Stef Walter

Cockpit is an open source project that has built the new system admin UI for Linux. It turns Linux server into something discoverable and usable. Its goal is to remove the steep learning curve for Linux deployments. But more than that, it's a real Linux session in a web browser.

Cockpit is an open source project that has built the new system admin UI for Linux. It turns Linux server into something discoverable and usable. Its goal is to remove the steep learning curve for Linux deployments.

Cockpit lets you immediately dive into things like storage, network configuration, system log diagnosis, container troubleshooting and Kubernetes orchestration. All while being zero-footprint: It goes away when not in use. Cockpit interacts well with other management configuration tools, it reacts instantly to system changes made elsewhere.

We'll look at how Cockpit is an actual linux user session that you drive through your browser, running with user privileges, and accesses to the native system APIs and tools.

You'll be able to build new pieces of sysadmin UI as fast as you write a shell script. In fact we'll do it on stage in a few minutes.

A purely human team does not scale past a certain complexity point. In the Cockpit project we’ve done something amazing: We’ve built a team that’s part human and part machine working on an Open Source project.

In the Cockpit project we’ve done something amazing: We’ve built a team that’s part human and part machine working on an Open Source project. “Cockpituous”, our project’s #5 commit contributor, is actually our automated team members.

Bots do the mundane tasks that would otherwise use up the time of human contributors. During the talk you can see them self-organizing, doing continuous integration, finding issues, contributing code changes, making decisions, releasing the software into Linux distros and containers. They work in a completely distributed, organic way, and run in containers on Kubernetes.

We’ll talk about how humans are training the bots, and how bots are using machine learning to learn from the humans. The project and its pace would be unthinkable otherwise.

Treating the bots as team members is fundamental to achieving this. I’m excited to show you how to pull that off.

Please note that this talk has been cancelled.

Cockpit is a discoverable admin interface. Cockpit makes Linux usable by a far more sysadmins. Cockpit is on by default in Fedora Server, and available on RHEL, CentOS, Atomic, Debian, Arch and others.

In this talk we'll look at how Cockpit is designed. It's zero footprint and starts on demand, without a heavy backend, but just enough server-side logic to let a browser talk directly with system APIs. This also means that admins are not limited to Cockpit, but can use other tools, or the terminal, along side it.

Cockpit interacts heavily with all corners of the system. Because of that we rely heavily on continuous integration. In this talk we'll show how the Cockpit project boots and tests real operating systems many thousands of times a day, and does continuous delivery into distros as well.