Fun with FreeBSD: Make Your Own Mini-Cloud
10-23, 11:10–11:40 (US/Eastern), Side Room

What do you do when you have one nice PC sitting around but you really need to hack on a multi-node Kubernetes cluster? Build one by installing FreeBSD and using its native bhyve virtualization platform.


The FreeBSD operating system is not yet a first-class citizen in the cloud native ecosystem, but that does not mean it cannot have a role. One example of how FreeBSD can currently play along is by using its native bhyve virtualization to host a Kubernetes cluster on Linux virtual machines.

FreeBSD is a stable, elegant, and richly-featured operating system. Bhyve virtualization, built into the kernel, makes it very simple to create and run virtual machines on modern compatible CPUs and network those VMs. This ability makes it a great platform for creating multi-node Linux-based Kubernetes clusters for fun and profit.

This talk will briefly cover how amazing FreeBSD is and why you would want to use it. Then it will get down to basics of what it takes to create a few Linux VMs and join them into a full Kubernetes cluster.

Karen likes cats and not much else. She has a long history of smacking computers to get them to work. She misses getting paid to hack on FreeBSD.

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