Recently Corey Quinn from LastWeekInAWS wrote an article that made me think “Nobody Cares About the Operating System Anymore”. Please have a look

LinuxKit as a Commodity for Building Linux Distributions

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2021-06-11 14:00:18

Recently Corey Quinn from LastWeekInAWS wrote an article that made me think “Nobody Cares About the Operating System Anymore”. Please have a look at it! I like the idea that nobody cares about where their application runs. Developers only want them running.

I am one of the maintainers for the Tinkerbell project. A bare metal workflows engine that heavily relies on containers and Docker to get its work done. It tries to find an answer for a reasonable question: how do we manage rooms of pieces of hardware? More in practice, how can we bring an API on top of everybody’s data centers?

Containers are the abstraction we decided to use when running reusable code (that we call actions) in somebody else’s hardware. Mainly because distribution, packaging, and runtime are solved issues. Everyone knows how to build, push and run a container.

I think this scenario compares well with the story Corey highlighted. Operating systems are an established, well-known abstraction for the majority of the use cases.