In his unusual keynote speech,Thomas Pornin shed light on the dynamics in development teams using a comparison with the Trojan Krieg, as described in Homer's Iliad. Achilles, the invincible hero, embodies the exceptionally talented developer, the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon a management failure on Agamemnon's side.

Quintessence: it's easier to manage a team without a hero. But then you lose the war.

Olivier Cochard-Labbé showed what measures can be taken to implement a FreeBSD-based router on standard server hardware that achieves 10 Gbit/s forwarding throughput. Since our current infrastructure is challenged less by throughput than by the memory requirements of the global routing table, outsourcing our BGP to a software router is an interesting approach that we will continue to pursue.

In my own presentation, I was able to explain the challenges we have faced in hosting in the recent past and the changes we have implemented since then compared to our "NanoBSD" architecture presented in 2010. On the hosting provider side, the proServer has many of the desired features of a "private cloud" product, but presents itself to the customer as a classic root server. For applications that require such a platform, this is an invaluable advantage over pure container solutions, which practically always require a specially adapted application architecture.

A lively and informative discussion followed the well-received presentation in front of a full audience.

Mariusz Zaborski reported on his experiences in adapting parts of the FreeBSD base system to Capsicum. Capsicum is a capability framework, i.e. a way of running applications separately from each other in their own "sandboxes". Capsicum is only the latest and most modern of a series of projects related to "Mandatory Access Control". You probably use one of them - TrustedBSD - yourself on a daily basis, certainly if you own an iPhone or iPad.

Ed Schouten spoke out in favor of not trying to port Docker to FreeBSD. This was a race that could not be won, as it would always lag behind the Linux implementation in terms of compatibility, features and stability. Quite apart from the question of what advantages would be gained by running the solution in an otherwise identical form on a different platform.

He advocated a pragmatic approach and presented his project, in which he uses the well-known cluster framework Kubernetes to orchestrate highly encapsulated micro-services on FreeBSD with Kubernetes. This solution offers more and different features than Docker in terms of isolating the individual services and may therefore be of interest to some applications. Ed is looking for committed contributors.

As a kind of supplement to our tutorial, George gave an overview of the current status of the FreeBSD port of DTrace and an outlook on further development across all supported operating systems in his presentation. In particular, he discussed the possibilities of using DTrace in the context of computer science education in the subject "Operating Systems". Studying source code is one thing, being able to watch a running system at work is another. An approach that Richard Stevens had already chosen 20 years ago to familiarize his readers with how TCP/IP protocols work.

To round things off, Julien Simon and Nicolas David demonstrated how to deploy and operate FreeBSD in the Amazon Cloud (AWS). Although the presentation degenerated a little into a promotional event for Amazon, it was still an interesting introduction. Offering the proServer platform not only in our own data center but also on the platforms of common cloud operators is a declared goal of our team. One possible application, for example, is to operate application servers distributed around the world - something that we would not be able to offer in this way with traditional hosting.

Unfortunately, we had to miss the closing keynote by Brendan Gregg, as the TGV back to Karlsruhe was waiting. Brendan is the author of books on DTrace and systems performance. Not surprisingly, analyzing performance bottlenecks was also the topic of his talk, with a focus on FreeBSD.