Announcing Ubuntu Core, with snappy transactional updates

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1434

by selectnull • 12 years ago

650 147 12 years ago

sciurus• 12 years ago

There's some more details at http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/tools/snappy and a walkthrough of using it at http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2014/12/its-a-snap.html

smacktoward• 12 years ago

I'm a huge Ubuntu fan, and use it every day on both my laptop and primary workstation. But I dunno how much more of this "we're pulling a piece of what is traditionally considered 'Linux' out and replacing it with our own shizz" I can take.

krschultz• 12 years ago

That's really misunderstanding what this is. They're not removing apt & debs from Ubuntu. This is a snapshotted version of Ubuntu that uses images for upgrades.

markshuttle4• 12 years ago

Correct. We still use deb-src as our daily primitive, that's how we update packages and source and it's what we build. Snappy images are just rendered from those binaries similar to the way that ISO images are generated from them.

coldtea• 12 years ago

But I dunno how much more of this "we're pulling a piece of what is traditionally considered 'Linux' out and replacing it with our own shizz" I can take.

All the people that want what is "traditionally considered Linux" why don't they go and use a traditional Linux?

They idea is that a lot of what "traditionally is considered Linux" (and UNIX) is decades old, designed before the current era of multicore/cheap SSDs/mobile devices/wireless connectivity/laptops/multi-TB filesystems at home/hi-dpi composite visuals/touch interaction/unicode everywhere/etc etc, and is not the be all end all of how an OS should be, nor the pinaccle of OS design...

vidarh2• 12 years ago

When you are talking about what's "traditionally called Linux", ca. which years version of "traditionally called Linux", and which distribution, are you talking about?

When I started using Linux, there was no package management, glibc was nowhere to be found, there was no "/proc", and so on.

Linux has changed drastically on a semi-yearly basis for well over 20 years, and many of the distributions have changed in vastly different ways.

Packaging systems being one of the things that have diverged the most widely over the years.

nyir• 12 years ago

The names clashes with a compression library, https://code.google.com/p/snappy/ (that's probably enough to disambiguate it in search).

wiredfool3• 12 years ago

Not to mention Ubuntu Core, https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Core , which was a stripped down, smallest set of Ubuntu that can run apt.

markshuttle4• 12 years ago

This is the same set of packages as that Core, only rendered with snappy instead of apt-get as the package management system.

fidotron• 12 years ago

This looks great.

It's often overlooked, but Android devices are really low system administration high availability Linux systems. That they work as well as they do is kind of crazy, and a lot of it is down to the application packaging and isolation mechanism. This Canonical stuff is going to generate a lot of noise, but it is the way forward.

Ultimately between this, containerization and virtualization, we're witnessing the death of the whole dll concept long after dll-hell became a thing.

rst• 12 years ago

Android apps update frequently, but core system components (where you'd expect dependency problems and tricky compatibility issues to crop up) update hardly at all, so it's not clear that it's a model to follow.

izacus2• 12 years ago

What does vendor not deciding to update a device have to do with an actual software mechanism of applying patches?

dingaling• 12 years ago

Android devices are really low system administration high availability Linux systems

Low maintenance partially because they are functionally very limited ( much of what the kernel and userspace can do is locked-out) and partially because the mission-critical stuff lives in seldom-updated firmware.

High availability... Given how often 'reboot your phone' or ' clear the app data' is given as advice?

I just don't see many parallels with server environments.

Florin_Andrei2• 12 years ago

Anything can be low-maintenance as long as you can keep users' fingers far, far away from the system's guts.

lrem• 12 years ago

I have never cleared app data and seldom reboot, neither in Nexus nor Cyanogen, despite beta-testing a lot of stuff. I just asked my wife, she never did these things on Motorola's and Sony's "roms". Are you sure that these events are that popular?

hobs• 12 years ago

While the devil is certainly in the details, I think an android device would be more akin to a specific docker container running some sort of app.

A limited functionality device that services a specific purpose, if we were to take it to the world of the web, would be a webservice.

