Learn about the history of Linux, containers, invisible infrastructure, and how embedded going frictionless will free developers to innovate new products.<\/b>
\nJoin the DZone community and get the full member experience. At a recent Linaro Connect event that took place this past fall, Alexander Sack ( @asacasa), CTO of Pantacor, delivered a talk on the Linux Distro and how it is relevant in today’s embedded world of the Internet of Things (IoT). Alexander gives us insightful context on the birth of Linux and the embedded world, and where it is going today. He spoke on the history of the Linux Distro and drew parallels with how the embedded development ecosystem is changing. Much like the early days of Linux, the embedded Linux world also needs to embrace automation and take advantage of containerization in order to make infrastructure frictionless and invisible. Alexander started us off with an overview of how Linux started and how it has progressed from a hobbyists\/tinkerers platform to a reliable and secure OS that today basically runs the Cloud. From the early aughts (the 00s) and onward, there were many different distributions like RedHat, Debian, Suse, and others whose goal was to make Linux reliable, easy to use, and secure. These distributions were created by large, vibrant communities of developers who donated their free time to contribute to open source Linux projects. Even though Linux gained a lot of traction in those early days, it still took quite a bit of effort and technical ability to integrate a distribution before you could deploy it and use it on a server to run your applications. \u201cMany ISVs offering Linux distributions and products, attempted to simplify a way for end-users to create customized distributions without having to make huge investments in both infrastructure and engineering teams. And as part of the community myself, and as more time went by, I realized in the early days that there wasn\u2019t an easy way to do this.\u201d — Alexander Sack, CTO Pantacor This changed somewhat with the arrival of public clouds like AWS that allowed servers to be spun up and scaled out on demand. Most importantly, you can deploy software onto it and not worry about having to integrate the Linux distribution to work with your software. However, in the early days, those one-click distributions came in the form of images that still required some effort to configure before they could run the way you needed them to run. 2015 saw another shift in how Linux systems were being built and managed, according to Alex. The rise of Docker containers meant that you were no longer required to manually integrate distributions and match corresponding library versions. Before Docker, working with Linux was quite difficult for third-party software and services to make changes or to influence how a distribution worked. Docker containers allow developers to package whatever they want, including 3rd party extensions, into a self-contained unit and then deploy into a virtual environment without worrying about it. Because of this ability, the host operating system on which your applications are running is less and less important and essentially has become invisible. This means that developers can focus less on infrastructure and spend more time on creating applications that add value to your business. Unlike embedded developers today, cloud developers don\u2019t typically think in terms of kernel functionality. \u201cThe only thing that actually matters on the host operating system is the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel is what will remain for the foreseeable future. The kernel is the common denominator, and is the most important piece of the Linux puzzle for embedded developers,\u201d says Alex. Most cloud developers today only need to worry about what they can run inside of a container. Most don\u2019t even think about what kernel they are running on or ever worry about whether it has all of the features you need. For more information on embedded development challenges see How to Update IoT Devices in the Modern Cloud Era. In fact, cloud developers don\u2019t even worry about the host operating system that much anymore. The cloud removed the host operating system as an intermediate layer that in the past you would have interacted with on a daily basis. Now with Kubernetes SSH\u2019ing onto the host to install software is a thing of the past. Instead, you can just use the platform API and automatically deploy any payloads you want to use right onto the cluster. Instead of small components, you now have large building blocks that work the way you want them to without you thinking about how they work together. On the embedded side, the kernel and its functionality are among the most important aspects to an embedded developer, especially when it comes to creating new products on embedded Linux boards. Micro-controllers cannot run sophisticated apps like robots and are typically more suited to sensor-type data. Because of the resource constraints on most IoT devices running Linux, customizing and specializing the firmware is one of the important things that embedded developers need to do. Alex then presented a practical platform for building applications on resource-constrained embedded platforms with containers. He refers to this as the Universal Embedded Linux system. So why is it universal? At Pantacor, the Host OS should be as minimal and as un-opinionated as possible. In fact, it should do nothing but operate the lifecycle of the containers, mediate access to the hardware devices and offer a protocol to drive the deployment of the system. To deploy something, you need a system runtime that can be described as a single transactional unit. With a universal embedded model, you are able to define all the components you need as a single transactional deployable unit. The rest are middleware containers, the system containers, and then the application containers. All those can be done in containers and they should be done in containers because that’s the only way it can become really universal. According to Alex, when you think about it, if you replace the immutable deployment platform with something else, you\u2019ve already lost half of the potential use cases. Some people might not like Yocto; they may want to work with OpenWrt or the Broadcom SDK or Qualcomm SDK. They may also have something completely custom. If they want to make a special middleware, why force them to learn about Yocto and bring that into that ecosystem? With a universal containerized embedded system, you have the choice of distro. In fact, the distro becomes irrelevant on a large team of embedded developers, and this is very powerful. View the entire talk here: In this post, we discussed the history of Linux, and how it led to containers and to the Cloud, eventually giving way to invisible infrastructure. The embedded Linux world will also give way to a frictionless infrastructure that will free up developers to work on innovative new applications, services, and products. Pantavisor Linux leverages containers to build modular containerized embedded Linux systems that are fully customizable and easily managed with standard open source technologies. The portability of containers simplifies the lifecycle management of embedded Linux firmware and applications across IoT fleets. Virtualization at both the system and application levels allows for embedded Linux engineering teams to adopt Agile and modern cloud-native methodologies such as microservices and other automation strategies to secure device fleets, speed up time to market and increase innovation. Published at DZone with permission of anita buehrle. See the original article here. Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.<\/p>\n