Hi all, TL;DR: we need to talk about keeping DebOps the awesome and healthy project that it is today, for many years to come. Please voice any concerns you may have. Also, some battle history, cuz' Maciej is a sucker for war stories. Let me start off this lengthy email by congratulating everyone involved in this project with the sheer progress that we made since DebOps 0.8.1, which is the first DebOps release I got to use. In production mind you, which may or may not have pressed Maciej to pull forward his 1.0.0 release [1]. There has been even more progress since genesis [2] (is that where the 'ginas' name came from, Maciej?). I had just started my System and Network Engineering education at the AUAS and landed my first job as a Debian (or initially, Ubuntu) system administrator at Bits of Freedom. It would have been good to know a thing or two about Ansible and IT automation back then. But I got an O'Reilly book on that subject a few months into the job, so that was nice. After some time I had been using Ansible for about half a year at Bits of Freedom, but wrote all playbooks from scratch. They weren't exactly the best quality and I still felt like I was working hard, not smart. I had trouble reusing my own roles and had difficulty solving some automation problems which resulted in me still doing a lot of manual sysadmin work. This of course felt more like putting out fires instead of real progress. I thought that Docker could save me, but no, that only made it worse because now I still had the exact same automation problems, but with the added complexity of container lifecycle management. Then, somewhere at the end of february (or beginning of march) 2019, I decided to give this "data center in a box" thingy a try. I had just landed my second sysadmin job at CipherMail, where the previous admin had been doing everything by hand. Long story short, I turned off the very last legacy, hand-managed VM last week. We now run ~45 servers across multiple data center locations and cloud providers. There are high availability setups in there, like our DNS, LDAP, RADIUS, mail and web clusters. We have firewalls, load balancers, DNSSEC, Let's Encrypt and IPv6 everywhere. Our office wifi has WPA2 Enterprise with EAP-TTLS for authentication against our LDAP database. Our VPN setup is incredibly easy to enroll for new users and allows login with LDAP username, password and Yubikey OTP. Simply removing a user from our LDAP database immediately revokes their access to almost every IT system we have. Everything is all meticulously monitored with Icinga and its agents. Security patching takes minutes instead of hours. And the best thing? It is *all* automated. And that leaves me with lots of time to automate even more, like our continuous integration setup and an upcoming cloud service. I actually have the time to visit customers on-site now, which happened last week for the first time and was really inspiring to me! I truly feel like I am in full control of the whole IT infrastructure at my place of work, which is something that I had definitely not felt before. That data center in a box thingy, combined with some additional roles I wrote, has been a major game changer for me. It became the only open source project that I regularly contribute to, although I don't put nearly as much time in it as I would want. The small but capable community around it is just great. I feel indebted to many of you, especially to Maciej. Which is why I never want this adventure to end. Honestly, even the thought of the possibility of this great project ceasing to exist makes me sweat. I know that DebOps has brought a lot of joy to many system administrators and homelab hobbyists out there. CipherMail has also benefited greatly from the steady development over the last few years. Of course there won't be an immediate operational or security issue for us if all development would cease, but our automation progress would most certainly be heavily impacted by it. So consider this a check-in round. What I would like is an honest 'temperature' reading of all contributors. Not your actual temperature (although it would be nice to hear that you're COVID-free), but more how you currently see the future of DebOps and your involvement. Is there anything you would like to see improved? And, even more important but not as pleasant to discuss, what would happen if you were to cease spending time on DebOps due to other priorities or unforeseen circumstances? Do you feel like the project is (heavily) dependent on you? Is your involvement causing you any sort of stress? Lastly I'd like to lend a proverbial ear to any suggestion or comment on this email. I want to know if I can do something more to ensure the continued success of this project. I am certainly able to arrange things like publicity and sponsoring of infrastructural services, and will probably be able to organize a meetup for all of us once these tougher times are behind us. Or maybe we should do regular online meetups. Let me know what you think. My employer and I both recognize the importance of our shared adventure. Yours truly, and truly yours, Imre [1] https://lists.debops.org/hyperkitty/list/debops-users@lists.debops.org/me... [2] https://github.com/debops/debops/commit/a214ab2c2f1f28d072456204477bd040a...