We are excited to announce the Operations Devroom, a new track at FOSDEM 2027 for SREs, DevOps & SecOps Engineers, Incident Responders, and anyone who keeps the lights on! This devroom complements established tracks that excel at showcasing how open-source technology works by creating a dedicated space to discuss how it actually survives in production. We aim to build a "stories from the machine room" anthology, capturing the messy, real-world reality of operating these systems day-to-day. Whether you are a solo administrator creatively managing a small deployment or part of a team pushing software to its limits in complex environments, we want to hear how you keep your systems standing! ## Content Guidelines We invite talks that share real-world experiences operating systems at any scale, along with hard-earned lessons and practical recommendations. Our goal is to showcase the truth of running open-source infrastructure in production. Key topics: - **Real-World Stories:** Post-mortems of outages and security incidents - how you recovered, adapted, and what you learned. - **Scaling Challenges:** Practical lessons from growing a system from a single server to hundreds or thousands. - **Small Scale, Big Impact:** Creative solutions for managing critical infrastructure with limited budgets or small teams. - **Maintainability & Security:** Techniques for building systems that are easy to operate, debug, harden, and upgrade over time. - **Tooling & Workflows:** How you use (or abuse) open-source tools to solve operational headaches, focusing on the workflow rather than just the tool itself. ## Practical Info - **Language:** All talks must be delivered in English. - **Duration:** The standard format is a 20-minute talk followed by a 5-minute Q&A (25 minutes total), though we may allocate longer slots for topics of special interest. ## Submission Details - **Submission Deadline:** Friday, November 27th - **Acceptance Notifications:** Monday, December 7th Please submit your proposals at https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2027/cfp - make sure to select the **Operations** track from the list! By submitting, you agree to adhere to the FOSDEM Code of Conduct and have your talk recorded and published under the CC-BY license. ## Get in Touch If you have questions about the track, want to discuss your idea for a talk, or just want to say hello, please reach out to us: - **Giorgio:** me@grg.pw - **Gianluca:** gianluca.varisco@gmail.com We can’t wait to read your submissions and learn how you keep the lights on - and the pagers quiet! See you in Brussels in January! Giorgio & Gianluca