We sent our System Administrator Julian De Marchi to the 2015 Linux Conference in Aukland which he has turned into a series of blogs to keep everyone up to date with what is going on in the world of linux.

Part 1:

LCA this year was held in the New Zealand city of Auckland. A great CBD in a very hilly terrain on the bay. This presented a fun challenge walking around the city, I don't think there was ever a flat piece of ground. The conference was located at the University of Auckland in the school of business. There were 2 keynote speakers who spoke on Tuesday (view video) and Wednesday (view video). On Thursday (view video) there were 3 people speaking 15 mins each on their chosen subject. Friday[4] presented a Q&A session with Linus Torvalds, Andrew Tridge, Bdale Garbee and Rusty Russel. All the available videos from the conference are on the Linux 2015 youtube channel.

Linux Conf operates mini confs on the first two days. The first mini conf I attended was on the Monday and it was Clouds, Containers, and Orchestration. The day was very full on with 10, 35 min talks covering a variety of subjects. Most of the talks focused on containers, management of containers and container scheduling and clustering. The stand out talks from the day were, Cloud Herding: Delivering Services Across Multiple Environments, Containers and PCP (Performance Co-Pilot) and Building a PaaS with Docker Kubernetes and Hard Work. This is where the theme for a lot of the technical talks came to light, Docker and microservices. I'll expand on this. Ever since Docker took the limelight last year the idea of a linux server has changed dramatically. The last talk which was based on a product called Atomic really cemented this position. So it's like this.

Instead of viewing a linux system in the traditional sense, which is a server OS and many services running on it to provide the service needed. The new way of thinking is install the bare minimal to run a system. I really mean the bare minimum, no traceroute, no ip commands, just enough binaries to run the OS and the container system. The idea here is, if you want any additional software you install it via a container. Want traceroute, fire up a container with the binary. If you want the system to send mail, same theory, install a container which does so. As a traditional sysadmin this concept was hard to take in. As these projects mature this concept will start to be seen more and with the big names pushing it I won't be surprised if we see it mainstream. Personally I have my doubts, but I'll walk into this with an open mind. This is how the buzzword microservices came to fruition.