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.