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
2. @garethr
3. Gareth Rushgrove
4. Gareth Rushgrove
5. This talk
6. What server operating systems are you running? Gareth Rushgrove
7. Gareth Rushgrove I’m guessing most people said:
8. Gareth Rushgrove Someone will try and be smart and say:
9. Gareth Rushgrove And someone will hide the fact they’re running:
10. The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed. Gareth Rushgrove William Gibson
11. The hypervisor of containers The race to PID 1 Your container operating system The rise of the Unikernels Gareth Rushgrove
12. Some problems
13. Operating systems are really big, both on disk and in memory Gareth Rushgrove
14. Operating systems take a long time to boot, and we’re booting them more often Gareth Rushgrove
15. Operating systems have a lot of moving parts that need managing and securing Gareth Rushgrove
16. Our workloads are increasingly single purpose, rather than general purpose Gareth Rushgrove
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.
18. The hypervisor of containers
19. Gareth Rushgrove
20. Gareth Rushgrove Xen, ESX and HyperV are Type 1 hypervisors
21. Challengers for the hypervisor of containers Gareth Rushgrove
22. Coming from the operating system up Gareth Rushgrove
23. Gareth Rushgrove From RedHat, uses RPM-OSTree under the hood
24. Gareth Rushgrove Built-in service-discovery and clustering support
25. Gareth Rushgrove Snappy from Ubuntu, basically replaces apt-get with docker
26. Gareth Rushgrove Docker running on Docker running as PID 1
27. Common themes Gareth Rushgrove
28. Cluster native Read-only file systems Atomic changes Integrated with Docker Gareth Rushgrove
29. Don’t count out… Gareth Rushgrove
30. Gareth Rushgrove VMware are already the hypervisor of virtual machines
31. Gareth Rushgrove Don’t forget the Microsoft ecosystem, with Docker support incoming
32. Gareth Rushgrove Subplot - the user interface to the hypervisor of containers
33. Coming from the user interface down Gareth Rushgrove
34. The importance of APIs Gareth Rushgrove
35. Gareth Rushgrove The Kubernetes API is based on years of experience at Google
36. Gareth Rushgrove Another Google Borg inspired project. Aurora is used heavily at Twitter
37. Gareth Rushgrove Don’t count out the Platform as a Service folks just yet
38. Gareth Rushgrove Amazon has launched a beta of AWS Elastic Cloud Service
39. Gareth Rushgrove And with Swarm, Docker want to own this user interface too
40. The race to PID 1
41. Gareth Rushgrove Meanwhile, at a different part of the stack…
42. Gareth Rushgrove Not the real Systemd logo
43. Gareth Rushgrove
44. Gareth Rushgrove SystemD coming from the init system up
45. Gareth Rushgrove Docker coming from the user interface down
46. Gareth Rushgrove SystemD already contains container functionality (systemd-nspawn)
47. Gareth Rushgrove Both want to own supervision of processes
48. Gareth Rushgrove Expect more overlap, and (separate) ecosystems of tools to emerge
49. The operating system inside a container
50. What’s wrong with running a full distro in a container? Gareth Rushgrove
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
52. A base ubuntu container has 184 packages installed Gareth Rushgrove
53. Just a few apt-get commands will see that increase to 302 packages Gareth Rushgrove
54. That’s a lot of things to track inside what’s meant to be a black box Gareth Rushgrove
55. Minimal linux distros Gareth Rushgrove
56. Gareth Rushgrove BusyBox
57. Scratch images Gareth Rushgrove
58. Lots of opportunities here for interesting tools Gareth Rushgrove
59. The rise of the unikernels
60. Gareth Rushgrove Hypervisors are actually awesome
61. Gareth Rushgrove Strong isolation guarantees, often enforced in hardware
62. Gareth Rushgrove Mature tooling and experienced people
63. Gareth Rushgrove What is a unikernel?
64. Gareth Rushgrove A library to build your own operating system
65. Gareth Rushgrove No userspace
66. Gareth Rushgrove You application is compiled into a kernel
67. Gareth Rushgrove Operating system Hypervisor Hardware Runtime Application Virtual machines
68. Gareth Rushgrove Operating system Hypervisor Hardware Container Operating system Runtime Application Containers
69. Gareth Rushgrove Unikernel Hypervisor Hardware Unikernel
70. Gareth Rushgrove Drastically smaller surface area for attack
71. Gareth Rushgrove Very fast to boot, but with strong isolation guarantees
72. Gareth Rushgrove
73. Gareth Rushgrove Warning: research projects ahead
74. Gareth Rushgrove
75. Gareth Rushgrove MirageOS
76. Gareth Rushgrove Erlang on Xen
77. Conclusions
78. Understanding technology change in the large means understanding the economics of software companies Gareth Rushgrove
79. Don’t expect all this to replace what we have now, but to run alongside it Gareth Rushgrove
80. Many small devices and the internet of things Gareth Rushgrove
81. Enterprise App Stores Gareth Rushgrove
82. Evolution and revolution happen at the same time Gareth Rushgrove
83. Times they are a-changin Gareth Rushgrove Bob Dylan
84. Questions? And thanks for listening