LISA18

Often system administrators have to choose one of two options: On one end, traditional service management has a service starting with all privileges, and a full view of your system, and on the other end we have containers, with a restrictive, more controlled view of your system. But, with a modern kernel and systemd, it is no longer one or the other, but you can actually take the best of both approaches and decide which components to apply to your service.


Do you like the concept of packaging dependencies of containers, but also like the idea of sharing the network with your server from a traditional service manager? Do you want to restrict the access to the files on your system from containers, but also want to be able to manage your service from your server like traditional service management allows you? It turns out that you can have it all.


In this presentation I will show all the service techniques to deploy services in Linux that use and abuse systemd, from spinning up a simple service, to actually running your service isolated on a systemd container, and everything in the middle. I'll also show you how to use these features with other traditional techniques, like socket and path activation, service watchdog. scheduling tasks to be executed later on, and what happens when a service goes down.


You already have systemd installed on your server...Why not take full advantage of its capacities?