2024-02-07, 10:00–14:00, B.4.029
Flatcar is a free and open-source operating system designed for easy automation and to securely run containers. In this tutorial, Kai and Mathieu will be your guides to get you to know the specifics of the OS and acquire the basis to become autonomous in the OS operation.
Flatcar is a bit different from a day-to-day Linux OS: there is no package manager, /usr is in read-only mode, there is an auto-update mechanism, provisioning is done from the initramfs... In this session, Kai and Mathieu will cover all these aspects and how to leverage them to focus on what is running in your infrastructure and not on how is running your infrastructure.
From local Flatcar exploration to cloud deployment using Terraform passing by provisioning and OS update, the goal of this session is to give you the key elements to continue exploring Flatcar once the session will be over. At the end we give you an introduction to deploying Kubernetes with Cluster API using Flatcar as base OS.
Participants only need a few requirements: Terraform binary available in your PATH, Linux (or Linux VM with nested virtualization) and QEMU. Cloud credentials will be provided.
Mathieu works as a Linux OS software engineer @ Microsoft mainly involved on Flatcar development (an open-source Container OS Linux distribution). He mainly works on the tests automation, release cycle and feature development. Outside of the work, he co-founded SRE France an association that organizes DevOps/SRE Meetups in France and co-created the SRE SummerCamp: a 2 days event mixing outdoors activities and SRE/DevOps talks.
I work on Flatcar Container Linux since early on and also had my hands on the Kubernetes distribution Lokomotive and the eBPF tool Inspektor Gadget and traceloop. As part of the Kinvolk team I joined Microsoft. In my spare time I'm maintaining GNOME Disks and have many ideas of software yet to be built.