FreeBSD provides powerful building blocks for modern infrastructure: Bhyve for virtual machines, Jails for containers, ZFS for storage, and PF for networking. What it has traditionally lacked is a unified way to manage these components, especially across multiple machines.
Sylve is an open-source infrastructure management platform built specifically for FreeBSD, with development supported in part by the FreeBSD Foundation.
In this talk, I'll introduce Sylve, explore its architecture, and demonstrate how it brings virtualization, containers, storage, networking, backups, and clustering together through a unified interface.
I'll also share some of the engineering challenges encountered along the way, from integrating FreeBSD's native technologies to building distributed cluster coordination using Raft, secure inter-node communication, and workload replication.
Finally, I'll discuss how working on Sylve has led to contributions upstream in FreeBSD, what comes next for the project, and how the community can get involved.