[2024] Building an Appliance - Allan Jude

Examining the building blocks provided by FreeBSD to build physical or virtual/cloud appliances. * Installation and image generation * Secure Boot and Veriexec * Upgrade mechanism (fail-safe upgrades, offline upgrades, seemless rollback) * Custom security policies with Mandatory Access Controls * PKI and signing * Package management * Immutability and "factory reset" * Deployment and automation * Best practices for maintain a fork of FreeBSD (and/or OpenZFS) FreeBSD provides a very powerful base for building appliances, and can allow a vendor to bring a product to market very quickly. However there are many lessons that can be shared from those that have come before to avoid common pitfalls, and ensure the long term sustainability of a product.