If you were having a problem with one of your puppet&co managed web servers on some cloud host, would you: a. perform root cause analysis. b. redeploy the entire machine because fuck it, you have your recipes or whatever and spinning up a new instance is a super cheap operation.

That's what I read into when I think about the grandparent.

xorcist3• 12 years ago

Android updating doesn't work at all, for any reasonable definition of to work that is applicable in the server space.

Pretty much every device out there has multiple known security holes and they're not getting updated.

izacus2• 12 years ago

I'm rather sure fidotron is talking about the technical aspect of the updates. Which has practically nothing to do with the political aspect you're talking about.

What was your point exactly in that respect?

cryptoz• 12 years ago

If you're going to count every derivative of AOSP Android, to make a fair comparison you'll also have to count every for single distro that is based on Ubuntu - how frequently do they all get kernel updates, etc?

Yes, the Android ecosystem has an update problem. But that problem is largely due to external companies and not a technical limitation of Android.

Alupis6• 12 years ago

The notion of "updates" for most rom users (I'm on Cyanogenmod), is literally a flash over the existing rom.

However my busybox updater app does run in the background and does update busybox as needed automatically. Same with my su updater. So I suppose parts of my android are indeed auto-patched without my noticing.

sp332• 12 years ago

Android has a completely different userspace from desktop or server Linux distros. They only share a kernel, which means package management techniques aren't going to transfer directly.

andyidsinga2• 12 years ago

hmmm.. I'm not sure I would call android devices high availability - they're pretty good, but I suspect the 9s of availability is much less than the average system admin's notion of high availability.

/beingargumentative :)

_pmf_• 12 years ago

It's often overlooked, but Android devices are really low system administration high availability Linux systems.

By all conceivable notions, no.

rbanffy2• 12 years ago

Why do you say so?

My devices restart for system updates and that's pretty much it.

shmerl• 12 years ago

Android installations are also dependencies mess, i.e. you have no way to even specify them and each application has to bundle them all (unless you resort to some hackish workarounds). Such approach a stick with two ends with its won pluses and minuses.

chetanahuja• 12 years ago

"also dependencies mess..."

"you have no way to even specify them and each application has to bundle them all..."

Yeah, I think you're confusing a dependency free heaven for a dependency mess.

nodata• 12 years ago

Erm aren't android apps basically self-contained and statically compiled?

arenaninja• 12 years ago

Slightly off topic, but I installed Ubuntu desktop last night and was pleased by how easy it has become. Though there's a weird bug that I have a hard time even explaining. Visually, everything is 'in' the workspace, but the workspace thumbnail contains my actual screen on the top right, and a smaller screen that I don't have is on the bottom left. I installed Chrome to get Netflix, but Chrome always opens in that section of the workspace that I can't access (I only see it in the thumbnail of the workspace switcher). But with Pipelight I'm able to get both Flash and Silverlight.

Anyway, kudos to the Ubuntu team. I even like the customization of the Search bar.

martinald2• 12 years ago

Looks great but I am doubtful Ubuntu can deliver all this. They've spread themselves so thin recently (Unity, Mir, Upstart, TV, Mobile, Landscape, bzr, openstack...) that it feels like they're just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. Which is ok, but not great if you bet your house on it.

rlpb4• 12 years ago

Upstart [as an init system]: no longer in active development, moving to systemd.

bzr: no longer in active development.

Landscape: very well established.

Mir: not really a wide-reaching project (AFAICT). It fits in between existing well-defined APIs (a handful of toolkits on one side, and hardware on the other), and can be implemented fairly independently by a separate team.

That doesn't leave very much to "spread themselves so thin". It comes down to spreading over two main areas: client devices, and cloud.

With client devices, it makes sense to cover multiple form factors with a single code base. That's Unity 8 across phones, tablets, etc. That's not spreading out to me; it's just being smart about code re-use.

With cloud, it makes sense to look at Openstack on the host and transactional updates on the guest. That's hardly "thin".

