LinuxCon - CloudOpen North America 2014

This year I was lucky enough to attend LinuxCon in Chicago.   Three days of project demos, technical presentations, and code sprints all centered around the Linux ecosystem.  There was a lot going on to say the least, I was able to attend a great presentation by Matthew Miller, the Fedora project lead, that discussed where Fedora is now with F20, and where they are going with Fedora 21 and how they would like to make the future releases of Fedora workstation more centered around developer.  Which is good news for me being a Fedora workstation user on at least 2 of my machines.  

A couple of other interesting presentations I attended were from Brandon Philips, of CoreOS.  The first on how CoreOS works, and the second on how to deploy CoreOS clusters with fleet.  CoreOS is a really interesting Linux distribution that offers an alternative way of deployment instead of your standard virtual machine replication.  CoreOS users fleet to deploy host machines in clusters with Docker running on top of the installation.  Docker containers are utilized to hold the database stack, application stack, or the load balancing packages needed to run your traditional web application.  Docker containers that are referenced from the host machines read and write to one centralized version of etcd.  Etcd and Docker together both make CoreOS a very flexibly distribution.

One of the biggest takeaways from this years LinuxCon is the momentum that the Docker project has behind it.  Docker has taken the Linux world by storm and it seems that everyone is working to integrate Docker into their projects.  Docker is used by spinning up lightweight virtual machines where applications or packages can be installed and executed in Docker containers where they are referenced by the host machines, whether that is a workstation or a cloud image.  Docker is a really interesting platform, I just hope that it does not gain too much popularity too fast before it has time to really harden inside the Linux ecosystem.