This keynote is part history lesson and part rallying cry. Proprietary OSes and services aren't dead, they just morphed into the cloud. By remembering why Linux was important in the age of Solaris, we can apply those lessons to cloud services before their proprietary APIs and vendor lock-in risk undoing the freedom, open standards, and overall progress our community has made over the last 20 years.

Netflix has built a CDN to distribute streaming media through most of the world. The content caches run a lightly customized version of the FreeBSD operating system. This presentation will describe how Netflix uses FreeBSD, and the benefits to both FreeBSD and Netflix.

In this paper we have presented Charon, a tool for provision- ing and deployment of networks of machines from declarative specifications. It has several important properties, such as reproducibility, integration of provisioning and deployment, and abstraction over cloud backends. In future work, we intend to improve management of mutable state, e.g., to allow migration of machines between cloud backends or regions.

About a year ago the PostgreSQL community discovered that fsync (on Linux and some BSD systems) may not work the way we always thought it is, with possibly disastrous consequences for data durability/consistency (which is something the PostgreSQL community really values).