On October 14, 2025, ATIX AG hosted the annual orcharhino Summit at Le Méridien Munich for the orcharhino community. The one-day event brought together automation specialists and open-source experts to exchange ideas, explore new developments, and shape the future of infrastructure automation.
Throughout the day, participants gained deep insights into orcharhino’s roadmap, customer success stories, and real-world applications — all highlighting how automation is transforming IT operations at every scale.
We opened the day with a warm welcome from our CEO, Mark Hlawatschek, who thanked our community for their continued trust and collaboration before introducing the day’s agenda.
Review & Outlook
This was followed by Kai Dupke, Principal Product Manager at ATIX AG, who presented the Review & Outlook, summarizing the key milestones of the past year – including six major releases from version 6.11 to 7.5 with improvements such as Structured APT and enhanced security and compliance features.
Looking ahead, Kai shared what’s next for orcharhino: support for SLES 16 and EL 10, expanded lifecycle management, and new developments around Ansible Director, containerization, and resource management. orcharhino continues to evolve as the vendor-independent platform for automated, secure, and scalable infrastructure management.
Real-World Experience: Customer Success Stories
In the session “Customer Story,” Rainer Schilling from Cordes & Graefe KG showed how his team uses orcharhino to efficiently manage large-scale infrastructures. The company is seeing continuous growth in its Linux server landscape – while operating with a small admin team. This increasing workload can only be handled through consistent automation and the use of powerful tools like orcharhino, clearly demonstrating how technology and process discipline create tangible business results.
His presentation also highlighted how automation with orcharhino ensures consistency, compliance, and transparency across distributed environments.
Developer-Centric Innovation
In “Development Support to Go: Dev-Notebooks Managed by orcharhino,” Marius Wigger and Malte Vesper from ROSENxt presented a creative use of orcharhino beyond traditional data centers. They showed how their team provisions, patches, and secures developer laptops using orcharhino – demonstrating that automation can make even local development environments more efficient.
Special Customer Use Cases
Jonas Trüstedt, Principal IT Consultant at ATIX AG, presented a series of practical examples from the field that highlighted the versatility of orcharhino:
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Automatic patching: Fully automated monthly patch cycles with recurring jobs and dynamic host collections.
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Air-gapped environments: Secure operations without internet access using ISO-based installations and incremental content synchronization.
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Multi-content views (tech preview): Assigning multiple content views to individual hosts for greater flexibility in complex release cycles.
Jonas showed how close collaboration with customers continues to inspire new features and drive product development forward.
Jonas showed how close collaboration with customers continues to inspire new features and drive product development forward.
Theo Schmidt from Max Bögl shared an impressive story of transformation in his session “Open Source Power: Automated Migration from SLES12 to SLES15 with orcharhino.”
He demonstrated how the team at Max Bögl used orcharhino’s automation capabilities to perform a seamless large-scale operating system migration – with less manual effort, consistent quality, and minimal downtime.
Theo’s presentation clearly illustrated the strength of open-source collaboration and how automation turns complex upgrades into predictable, repeatable processes.
Engineering in Action
Bernhard Suttner, Team Lead Engineering at ATIX AG, offered a look behind the scenes in his session “Engineering in Action.” He presented current work and upcoming innovations for orcharhino 7.6, including Flatpak management in the UI, alternate content sources for Debian, and a new host overview page.
Bernhard also introduced the integration of OpenTofu, which simplifies provisioning across different compute platforms, and the Ansible Director, which enhances lifecycle management for Ansible roles and collections sourced from Ansible Galaxy or Git.
He concluded his talk with an outlook on 2026, including planned extensions for compute resources and even more powerful Ansible workflows.
Expert Roundtable Discussions
In the afternoon, the Summit became a space for open exchange during the Expert Roundtable Discussions. Each round focused on a key topic in automation, linking user experience with the latest technical insights from the ATIX team.
At Kai Dupke’s table, “Shaping the Future,” participants shared their perspectives on where orcharhino should evolve next – from usability improvements to new management concepts and integrations.
Martin Spießl led the discussion on Security and Compliance, addressing how orcharhino can support the implementation and assurance of standards such as BSI, CIS, and NIST 800-53. Many shared their experiences using orcharhino’s OpenSCAP integration to automate compliance checks and remediations and to tailor policies to their own environments.
In Jan Bundesmann’s session on Automation at Scale, participants discussed how Ansible workflows within orcharhino are evolving – from lifecycle management to Git-based synchronization and structured content delivery.
Fabrice Brimioulle moderated the discussion on Resource Management, which focused on the Resource Quota Plugin, currently available as a tech preview. Participants provided valuable feedback on quota types, reporting requirements, and use cases such as temporary overrides during migrations.
In Bernhard Suttner’s group, the focus was on the future integration of new compute resources and virtualization platforms – especially the potential of OpenTofu to extend support for additional hypervisors and cloud platforms.
Finally, Jonas Trüstedt hosted the Ask Me Anything round, offering an open space for technical questions – from patch automation to complex content setups – and fostering lively peer-to-peer exchange.
These discussions captured the essence of the orcharhino Summit: turning feedback into direction, challenges into ideas, and ideas into features that drive the entire ecosystem forward.
Outlook
The Summit concluded with a summary of the results from the roundtable discussions and informal networking, as conversations between participants and the ATIX team continued into the evening. The energy and enthusiasm of the day reflected the strength of a community united by a shared goal: making automation more open, efficient, and sustainable.
“Seeing our community come together at the orcharhino Summit shows what collaboration can truly achieve. The conversations, ideas, and experiences shared here flow directly into the continued development of orcharhino – and make real automation success possible.”
— Mark Hlawatschek, CEO of ATIX AG
