Ottawa Linux Symposium, Day #1

Day #1 at OLS started off nicesly with Jonathan Corbet and his "State of the Linux kernel" talk. I just recently also saw this talk given at the Linux collaboration Summit. Jonathan updated the slides a bit but also included pointers to sessions related to key technologies making their way into the Linux kernel.

I next sat in on Paul Menage's talk on containers. While Paul is clearly a sharp guy, unfortunately, the big picture of his talk and goals weren't super clear in his talk. Paul has the leading implementation for something called containers, but somewhat unfortunately at the momemt, there are several things known as containers. He made an attempt to show that he was integrated with all of them by the end of his talk, although, I think the level of integration with some of them is pretty weak. I think the code and paper are probably better referencdes than his slides & talk.

The next session I attended was near and dear to my heart - I'm a big fan of appliances as the next wave of deployable solutions. However the work that David Lutterkort in Red Hat's Emerging Technologies group was doing was new to me. Of course, being on the program committee, I did have *some* preview of his high level goals, but the tools, such as puppet, that he's working on where completely new to me. He also mentioned Kronolith which I have yet to research. But the talk was good and the technologies are definitely cool for rapid deployments, pre-tested configurations, and easy of management for systems administrators deploying
similar workloads on lots of similar machines.

More to come...