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Back in my first days of Linux I had a bootable floppy disk with fully functional Linux distro (a kernel, a shell and busybox tools and lua scripting). Maybe that was not much, but it was less than 2MB and would work on an old 386 PC with 4MB of RAM. But shell is boring, graphical minimal Linux distros was several hundreds of mega bytes and need hundreds of MB of RAM. Embedded devices typically have a minimal Linux with busybox or alike running with no graphical interface but instead they have some sort of web interface exposed to some port. If you tried to run a minimal graphical Linux distro let's say XFCE on an embedded device (let's say a raspberry pi) you would notice that most of its limited resources are taken by Xorg the legacy graphical server. Introducing Wayland Wayland is a new different approach to graphical interface, instead of sending drawing instruction over a legacy protocol (with so many extensions) to a legacy daemon (with so many extensions) that ...

Introduction Kubernetes had won the container orchestration war. Here is a summary of its features. It's an API, command line and UI. It uses etcd to keep its state. Every thing is done via Yaml or JSON (your choice). General Node : a machine or instance (used to be called "minion") Namespace: a grouping of resources Label: a tag applied to a resource ex. role=frontend Annotations: another form of meta data  Workloads Container  ( spec ) : the building block of deployable service or runnable task using linux containers ex. docker image and params to pass at runtime. Typically created in a Pod see below Pod  ( spec ) : one of more containers scheduled to nodes together and thus can share volumes. Most common pods have a single container but there are use cases for more (ex. nginx and php-fpm) . If you replicate a pod to have 3 replicas it would have 3 nginx and 3 php-fpm. If php-fpm created a file in the volume, nginx can see it. Typically cr...

Introduction Alpine Linux is a minimal distro with package manager ( APK ) that is based on busybox and musl library . Like the  CirrOS , it's very lightweight, but unlike it, it's full featured. In case you don't know me, my Linux distro of choice is Fedora/CentOS, in this post I'm going to bootstrap a QCow2 cloud image of Alpine Linux on my distro of choice. Using docker to bootstrap a working chroot Type mkdir alpine35-root docker run --rm -ti -v $PWD/alpine35-root:/data alpine:3.5 apk --arch x86_64 -X http://nl.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.5/main/ -U --allow-untrusted --root /data --initdb add alpine-base  and you should get a line like this OK: 6 MiB in 16 packages so now we have a working alpine chroot in the directory alpine35-root Creating Bootable QCoW2 Image Because I don't want to format my hard disk by mistake and because I know Murphy's law, I'll take those 6MB as tarball and continue on a VM. dd if=/d...