Ubuntu Gets Container-Friendly "Snappy" Core

judgecorp writes: Canonical just announced Ubuntu Core, which uses containers instead of packages. It's the biggest Ubuntu shakeup for 20 years, says Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth, and is based on a tiny core, which will run Docker and other container technology better, quicker and with greater security than other Linux distros. Delivered as alpha code today, it's going to become a supported product, designed to compete with both CoreOS and Red Hat Atomic, the two leading container-friendly Linux approaches. Shuttleworth says it came about because Canonical found it had solved the "cloud" problems (delivering and updating apps and keeping security) by accident — in its work on a mobile version of Ubuntu.

Comments

Re:20 years?

[vux984]

Well TFA says:

"This is in a sense the biggest break with tradition in 10 years of Ubuntu..."

Editor fail.

This actually sounds pretty cool.

[Fwipp]

No dependency management or fooling around packages that require conflicting library versions, possibly near-instant "installation" (depending on if they're distributing Dockerfile-equivalents* or containers directly). Sounds good to me - I'll have to take a look sometime.

*Yes, I know that Docker is not the only way to do containers, but it's easy to imagine they could be using a similar "build" step.

Re:This actually sounds pretty cool.

[Fwipp]

Update: Playing with it, It looks like there isn't a build step. Following the steps here: http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/to... - it seems that docker is installed under /apps/docker (~20 files total) - they're basically just distributing tarballs which contain all necessary dependencies.

From there, it puts a quick wrapper script at ~/snappy-bin/docker, containing:

#!/bin/sh
##TARGET=/apps/docker/1.3.2.007/bin/docker
#TMPDIR=/run/apps/docker
cd /apps/docker/1.3.2.007
aa-exec -p docker_docker_1.3.2.007 -- /apps/docker/1.3.2.007/bin/docker $@

To build your own "snappy package" looks as simple as "cd mydir; snappy build ."