It may be hard to image, but some sysadmins do not operate in ideal, tightly controlled circumstances. Apparently, not every developer, application or organization is ready for Kubernetes…

In this presentation we will share a real world use case: deploying and configuring a brand new natural history museum. We’ll show how we built the museum with open source software and config management tools, dealing with a broad set of technologies, a tight schedule, a sector dominated by traditional organizations fixated on proprietary solutions and a whole bunch of actual fossils. We’ll show how far we’ve come, and what choices we made along the way.

Check out this talk if you want to see how Ansible, MAAS, PlatformIO, Nextcloud and other tools were used to not just automatically deploy and configure Linux based media players, games and digital signage screens, but also to manage Cumulus Linux-based switches, OPNsense firewalls, show controllers, Arduino microcontrollers, KNX gateways, projectors and even the odd OSX machine.