FreeBSD jails provide a light-weight but powerful and secure way to virtualise services. However, the *BSD world has sort of stood on the side lines as the recent advances in systems deployment have developed. I.e. while vagrant, puppet, chef, ansible etc. have gained a great deal of acceptance in the Linux world, they often only consider BSD as an afterthought, which is a shame.

Well, BSDploy has changed this! With its declarative provisioning approach you simply define a jail host and its jails and BSDploy will go about and make it so.

Configuring a jail then simply becomes a matter of applying one or more ansible playbooks to it and maintenance operations such as performing updates, backups, managing services etc. that don't quite fit the declarative approach of ansible can then easily be applied using Fabric - all powered by a single, canonical configuration!

By separating provisioning from declarative and imperative configuration each area becomes much more concise and clean.

Having great Python tools for each of these areas allows BSDploy to tie them together on API level to provide a seemless, powerful solution that becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Scope

The training will comprise of a complete introduction to BSDploy as well as an auxiliary introduction to Ansible and Fabric.

Participants will learn how to provison and configure a FreeBSD host from scratch and how to perform basic maintenance tasks.

In essence, it will be an in-depth and interactive version of BSDploy's quickstart tutorial.

Requirements

The course is designed to work with VirtualBox and BSDploy, so participants are encouraged to install both of these on their machines prior to the course.