Building an Appliance - Allan Jude - EuroBSDCon 2024

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.