AlmaLinux Announces First Round of Speakers for Next Month’s Vancouver Event

FORT MYERS, FL, UNITED STATES, July 8, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The AlmaLinux OS Foundation, the nonprofit organization that stewards the forever-free, community-owned and governed, open-source enterprise Linux operating system AlmaLinux OS, today announced the first set of speakers and a partial program schedule for AlmaLinux Day: Vancouver, taking place August 9, 2025 at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

The one-day event is set to bring together open source enthusiasts, sysadmins, developers, DevOps engineers and IT leaders to discuss numerous topics, including AlmaLinux's proven stability in high-availability scenarios, its seamless migration path from CentOS, and the comprehensive ecosystem and support that makes it ideal for containerized and cloud deployments.

“Every AlmaLinux Day that we host is in reaction to a request from the community, and AlmaLinux Day: Vancouver is for the VFX community,” said benny Vasquez, chair of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation. “We’re pleased to have arranged it next to SIGGRAPH, a massive annual VFX event, and are so excited to spend the whole week with our VFX friends.”

Featured speakers include:

-- Stephen Winters (Beyond the OS: A Strategic Playbook for Large-Scale Linux Migrations with AlmaLinux) Transitioning large businesses and media and entertainment studios to a new operating system like AlmaLinux is a comprehensive journey that goes beyond the OS itself. This session offers a strategic guide for mastering these significant migrations, drawing from real-world experiences. We'll dissect the entire process, from initial assessment and planning to pilot programs and full-scale deployment. Whether you're contemplating a partial shift or a full embrace of open-source solutions, this talk will equip you with practical guidance, addressing both the technical roadmap and the vital human element, to successfully transition your organization to AlmaLinux.

-- Neal Gompa (Powerfully pushing pixels easily!) It's no secret that leveraging NVIDIA hardware is one of the most difficult things to do on Linux, stymied by complex processes to use and enable all the functionality of the hardware. With AlmaLinux, this is no longer the case. This session discusses the efforts done to simplify the experience for enabling the NVIDIA driver and the implications for users with NVIDIA hardware.

-- David Duncan (Custom AlmaLinux Desktop Environments Using Kiwi, and the EC2 Image Builder for custom builds) This session demonstrates building custom AlmaLinux desktop environments using Kiwi and EC2 Image Builder while maintaining Enterprise Linux compatibility. We'll explore component-based builds where AlmaLinux support components could be assigned through EC2 Image Builder, creating cloud-optimized images similar to those built for AWS Workspaces. Attendees will learn hybrid image building workflows, discover how to leverage both Kiwi's flexibility and EC2 Image Builder's component system, and understand deployment strategies for enterprise requirements. It includes live demonstrations of building tailored desktop configurations using both toolchains for diverse organizational needs.

-- Eric Hendricks (No Downtime, No Compromise: AlmaLinux for Always-On VFX Pipelines) VFX can’t sleep — and neither can your systems. Join Eric "the IT Guy" Hendricks as he walks through how AlmaLinux, paired with live patching via KernelCare, can keep your VFX pipelines secure and stable without interrupting rendering, editing, or creative flow. Whether you're running a boutique studio or a large render farm, you’ll learn how to build Linux-based systems that stay compliant, patched, and performant — no reboot required.

-- Syed Usman Ahmad (The Perfect Open Source Toolkit for Container Monitoring) Containers are everywhere, whether you run them locally for testing or on a production server, there is always a need to find its logs, metrics to know how much resources are being consumed and whether it is stable or not. In this talk, we will demonstrate an example of how to monitor your Docker Containers using Prometheus and cAdvisor and view the metrics in Grafana to get better observability. It will be an introduction to Open Source tools, integration and also an excellent opportunity to learn more about the advanced features, including troubleshooting & debugging. Join us to learn more about Grafana, community contributions and share your feedback and suggestions!

-- Chris Taylor (Security Requirements for Linux Workstations) ISO, NIST, and other security frameworks impose a bunch of security requirements that impact how you configure and deploy endpoints. In this presentation we will attempt to distill all of those requirements into a usable summary to help you make sure your production deployments meet all the security best practices, compliance requirements, and generally good ideas.

Any questions regarding the event can be emailed to aldv@almalinux.org.

About AlmaLinux OS
AlmaLinux OS is an open source, community-governed, and forever-free enterprise Linux distribution focused on long-term stability and delivering a robust production-grade platform. Distributed from a network of over 400 mirrors across six continents, AlmaLinux is compatible with RHEL(r) and pre-Stream CentOS, and powers projects for governments, the defense sector, and scientific research institutions as well as numerous global business sectors and the web hosting industry. Adopted by some of today’s foremost open source ecosystem projects such as VMware, GitLab and Tenable, it’s available on all major public cloud platforms including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle OCI. The AlmaLinux OS Foundation is a 501(c)(6) non-profit entity created as the central collaboration point for everything to do with AlmaLinux and for the benefit of the AlmaLinux OS community. Visit www.almalinux.org.

AlmaLinux Contact:
hello@almalinux.org

Matthew Zintel
Zintel Public Relations
matthew.zintel@zintelpr.com