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Red Hat Strips Down For Docker

Posted by timothy on from the wearing-or-not-wearing-dockers dept.

angry tapir writes Reacting to the surging popularity of the Docker virtualization technology, Red Hat has customized a version of its Linux distribution to run Docker containers. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic Host strips away all the utilities residing in the stock distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that aren't needed to run Docker containers. Removing unneeded components saves on storage space, and reduces the time needed for updating and booting up. It also provides fewer potential entry points for attackers. (Product page is here.)

2 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. Re:define terms in article summary by solios · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Indeed. I'm too busy struggling to stay almost not quite embarrassingly behind on front-end buzzword compliance, and now this? I'd have no idea what it was if I wasn't friends with a devops specialist. Ditto Chef, Hadoop, and a few other extremely specific buzzword compliant "concepts" tech writers whisper about in worshipful tones.

    I kinda miss the era in which a general computing proficiency was possible. Specialization used to be for insects.

  2. Re:define terms in article summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Funny thing is, most people working in the DevOps field are generalists (myself included). People with a mix of infra and development backgrounds, with a broad range of skills across multiple disciplines, and maybe one or two "deep" skills. I spent years bouncing between system administration and development and couldn't make my mind up which direction I wanted to take because everything was interesting and I wanted to play with ALL the things. Then DevOps became more than an obscure buzzword and I found my home :)

    Docker isn't perfect, there's still a few issues that they need to address, but the idea of running version controlled micro services in portable, lightweight containers seems like the way of the future.

    I'd be interested to see which distro can get their image down to the smallest (functional) size. Strip the OS down to just the absolute minimum required to boot it up, then leave it upto the docker image creators to decide what services to enable. It's a great way to minimize attack vectors, keep image size down and make the container nice and lightweight.