Hello everyone, and welcome to the ride!
Overlook InfraTech Announce
Your interest in what we’re building at Overlook InfraTech is truly heartening. You may or may not have been following the news, but we did have to take an unexpected small detour – instead of focusing on building product, we had to take some time to focus on facilitating a truly open source Puppet fork and then supporting and nurturing the project into self-sustainability.
🔔 tl;dr:
The OpenVox project is running smoothly and we’d love for you to get involved.
Our first support plans are available and we focus on sustainable upstream ecosystem fixes rather than giving you quick and dirty easy mitigations. We even throw in regular system health checks so we can catch problems before they become problems.
We’re nearly to that point now, and we’re starting to pivot back to our original roadmap. This means that we’re not quite ready to talk about what we’re building, but we couldn’t wait any longer to brag a little bit about OpenVox. A few days after Perforce sequestered the Puppet source code and stopped building packages, we’d released rebuilt packages. Since then, we’ve been working hard on improving the build pipeline, creating a full-fledged fork, and getting it adopted by the Vox Pupuli community.
Because the build pipeline runs directly in GitHub Actions instead of complex and bespoke private infrastructure, we’re now at the point where anyone can see how the packages are built and published. Even more so, anyone can contribute improvements or support for new platforms, as long as there’s a container image for it. This means that if you’re a big fan of the Raspberry Pi, you could go add first-party platform support for it right now using this container image!
And the best part is that once you understand it, the pipeline is so much simpler that adding a new platform often takes only a few minutes. We’re already supporting major distro pre-releases and publishing ARM builds for everything, instead of leaving the community waiting two years after a release because it didn’t happen to be a high business priority at the time.
Now one of the big blockers for open source adoption amongst is the lack of support and indemnification. This is why I’m excited to announce that the first commercial offerings from Overlook InfraTech are a migration package and both standard and premium support plans for the OpenVox ecosystem.
Even better, our support plans are community oriented, solutions focused ecosystem support plans, not just product support. This means that if you run into a problem with a Vox Pupuli or other third party module, we won’t just diagnose the problem and offer suggestions, but we’ll actually fix the upstream module and work with the author to help get improvements published. This keeps your own codebase significantly more manageable, even when you have employee turnover.
The best way to prevent problems is to proactively catch them before they become problems. Each of our plans comes with free regular system health checks and we help you resolve issues before they become critical. Like your doctor always says, preventative medicine is the best kind!
Drop us a line and see how we can help you. We’re looking forward to working together, and we’ll keep you posted about our product updates!
Thanks much!
– binford2k