Scott Mccarty

👥 1 conference
🎤 1 talk
📅 Years active: 2020 to 2020

Biography

At Red Hat, Scott McCarty is technical product manager for the container subsystem team, which enables key product capabilities in OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Focus areas includes container runtimes, tools, and images. Working closely with engineering teams, at both a product and upstream project level, he combines personal experience with customer and partner feedback to enhance and tailor strategic container features and capabilities.

Scott is a social media start-up veteran, an e-commerce old timer, and a weathered government research technologist, with experience across a variety of companies and organizations, from seven person startups to 12,000 employee technology companies. This has culminated in a unique perspective on open source software development, delivery, and maintenance.

— biography from FOSDEM 2020
https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/speaker/scott_mccarty/

Conferences

1 known conferences

👥 FOSDEM 2020 📅 01 Feb 2020

🎤 Do Linux Distributions Still Matter with Containers?
02 Feb 2020 show details

In the beginning there was compiling and static linking. My first programs when I was 10 years old worked like that. Then, we discovered dynamic linking. This was great because we could now patch one library and all of the programs would pick up the change on restart. But we created another problem - dependencies. Throughout the history of computing we have solved one problem and created another. Containers are no different. This talk will walk through why we invented Linux distros and why we should continue to appreciate them in a world full of container images...

The short answer is yes. Yes, they still matter because of several reasons:

A linux distribution is a bunch of human beings that work together to create a dependency tree of software packages. This dependency tree is still convenient in container images
There is a TON of knowledge embedded in systemd unit files on how to properly start/stop commonly used daemons
Mapping CVEs to packages with meta data is still useful in a container
Standardized C libraries like glibc are used by binaries, interpreters like Python, and even virtual machines managers like the JVM
Critical libraries like libssl, openssl, and hardware accelerated bridges, are useful to everyone
Linux distros are a connection point with gravity which builds community. Community is what solves problems
Host and container image portability (glibc actually can take different code paths depending on what hardware is made available by the kernel. Also, glibc has a min/max kernel version that it supports well when compiled)