After having heard about FOSDEM for long time, and this year I had the privilege to attend it. This may be the reason of the extreme cold spell that hit Europe at that time. I reached Brian Thomason in Hamburg where he presented Eucalyptus. They loved him, and I have to agree with them: the presentation was very interactive and Brian was very charming. We then reached Brussels by train, on the only non-heated car: needless to say I was ready for a hot bath once we reached the hotel.
FOSDEM was as good as I read about, and more. My interests brought me most of the time at the Cloud and Virtualization track, although I did walked into a Google Summer of Code talk, CentOS and Debian talks, and a survey on how to have HA with MySQL. I like the HA talk (search for Ivan Zoratti's HA reloaded): there is no free lunch when deploying HA, and the talk highlights how decisions need to be taken early on about what kind of HA one wants and she is willing to pay for.
The Cloud and Virtualization track was very well attended. It was good to see old friends and shake hands, from Xen's Lars, to Dave and James from the Ubuntu server team, Thierry and Rick and more. Very good content too. I did enjoy quite a bit the libguestfs talk, since lately I have been doing some images work, and I already have been using zerofree, but I learned that there are a lot more tools I can use to simplify my life.