Dropping bzr from active development is surely an illustration of how "spreading themselves so thin" exactly what Canonical is not doing?

Naming a pile of buzzwords doesn't by itself provide any evidence of your claim. Especially when some of these are flat out wrong because they (quite publicly) aren't under active development any more.

seeing what sticks

Upstart remains excellent and nothing else existed at the time. It preceded systemd by a large margin. bzr is much the same. It pre-dates git.

In [1], Jelmer Vernooij writes: "Some people claimed Bazaar did not have many community contributions, and was entirely developed inside of Canonical's walled garden. The irony of that was that while it is true that a large part of Bazaar was written by Canonical employees, that was mostly because Canonical had been hiring people who were contributing to Bazaar - most of which would then ended up working on other code inside of Canonical."

It isn't so much that Canonical conceives of a project and goes off on its own direction; more that Canonical ends up hiring community members who are already contributing, who then make decisions they would have made anyway but with Canonical hats on, and larger community less aware of the details attribute this to some kind of secret internal Canonical policy decision.

I think that neither of these were about "seeing what sticks", since at the time they were conceived there weren't any other clear alternatives. And nothing else in your list is yet unstuck, so that hardly demonstrates that this is some kind of policy here.

Disclosure: I work for Canonical (but here I speak for myself, not for Canonical).

[1] https://www.stationary-traveller.eu/pages/bzr-a-retrospectiv...

vezzy-fnord• 12 years ago

Upstart [as an init system]: no longer in active development, moving to systemd.

But doesn't it still need to be supported for 5 more years because of 14.04 LTS?

In addition, it's still the default for ChromeOS and not much interest has been expressed in a switch. Anything new on that frontier?

martinald2• 12 years ago

While I see what you're saying, I've never seen a company the size of Canonical attempt to respond to every single new thing in the marketplace the way it does:

Smartphones? Ubuntu Phone. Also Ubuntu for Android Smart TV boxes? Ubuntu TV AWS? OpenStack CoreOS? Ubuntu Core DVCS? Bzr Windows 8 Metro mode? Unity

The problem is most of these don't do their jobs well. I think they'd be much much better off focusing on one or two rather than attacking on so many fronts. I still use Ubuntu on the server but everyone I know has moved off ubuntu on desktop for OS X, mainly because of how slowly Unity has improved.

23david4• 12 years ago

You left out Juju and MAAS... I hope I'm not the only one who's been burned by those Canonical 'Enterprise' projects.

kokey• 12 years ago

You've been burned by Juju? I am curious, since it looks like it was a bit of a not-invented here GUI to facilitate things people would do with configuration management, without doing it like configuration management or even like packages.

peterwwillis2• 12 years ago

Traditional package management systems already use transactional updates, and have checksums, so you have the same reliability now; these updates just roll them out without version numbers. 'Read-only' is also redundant, as everything owned by root is basically read only.

rckclmbr• 12 years ago

They have versions. Also, easy rollback.

    ubuntu@localhost:~$ snappy versions
    Part         Tag   Installed  Available  Fingerprint      Active
    ubuntu-core  edge  141        -          7f068cb4fa876c  *
    docker       edge  1.3.2.007  -          b1f2f85e77adab  *

vertex-four• 12 years ago

Traditional package management systems already use transactional updates

Sort of, ish. When things actually get copied to the filesystem, if the process crashes or fails during that time, (a) it could cause a state where the system might not be able to boot, and (b) they tend to complain loudly and require manual assistance. This isn't great for embedded or even mass consumer systems.

mike_hearn3• 12 years ago

Worse, if an app is updated whilst it's running, it can cause arbitrary crashes and data corruption.

