EuroBSDCon 2025

Managing infrastructure efficiently is critical, but many automation tools feel disconnected. In this hands-on tutorial, attendees will learn how to combine Terraform, Ansible, and Salt to fully automate the provisioning, configuration, and long-term management of infrastructure—all from a FreeBSD workstation.

We will walk through:
- Terraform: Defining infrastructure as code to provision FreeBSD EC2 instances.
- Ansible: Initial configuration of servers, including network setup and package installation.
- Salt: Ongoing configuration management, patching, and long-term server maintenance.

By the end of this tutorial, attendees will have a working hybrid infrastructure using FreeBSD locally and in AWS. They will leave with practical skills to automate and maintain infrastructure efficiently using BSD-friendly tools.
Intended Audience

System administrators, DevOps engineers, and developers using FreeBSD.
Anyone interested in automating infrastructure with open-source tools.
Attendees should have basic FreeBSD and shell scripting knowledge, 
but no prior Terraform, Ansible, or Salt experience is required.

Expected Duration

3 hours (Hands-on, with live demonstrations).

Outline
1. Introduction (30 min)

Overview of Terraform, Ansible, and Salt
Why use all three together?

1. Setting Up FreeBSD Infrastructure with Terraform (55 min)

   Writing Terraform to deploy FreeBSD EC2 instances
   Managing networking and security groups

2. Configuring FreeBSD with Ansible (55 min)

   Installing software
   Setting up IPSec VPN for secure remote management
   Configuring a Lab Environment using FreeBSD Jails

3. Maintaining FreeBSD with Salt (55 min)

   Automating updates and configuration changes
   Enforcing security policies

4. Q&A and Wrap-Up (15 min)
   What Attendees Will Learn

   How to provision FreeBSD servers in AWS using Terraform.
   How to use Ansible for initial setup and configuration.
   How to use Ansible to setup a FreeBSD Jail lab environment.
   How to maintain and scale FreeBSD infrastructure with Salt.

Requirements

Laptop with SSH access
FreeBSD workstation recommended, but not required, Hypervisor works (VirtualBox, etc)
Some prior BSD experience (but no automation expertise needed)

Managing multiple FreeBSD machines can be time-consuming, but automation makes it effortless. In this talk, I will demonstrate how I use Ansible to set up my FreeBSD lab and Salt to maintain and scale it across multiple machines—including how I configured a second FreeBSD laptop with just SSH access.

Attendees will see how automation enables:
- Seamless FreeBSD system setup using Ansible.
- Automated configuration management with Salt.
- Effortless scaling to new machines, reducing manual setup to a few commands.

By the end of the talk, attendees will understand how to leverage Ansible and Salt to build a reproducible and maintainable FreeBSD infrastructure.
Intended Audience

FreeBSD users interested in automating system setup and maintenance.
System administrators managing multiple FreeBSD machines.
Anyone curious about Ansible and Salt for FreeBSD automation.

Attendees should have basic FreeBSD knowledge, but no prior experience with automation tools is required.
Outline
1. Introduction (5 min)

Why automate?
My FreeBSD lab & laptop setup overview.

1. Building My FreeBSD Lab with Ansible (15 min)

   Bootstrapping a new system.
   Automating system installation & package setup.
   Adding a second laptop with just SSH access.

2. Maintaining & Scaling with Salt (15 min)

   Managing configs, packages, and updates.
   Enforcing system state across multiple machines.
   How I maintain consistency between multiple devices.

3. Lessons Learned & Challenges (5 min)

   Why this method works well for FreeBSD.
   Troubleshooting automation quirks.

4. Q&A (5 min)
   What Attendees Will Learn

   How to use Ansible to set up FreeBSD machines quickly.
   How Salt makes long-term configuration management effortless.
   How to automate multiple FreeBSD machines with minimal manual work.