Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2020

Automatically updating and adjusting configuration files, especially if the admin made already changes to them, is not that easy and still one of the not solved problems under Linux. At the same time, more and more Linux Distributions provide variants with "Atomic Updates", which means either all updates are fully applied without error, or none. This makes updating configuration files even harder. In this talk I will explain the current problems, generic solutions for this, what various distributions choose to solve it and how we are planing to solve it.

There's many different approaches to building a linux distribution. Should we aim to have one distro to rule them all? Or should we have a specialized distro for each need? When does it make sense to go for one or the other? When running software on Kubernetes, does the distro running on the nodes make a difference? What about the distros in the containers? Marga has been building linux distributions for over 15 years. She started as a volunteer in the Debian project, continued as an engineer at Google, building the operating system used by other Google engineers. Currently, she is working on Flatcar Container Linux, Kinvolk's container optimized OS. This talk will build upon her experience to shed light on the advantages and disadvantages of having general purpose distributions vs narrow focus ones. Focusing in particular on the manageability and security implications at scale for cloud native applications. It will touch upon the redefined boundaries between the software running on the base OS and the containers, how to keep everything up to date, and how to stay sane in our current containerized world.