CfgMgmtCamp 2026
It was that time of the year again. Fosdem taking place during the weekend in Brussels, and then CfgMgmtCamp extending it into the week. I only went to CfgMgmtCamp, not Fosdem. CfgMgmtCamp took place from 2-4 february 2026.
Over the span of the 2 days (I did not go to the workshop day) there were so many interesting talks. Since my dayjob involves a lot of Ansible, I made the distinct choice to try and broaden my sources of inspiration and go look around in the other tracks and sort-of actively avoiding the Ansible track.
Adjacent talks like licensing
To be honest even though I usually mostly enjoy the hardcore technical talks. I enjoyed the several talks who were more focussed on Open Source licenses and challenges related to those. And the history of Open Source framed in a way that we are probably at the end of the gilded age of Open Source.
Digital Sovereignty
Another item that must be highlighted is the digital sovereignty panel discussion. Disclaimer here I lean as far away from big-tech as possible so I’m opinionated. The panel was in my opinion well chosen where there was a good diversity between “We must do everything ourselves” and “There is no issue in using the hyperscalers”. I would state the panel could work probably better with a bit more moderation. My personal take after listening to the panel was the following:
- we should strive to more interoperability between services
- many of these things should have a common api
- how much control you need depends on your use case, not everything needs the same hard boundaries
Tech talks
I’m not really going in to details about the several really interesting talks I have seen and hallway conversations about different aspects of our field. Needless to say, when leaving the event location on day 2 my head was filled with ideas and potential things I can personally use or apply in my dayjob.
LLM’s
Needless to say, but this time LLM’s were no longer a niche idea but very prevalent in several talks. The use of LLM’s in our field still remains controversial and you have strong proponents and strong opponents. I’m in the camp where I’m really not sure, and if the LLM’s which we have today raise so much ethical questions, these should be resolved first. And lets be honest just throwing slides together with an LLM, was that really useful?
Conclusion
I’m again inspired by going to this conference. Which makes it already something to look forward to for next year. Hereby also a warm thank you to the organisers of this conference, all volunteers who made this a success and the sponsors for keeping this event free, which is really exceptional.