Pierre Emeriaud
A great enthusiast of high-pressure environments - whether diving 60 meters underwater or securing IP/MPLS networks, Pierre discovered OpenBSD while looking to replace Solaris on old dumpster-dived Sparc64 hardware. Today, he is an IP/MPLS network security engineer, currently focusing on leveraging FreeBSD firewalls to protect critical management networks. In his spare time, he is also a ham radio operator and runs his own ISP powered by OpenBSD routers.
Session
Developing and maintaining a robust software appliance requires modern tools and reliable processes. In this presentation, we will share our experience building PFWall, a software firewall appliance built entirely on FreeBSD at Orange.
We will detail our development pipeline, which leverages poudriere-image to generate reproducible, secure, and custom system images. We will demonstrate how our Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach, orchestrated by GitLab-CI and Ansible, allows us to automate the entire lifecycle, from a code commit to the final image production and appliance configuration.
Finally, we will discuss our support model for an open-source product and how we interact with the FreeBSD community as a corporate entity. We will cover our process for reporting bugs and contributing to the ecosystem that makes our project possible.