Config Management Camp in Ghent: Puppet community robbed of its base

The infrastructure automation tools Puppet and Foreman have irritated their respective communities with changes to their licensing and sales models – and thus reinforced the trend towards forks. This was demonstrated at the annual meeting of the configuration management software communities ConfigMgmtCamp in Ghent, Belgium, at the beginning of February.

Puppet manufacturer fights for popularity

At this year's ConfigMgmtCamp, the OpenVox community discussed open questions that had arisen since an announced license changeover by Puppet owner Perforce. OpenVox is the open-source fork of Puppet. Perforce took over Puppet in 2022 and announced at the end of 2024 that it would significantly change the distribution of Puppet packages. From the beginning of 2025, the Puppet development team will send all new binaries and packages to a private, secure and controlled location. Community contributors will have free access to this private repository for development purposes under the terms of an End-User License Agreement (EULA).

This was met with disapproval from the community. Despite the trend to switch to the more accessible Ansible for configuration management, Puppet is still widely used, and the community is correspondingly large – and the fork was quickly decided. As a consequence, Perforce tried to fight for its popularity at ConfigMgmtCamp. In the Puppet workshop, it was said that not so many representatives of the Puppet product had been present since 2017.

Terraform is also in the process of relicensing or changing its sales model. As the most popular representative for Infrastructure as Code, the tool has long played an important role for ConfigMgmtCamp, but has been replaced this year by OpenTofu. Terraform's OpenTofu fork was about 18 months ago, and OpenTofu version 1.10 will be released soon. In plenary presentations and session talks, the ConfigMgmtCamp participants looked back on the development and discussed the extent to which the two products have diverged in the meantime. The aim is to remain compatible at provider level. In addition to minor changes, such as improved provider mocking for the development of new modules, State Encryption stands out. Terraform and OpenTofu store the generated infrastructure status in a file. For collaborations, it is usually stored in an S3 bucket. However, if its access permissions are set incorrectly, unauthorized people can read the content – and Terraform lacks encryption.

The opening presentation was given by Hazel Weakly. Her key message was that software development and configuration management is always about people. There are several possible definitions for software and configuration, such as “teaching sand to think” for software or “type-driven development” for configuration. According to Weakly, the ones that revolve around people work better: “An explanation of how we see the world through each others eyes” for software and “How humans learn to adopt software to their needs” for configuration.

Incorrectly trained for the cross-sectional task of troubleshooting

Laura Nolan presented her thoughts on troubleshooting and debugging. Typical DevOps and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) teams, which are often responsible for troubleshooting, are incorrectly trained to adequately fulfill this cross-cutting task. They often lack experience because the professional fields tend to be filled with young people, and the focus on cloud or abstract systems implies a lack of knowledge in classic system administration, said Nolan. Her presentation was underpinned by extensive scientific sources, the concepts of which she clearly presented in her talk using the “Worst Issue You Ever Deal With”.

Ben Ford, a well-known member of the Puppet community, explained how products based on open-source projects must generate their value by promoting a functioning ecosystem. Nobody would buy Puppet without its “ecosystem,” he said. Between the lines, he hinted at how ungrateful he perceives Perforce to be for their aforementioned change in access to Puppet. Philip Hölzenspies introduces Pkl (pronounced like the English word for pickle), a language for generating structured data. At its core, it is similar to Jsonnet, but has additional mechanisms for validating the input – most comparable to CUE. Pkl has been an open-source project since the beginning of 2024.

The developers of the Foreman community discussed innovations in host provisioning and content management, in particular Secure Boot, Debian clients and the containerization of Foreman and its components. The container setup (including Katello) already works for development and testing, but it is not yet ready for productive use. This is also because the classic Foreman installer no longer works here, which had kept many aspects of the complex setup away from the people in front of the screen.

In recent years, more and more Kubernetes users have appeared at ConfigMgmtCamp. Affectionately known as YAML Camp, the conference naturally liked to focus on a product that runs entirely in YAML. In 2025, there was again a session on this topic, but the trend seems to have stopped, presumably because there are enough specialized conferences on this topic. Ansible also played a major role, of course. Nix and NixOS brought a lot of input and were in great demand, and social topics such as “How do we read DevOps?” or “How do we deal with each other?” were still present. The buzzword AI/KI cannot be avoided, but contributions to it have so far remained rather speculative.

The Config Management Camp has been taking place in Ghent, Belgium, in February for more than ten years. The regional and temporal proximity to FOSDEM makes it possible to attend both conferences directly after each other. In 2025, almost 700 people attended the CfgMgmtCamp in a total of 11 tracks, and 450 on the workshop day (after 260 last year).

(dmk)