systems and different types of operating systems can be a very hard job. Mark Bolwell is one of the creators of Ansible Lockdown, which takes a lot of the tediousness out of your hands. https://cfp.cfgmgmtcamp.org/ghent2025/talk/RTV7UM/

Mark was followed by Fabio Alessandro “Fale” Locati with some hardcore Ansible meets Podman and podman quadlets in his “Simplifying container orchestration with Ansible and Podman” with a lot of demos. https://cfp.cfgmgmtcamp.org/ghent2025/talk/CFRTJF/

After the last talk it was time to head to The Zone where all attendees participated in the social event with a selection of Belgian Beers.

Day 2

After Laura’s keynote and the presentation of Kief Morris, it was time for code again.

Philip Hölzenspies talks about Pkl, a configuration management tool created by Apple and now open sourced. https://cfp.cfgmgmtcamp.org/ghent2025/talk/W7QSQG/

After lunch we went to the Securing secrets at scale with Conjur by James Freeman. A way to manage secrets with Ansible. A very pleasant presentation about integration of Ansible with Conjur. https://cfp.cfgmgmtcamp.org/ghent2025/talk/ERF7ZA/

The presentation by Helen Bailey about the future of AWX. Currently AWX, and therefore Ansible Automation Platform, has a operator freeze, as AWX is reorganised from a large monolithic application into a plugin system, which is much more maintainable. Unfortunately there is no timeline when this will be finished. https://cfp.cfgmgmtcamp.org/ghent2025/talk/M9QFSV/

Later on the second day Tim Apnell got a completely filled room because of his capturing title “You’re Doing Ansible Roles All Wrong”. Apparently a lot of people disagree and want to see why. Tim explained why he thinks that most people use roles in a way that could be improved upon when using collections. In a way he has a point, but during the discussion he agreed that roles still have validity and will never be removed from Ansible. https://cfp.cfgmgmtcamp.org/ghent2025/talk/UYWGGF/

After Tim it was time for Don Naro, to explain us that building Ansible modules is a lot easier then you think. And he is right (if you use Python). With a nice example, and pictures of hos cat, he demonstrated how to quickly build a modules. But in fact he was telling us not te reinvent the wheel, but to use the Ansible developer tools. https://cfp.cfgmgmtcamp.org/ghent2025/talk/SZSJV7/

Kirill Satarin (tried to) explain to us that every Ansible variable is in fact a function in a functional programming language, and very often even a pure function. By example he demonstrated that how this works. Looking at the reactions of the audience, it was obvious that this was a difficult subject, late on the Tuesday afternoon. https://cfp.cfgmgmtcamp.org/ghent2025/talk/NVGQ39/

The final talk of the conference in the Ansible track, was about testing of Ansible playbooks and collections, in an automated way. In this case through Github actions. Nice overview of different tools and how the work together in an continues process. https://cfp.cfgmgmtcamp.org/ghent2025/talk/DYEVRX/