openSUSE MicroOS - The OS that does "just one job"

The openSUSE Summit 2020 kicked off yesterday. Like many others this summit was a virtual one too. It ran on a platform managed by openSUSE fan and user P. Fitzgerald.

I was busy with work stuff and couldn't watch the presentations live. I hopped on and off on the platform. I didn't want to miss Richard's presentation about MicroOS yet I missed it. Luckily he was quick to record his session and upload it on YouTube. I got a chance to watch it afterwards. Surely, all other presentations will be available on openSUSE TV soon and I'll be able to catch-up.

If you didn't rush to watch Richard's presentation on YouTube right-away, here are a few hints that may encourage you to do so.

openSUSE container registry

I'm not going to tell you what MicroOS is, you got to watch the video to learn about that, but did you know that the openSUSE project had a containers registry available publicly at https://registry.opensuse.org ? You can add it to the /etc/containers/registries.conf file and Podman can now search & pull containers from it.

Tiny openSUSE containers

When deploying your application in a container you always look for the fattest container, right? Of course, no!

ish@coffee-bar:~$ podman pull registry.opensuse.org/opensuse/busybox
Trying to pull registry.opensuse.org/opensuse/busybox...
Getting image source signatures
Checking if image destination supports signatures
Copying blob b6fc9a391c78 [====>---------------------------------] 515.9KiB / 3.8MiB

ish@coffee-bar:~$ podman images
REPOSITORY                               TAG      IMAGE ID       CREATED        SIZE
registry.opensuse.org/opensuse/busybox   latest   c19f82628d9f   44 hours ago   9.4 MB

openSUSE offers a small (Tumbleweed) busybox container that is just under 10 MB. Mini but mighty! 💪

How to keep a system patched & running?

If it's running you don't want to touch it, but, systems need security updates. Someone has to do the dirty-job. Who? Can a system update itself without breaking the applications that are running?

Health checks during boot-up

Have you ever had a system that fails to boot after an update? I had. MicroOS checks for errors during the boot phase and if a snapshot is faulty the system then boots up with the last known working snapshot. MicroOS does so without any manual intervention, so, automatic reboots are safe.  😀 🎉 🎊

Debugging your MicroOS container host

MicroOS is a lightweight system that doesn't come bundle with debugging tools (for obvious reasons). Once in a while though you need to troubleshoot things like network issues. There you go, you can spin a toolbox container and inspect the network interface on the host. 🛠️

I hope these are enough to convince you to watch the presentation and that openSUSE MicroOS becomes part of your servers infrastructure. 🐧