I'm really glad Linux is finally moving beyond the curse of apt-get. I wrote a framework a long time ago for building distro-neutral binary installer/package hybrids and eventually walked away ... back then Ubuntu was brand new and Shuttleworth was even warm to the idea, but the old guard he had to deal with hated the idea. Other distributors were even worse. They had all bought into the idea that the way Linux managed software was awesome and superior to every other OS, even as new operating systems were designed and shipped that universally did not use it.

peterwwillis2• 12 years ago

That's true. I'd be happy to learn how snappy is immune to random system failure, I just didn't see it in the write-up; need to research it more.

rlpb4• 12 years ago

One problem with traditional package management is with maintainer script failures, which then leave the packaging system in a broken state. As the bug database shows, this is not uncommon.

'Read-only' is also redundant, as everything owned by root is basically read only.

Much of the core system runs as root, though, and can change system state that you then have to manage (with backups, careful handling of this state during upgrades, etc).

I back up / on the systems that I really care about. This is why. If / is read-only and only comes from an image, then I don't have to; I only need to make sure I have my image, and back up the parts of the filesystem that can change, which is far more limited.

digi_owl2• 12 years ago

I the "read only" bits refer to them dropping the update into a new place, rather than overwrite existing files. This makes rollbacks fairly simple, as the old version is still sitting there.

walterbell2• 12 years ago

How are the storage snapshots implemented: btrfs, unionfs, aufs, zfs, ceph ... or something new?

cdnsteve• 12 years ago

Anyone have a Vagrant image for this yet?

therealmarv3• 12 years ago

Yes, I made one! Enjoy!

https://vagrantcloud.com/therealmarv/boxes/ubuntu-core

acomjean• 12 years ago

Managing systems is complex.

Its gotten better since the days I was mucking about with hpux ignite to make sure all the systems were running the same software/libraries.

But there are still a lot of complex inter-dependencies of the base OS and the Apps running on top of it. It would be great to decouple the two, but I'm a little skeptical that these updates still won't require some testing of software running on them before deploying.

Or are the linux libraries stable enough that these migrations are easier now?

davexunit2• 12 years ago

Looks like a lot of overlap between this and Nix[0] and GNU Guix[1], which are purely functional package managers.

I'm not sure from this article how Snappy actually works. Are they repackaging everything they need for Snappy?

[0] http://nixos.org/ [1] https://gnu.org/software/guix

digi_owl2• 12 years ago

I guess a subset of that could be GNU Stow or Gobolinux.

quarterto• 12 years ago

Guix is based on Nix, with a Guile API.

swsieber• 12 years ago

This reminds me a lot of the nix package manager[1]. It deterministic package updates that are easy to reason about - they either succeed or have absolutely no effect. The packages are isolated to the point where you can have multiple versions of the same package at once.

That being said, at a glance Ubuntu Core looks like it might be better for the simplicity it brings to the table. It looks like it's making the images based of regular Ubuntu behind the scenes [2], but isolating everything for you and making things a lot more atomic. In short, it's a lot less foreign of a system than Nix.

Those are my general thoughts. I haven't actually used either of them, but Nix has captured my attention in the past for the problems it claims to solve.

[1] http://nixos.org/nix/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8724049

cies3• 12 years ago

Same to me. And I thought it was strange they did not list Nix as a source of inspiration.

I really look fwd to playing with UbuCore.

23david4• 12 years ago

i hope it works. i hope it works. i hope it works.

Agreed that this could be very cool.

diminish2• 12 years ago

Transactional installs are an advantage. I m trying to understand & brainstorm if any disadvantages exist especially with instances with multiple copies of every subcomponent.

* Transactional updates across instances: Let's say I have app, web, db, and some other roles of servers. How can I ensure all coordinating sets of instances to get updated altogether or not? For example, I don't want my app servers end up with a previous version of postgres adapter while my database is already updated.

* Memory requirements: does the approach increase the total memory requirements?

* Security: do we need to rely on a 3rd party for updates or can we still compile or own subcomponents? ( We had to in recent bash vulnerabilities)

* Security: If every image sits with its own copies and versions of each subcomponent, do we end up having to prepare a permutation of different images to ensure all is fine?

* Updates: Does it make integrators get lazier and end up with a lot of obsolete or non-improved versions of many subcomponents?

* Architecture: Do we give up the idea of reusable shared building blocks at this level of abstraction (sub-instance)?

