Learn about the history of Linux, containers, invisible infrastructure, and how embedded going frictionless will free developers to innovate new products.
Join 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. “Many 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’t an easy way to do this.” — 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.
