Kent Inge Fagerland Simonsen
Kent Inge has been working with Software Engineering since 2005. In that time, he has contributed to numerous projects and systems as well as publishing several academic and opinion pieces on various topics in Software Engineering. Recently he has become interested the challenges that have become ever more evident around sovereign and resilient IT infrastructures.
He has at the same time been lucky enough to be able to meet both the BSD community ant its software. This has lead him to suspect that BSD and its community can be a potent tool to help achieve the goals of sovereign robust an resilient IT infrastructure.
Session
IT infrastructure is becoming ever more complex. To serve a simple modern web application we need orchestrators, containers, server side renderers and a bunch of 3. party tools and services. And this is in addition to the slew of dependencies it takes to get the application itself to run. An alternative approach might be to use a good old-fashioned web server to serve web pages, javascript and resources to a browser.
In this talk I will present my, a BSD noob, experiences deploying a SPA web application directly on an OpenBSD vm using only the built-in web server (httpd) and other built-in tools without any docker, NodeJS or any other fancy dependencies. I will talk about meeting unknown commands, figuring out how to configure httpd and TLS using somewhat outdated descriptions and noticing interesting surprises in the logs.
Besides being a fun little exercise, this is also about control of our systems. As we build systems with ever more layers of indirection we also increase risk for various supply chain vulnerabilities as well as not really understanding our systems. This talk also aims to show that it is possible to serve modern applications based on an understandable stack.