Making Immutable Infrastructure simpler with LinuxKit

Justin Cormack

The idea of immutable infrastructure was initially popularised by Netflix in 2011, but it is not yet the standard way of deploying servers. One of the problems is that the tooling is complicated. You have to boot a VM, run a config management system, use Packer to create the template, then run Cloud Init to configure more at boot time. LinuxKit evolved as a simple tool to directly build immutable servers out of containers, designed to run very fast inside your CI pipeline. It can build small, fast, and secure machine images in under a minute from a simple config file, while being completely customisable. With the tooling getting out of the way there is an opportunity to really explore the benefits of immutable servers, such as full reproducibility, end to end testing, and continuous delivery of the whole stack from server to applications.

Slides and blog post summarizing talk

About Speaker

Justin Cormack is an engineer at Docker, based in Cambridge UK. He works on many open source projects at Docker, and is tech lead on LinuxKit. He used to be a sysadmin, and still feels the pain.