Flatcar Linux: Made for Containers

Open at Intel

In this episode, Danielle Tal and Thilo Fromm join us to discuss Flatcar Linux. They introduce Flatcar as a Linux operating system designed specifically for containers and Kubernetes workloads, highlighting its automation, self-healing capabilities, and security features. They emphasize how Flatcar simplifies operations for startups and large companies alike by automating OS provisioning and maintenance. We discussed contributor engagement and the project's involvement with the CNCF. They also share intriguing use cases, like a Kubernetes cluster running on a tractor fleet, and stress the importance of community contributions, not just in code but in evangelism and documentation. 00:00 Introduction 01:05 What is Flatcar? 02:01 Flatcar's Automation and Self-Healing Capabilities 04:10 User Experience and Testing 05:06 Ideal Users and Use Cases 10:36 Community and Contributions 13:38 Getting Started with Contributions 16:59 Impact and Future Directions 19:58 Conclusion and Final Thoughts Guest:

Danielle Tal is a Program Manager at Microsoft and an integral part of the team responsible for maintaining Flatcar Container Linux. The team is contributes to Linux OS distributions and Linux Security within Azure and other upstream projects. With a background in supporting diverse enterprise cloud applications as a support engineer, Danielle has transitioned into a management role, overseeing Docker EMEA support before joining the Flatcar team.

Thilo Fromm is an engineering manager and works on Community Linux distributions and Linux Security at Azure. Thilo's team helps maintaining Flatcar Container Linux. He has given talks at FOSDEM, FrOSCon, KubeCon, Open Source Summit, Cloud-Native Rejekts, and various meetups like Kubernetes Community Days.

Thilo started his career in embedded systems with hardware design and roll-your-own /from scratch embedded Linux, kernel and plumbing level development, and later virtualisation. After working for various cloud providers in engineering and management positions, he went full cloud native in 2019. Nowadays Thilo works on operating systems for cloud-native environments with a special focus on Flatcar Container Linux.