2024-03-04 –, Stage Wintergarten
The Relax-and-Recover (ReaR) Open Source project exists since 2006 and is now the de-facto standard for automated Linux Disaster Recovery.
A behind-the-scenes look at how a project works for such a long time, what goes well and what could be better, with specific examples and advice for others.
ReaR was born out of a single customers' need and a consulting project, to offer a cheaper and better alternative to a commercial disaster recovery product. Since then it has grown by many contributions to cover nearly any disaster recovery situation for Linux servers and desktops - and it is used in many data centres around the world. Red Hat and SUSE even provide commercial support, with their package maintainers also acting as ReaR maintainers.
With all this success, we still struggle to provide regular releases, test automation or even good architecture documentation.
This talk explores the reasons for that and shows some of the approaches that work, and some that didn't work. I'll be happy for a conversation with other maintainers/projects about how they solve this problem.
Schlomo Schapiro is an Agile IT and Open Source enthusiast dedicated to advancing an agile mindset and a DevOps-orientated culture in IT. He works at Tektit Consulting in Berlin, is author of several Open Source projects, conference speaker and regularly publishes blog and magazine articles.
Being busy with Open Source since the 90s building Open Source CD-ROMs for the Belgian Unix Users Group.
However, my first open source project was "Make CD-ROM Recovery (mkCDrec)" released in 2000, which lead to a complete rewrite in Relax-and-Recover (ReaR) together with my German friend Schlomo Schapiro in 2006. ReaR took a while to take off and lots of energy and time was put into it to become what it is today (most likely the best DR tool for Linux). As ReaR is 100% open source and we did all coding and testing on 'free' time the financial return was close to nil. However, we did not do it for the fame (who knows me?) or the money (could have richer doing paid work), but because I believe in the power of open source. As I use open source on daily basis (for which I also did not have to pay) why should we be selfish?
In the course of the year we wrote several other open source tools which are very useful for certain communities, e.g. ReaR-automated-testing, adhocr, upgrade-ux, horcm-utils, etc. Furthermore, we also assisted in other open source tools like cfg2html.