The End of the General Purpose Operating System

Talk for the London Devops meetup. Lots of speculation, talk of economic impact of technology advancement and big ideas. Hypervisors, containers, unikernels, and other future operating system trends.

Transcript

1. The End of the General
   Purpose Operating System
   Puppet Labs
   Gareth Rushgrove
   And other stories of the future
   

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2. @garethr
   

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3. Gareth Rushgrove
   

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4. Gareth Rushgrove
   

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5. This talk
   

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6. What server operating systems
   are you running?
   Gareth Rushgrove
   

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7. Gareth Rushgrove
   I’m guessing most people said:
   

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8. Gareth Rushgrove
   Someone will try and be smart and say:
   

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9. Gareth Rushgrove
   And someone will hide the fact they’re running:
   

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10. The future is already here
    — it's just not very evenly
    distributed.
    Gareth Rushgrove
    William Gibson
    

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11. The hypervisor of containers
    The race to PID 1
    Your container operating system
    The rise of the Unikernels
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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12. Some problems
    

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13. Operating systems are really big,
    both on disk and in memory
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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14. Operating systems take a long
    time to boot, and we’re booting
    them more often
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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15. Operating systems have a lot of
    moving parts that need managing
    and securing
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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16. Our workloads are increasingly
    single purpose, rather than
    general purpose
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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17. If my web application server is
    talking to a printer something has
    gone horribly wrong*
    Gareth Rushgrove
    *Or you work for Moo. Hi nice Moo people.
    

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18. The hypervisor of
    containers
    

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19. Gareth Rushgrove
    

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20. Gareth Rushgrove
    Xen, ESX and HyperV are
    Type 1 hypervisors
    

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21. Challengers for the
    hypervisor of containers
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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22. Coming from the operating
    system up
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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23. Gareth Rushgrove
    From RedHat, uses
    RPM-OSTree under the
    hood
    

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24. Gareth Rushgrove
    Built-in service-discovery
    and clustering support
    

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25. Gareth Rushgrove
    Snappy from Ubuntu,
    basically replaces apt-get
    with docker
    

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26. Gareth Rushgrove
    Docker running on
    Docker running as PID 1
    

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27. Common themes
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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28. Cluster native
    Read-only file systems
    Atomic changes
    Integrated with Docker
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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29. Don’t count out…
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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30. Gareth Rushgrove
    VMware are already the
    hypervisor of virtual
    machines
    

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31. Gareth Rushgrove
    Don’t forget the
    Microsoft ecosystem, with
    Docker support incoming
    

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32. Gareth Rushgrove
    Subplot - the user
    interface to the hypervisor
    of containers
    

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33. Coming from the user
    interface down
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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34. The importance of APIs
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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35. Gareth Rushgrove
    The Kubernetes API is
    based on years of
    experience at Google
    

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36. Gareth Rushgrove
    Another Google Borg
    inspired project. Aurora is
    used heavily at Twitter
    

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37. Gareth Rushgrove
    Don’t count out the
    Platform as a Service
    folks just yet
    

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38. Gareth Rushgrove
    Amazon has launched a
    beta of AWS Elastic
    Cloud Service
    

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39. Gareth Rushgrove
    And with Swarm, Docker
    want to own this user
    interface too
    

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40. The race to PID 1
    

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41. Gareth Rushgrove
    Meanwhile, at a different
    part of the stack…
    

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42. Gareth Rushgrove
    Not the real Systemd logo
    

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43. Gareth Rushgrove
    

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44. Gareth Rushgrove
    SystemD coming from the
    init system up
    

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45. Gareth Rushgrove
    Docker coming from the
    user interface down
    

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46. Gareth Rushgrove
    SystemD already contains
    container functionality
    (systemd-nspawn)
    

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47. Gareth Rushgrove
    Both want to own
    supervision of processes
    

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48. Gareth Rushgrove
    Expect more overlap, and
    (separate) ecosystems of
    tools to emerge
    

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49. The operating
    system inside a
    container
    

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50. What’s wrong with running
    a full distro in a container?
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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51. Gareth Rushgrove
    ~ » docker images
    REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED VIRTUAL SIZE
    garethr/mirageapp latest e524b7c2faaa 2 weeks ago 2.402 MB
    swarm latest 92d78d321ff2 2 weeks ago 7.19 MB
    garethr/realapp latest 0fc02241d533 5 weeks ago 442.5 MB
    ubuntu latest b39b81afc8ca 6 weeks ago 188.3 MB
    ubuntu trusty b39b81afc8ca 6 weeks ago 188.3 MB
    jeanblanchard/busybox-java latest 906dc9067a40 5 weeks ago 160.2 MB
    busybox latest 4986bf8c1536 8 weeks ago 2.433 MB
    scratch latest 511136ea3c5a 20 months ago 0 B
    

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52. A base ubuntu container
    has 184 packages
    installed
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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53. Just a few apt-get
    commands will see that
    increase to 302 packages
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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54. That’s a lot of things to
    track inside what’s meant
    to be a black box
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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55. Minimal linux distros
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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56. Gareth Rushgrove
    BusyBox
    

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57. Scratch images
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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58. Lots of opportunities here
    for interesting tools
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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59. The rise of the
    unikernels
    

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60. Gareth Rushgrove
    Hypervisors are actually
    awesome
    

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61. Gareth Rushgrove
    Strong isolation
    guarantees, often
    enforced in hardware
    

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62. Gareth Rushgrove
    Mature tooling and
    experienced people
    

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63. Gareth Rushgrove
    What is a unikernel?
    

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64. Gareth Rushgrove
    A library to build your own
    operating system
    

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65. Gareth Rushgrove
    No userspace
    

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66. Gareth Rushgrove
    You application is
    compiled into a kernel
    

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67. Gareth Rushgrove
    Operating system
    Hypervisor
    Hardware
    Runtime
    Application
    Virtual machines
    

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68. Gareth Rushgrove
    Operating system
    Hypervisor
    Hardware
    Container
    Operating system
    Runtime
    Application
    Containers
    

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69. Gareth Rushgrove
    Unikernel
    Hypervisor
    Hardware
    Unikernel
    

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70. Gareth Rushgrove
    Drastically smaller
    surface area for attack
    

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71. Gareth Rushgrove
    Very fast to boot, but with
    strong isolation
    guarantees
    

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72. Gareth Rushgrove
    

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73. Gareth Rushgrove
    Warning: research
    projects ahead
    

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74. Gareth Rushgrove
    

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75. Gareth Rushgrove
    MirageOS
    

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76. Gareth Rushgrove
    Erlang on Xen
    

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77. Conclusions
    

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78. Understanding technology
    change in the large means
    understanding the
    economics of software
    companies
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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79. Don’t expect all this to
    replace what we have now,
    but to run alongside it
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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80. Many small devices and the
    internet of things
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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81. Enterprise App Stores
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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82. Evolution and revolution
    happen at the same time
    Gareth Rushgrove
    

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83. Times they are a-changin
    Gareth Rushgrove
    Bob Dylan
    

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84. Questions?
    And thanks for listening
    

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