Linuxfabrik turned ten on 2026-10-28. Time to look back: on four major releases of Linuxfabrik, a datacenter of our own that we later took down again, and a kitchen we had to wait almost ten years for.
I had the idea for Linuxfabrik in June 2016, classically over an after-work beer. The plan was modest: found the company on 1 January 2017 and run it on the side for a while. It turned out a little differently. In October 2016 the first version of the website went online, on 28 October Linuxfabrik GmbH was founded, and in November the very first quote went out.
The first two orders came shortly after, both on the same day, one of them an emergency job without any quote, passed on to us through three corners of our personal network. That is exactly how Linuxfabrik works to this day: a large share of our customers come to us through recommendations.
In 2016 the two of us found Linuxfabrik and move into a 40 square metre office.
2017 brings the first service and support contracts.
In 2018 we moved into our own datacenter, offering managed hosting on our own Supermicro hardware with CentOS, oVirt and GlusterFS. The team grew, and so did the customer base.
In 2019 we were gold sponsor of the Icinga Camp Zurich at the Letzigrund stadium.
In 2020 we redeveloped our Icinga checks from scratch, and the Open Source Admin Handbook went online.
In 2021 our article "Linux from Scratch" made it onto the cover of the American Linux magazine. We gave notice on our own datacenter and decided to move to Swiss cloud providers.
In 2022 we decided to host all of our open source projects on GitHub. Shortly afterwards the Monitoring Plugins received their first external pull request, and with LFOps we published our Ansible collection there as well, which we use today to set up and run practically every server.
In 2023 we became, among other things, a Red Hat Advanced Partner, a Graylog partner and an OpenSearch partner. Icinga named us an "Icinga Community Hero", and we were on stage as speakers at the Icinga Camp in Berlin and at the Ansible meetups in Zurich.
In 2025 we launched our Icinga demo instance to play around and try things out, as well as ChecklistFabrik for standardized checklists in the team. At the end of the year we moved into a new office in the same building, and a little later we finally even had a kitchen of our own. Priorities. 😉
In 2026 we published FirewallFabrik and our central package repository, as usual the result of our daily work on datacenters, Linux servers and open source applications.
Today we stand at more than 320 Monitoring Plugins and more than 170 Ansible roles for our broad portfolio of supported Linux operating systems and open source applications, and even more for transparency and security.
Ten years of Linuxfabrik only exist because you trust us with your systems, recommend us and keep challenging us with your requirements. A large part of our open source software came about exactly this way: from a concrete problem at a customer that we solve properly, maintain continuously and publish for everyone.
We look forward to the next ten years, with you. 🎉
Want to know what we can do for you? Have a look at our Managed Hosting and our Service & Support plans and get in touch.
