Michael K. Johnson

I will be presenting and giving a tutorial (two separate sessions) about Application-Centric Systems Management at LinuxCon 2009 September 21-23 in Portland, Oregon.

Application-Centric Systems Management: Presentation

Historically, applications have been managed separately from the operating system, which have been managed separately from frameworks. The OS and frameworks have been managed with a one-size-fits-all homogeneous approach, leading to large OS+framework installations that support all relevant applications. Application developers have been expected to develop applications to a platform with minimal version changes, without taking advantage of new features and bug fixes. This wastes time and money. rPath's tools deeply introspect all software components and provide strong version control management of all system image file contents. This allows application-centric system image definition that reduces collateral damage from OS/framework updates while allowing agile application development and deployment.

Application-Centric Systems Management: Tutorial

A practical follow-on to to the Application-Centric Systems Management presentation, this tutorial will guide the participants through the use of several of rPath's tools (particularly Conary, rMake, and rBuild) for application-centric management of heterogeneous systems. This will include packaging source code and binaries, composing them into groups, and managing a sample software lifecycle including application development, QA, and releases. This will be a hands-on tutorial that requires participants to bring working systems with virtualization software already installed. The techniques taught will not be specific to virtualization, but virtualization will be used to facilitate development and testing during the tutorial session.