AaronFriel2• 12 years ago

I can address some of those questions based on my reading of the literature and what they will integrate with:

* This seems like it would be coordinated by fleet, mesos, kubernetes. If I recall, some of these would allow you to direct new connections to new instances. For databases where clustering requires more sophisticated upgrades, it might have to be manually rolled/scheduled, but could probably be scripted with these.

* Memory requirements: Generally yes, but the thought process is that by having a read-only filesystem for most data, deduplicating filesystems (BRTFS, ZFS) can reduce your memory and storage requirements.

* Security is the toughest nut to crack. You're right, if a package incorporates BASH as a simple shell to run exec against, then you end up dependent on the app provider to use that. Likewise, openssh, libc, other libraries seem like you could get stuck with whatever the app developer has packaged. Alternatively, it looks like if there is a security fix, it should be easy to handroll your own temporary version by unpacking a package, dropping in a new lib, and repackaging. Hopefully they're not pushing for static compilation (which would defeat my argument on memory as well.)

* Updates: Yes, but the same problem happens when everyone has long dependency chains. Instead of laziness, it becomes a hurdle to overcome to get people to up their constraints and incorporate fixes. At least this way, every app developer can ship what works for them.

* Architecture: The reusable component aspect would likely shift closer to compiler/build process. e.g.: Look at how Cabal for Haskell and Cargo for Rust work (and occasionally, fail to work.) I think the goal would be to have reliable, repeatable builds using components managed by something else, using repositories of source code/binaries to build against.

duaneb• 12 years ago

Snappy is already used as a compression algorithm.

rcarmo• 12 years ago

This is pretty cool in the sense that it seems more flexible than CoreOS. I'll be looking into it for container hosting for sure...

caio1982• 12 years ago

Given you can have infinitely nested LXC containers almost for free, I wonder what's used to really isolate the .snap packages. You can have Docker apps running on top of Snappy just like demonstrated, that's alright, but Snappy itself must know how to isolate things well and I'd guess it's LXC given Canonical's experience with it?

vidarh2• 12 years ago

LXC is "just" a wrapper around cgroups. There are plenty of alternatives, including systemd-nspawn, or just configuring cgroups directly.

therealmarv3• 12 years ago

Does anybody knows how this works together with LXD ? It's another sort of (Ubuntu) container and I wonder how they fit.

mectors• 12 years ago

LXD will be another Snappy Framework, just like Docker...

aruggirello• 12 years ago

Just my Ubuntu Xmas wishlist: I'd like to see "snappy" or "Ubuntu Core" in the repos. So I can install UC on my existing systems to convert them to snappy systems - is it possible at all? BTW having a VirtualBox image would be nice too.

But, should we really consider debian packages obsolete? IMHO apt-get begin-transaction,rollback,commit commands would be great to have too - I would love them even if I'm required to convert all filesystems to btrfs or ZFS, and keep one or more snapshots.

jcastro2• 12 years ago

snappy's additive, you can keep using Ubuntu traditionally if you want, just how some people continue to use traditional Ubuntu Server over say, the Ubuntu Cloud images.

andyidsinga2• 12 years ago

this really resonated with me:

You can run systems as canaries, getting updates ahead of other identical systems to see if they cause unexpected problems. You can roll updates back, because each version is a complete, independent image.

sandGorgon3• 12 years ago

This - http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2014/12/its-a-snap.html - is a much nicer intro to Snappy and how closely it is tied to Docker.

The surprising thing is that you cannot run Snappy on Docker - but perhaps there is the whole inception like thing going on there. Docker -> Snappy -> Docker -> Snappy.....

dschiptsov• 12 years ago

So, basically, it is like an FS-snapshots which runs in its own chroot or a VM, while one could "atomically" replace one "snapshot" with another, and there should be some kind of "volume manager", because we do not want to replace the data.

It looks like "windows way" - instead of solving dll-hell problem we would make "images" and restore them when a system is crashed.

But this will not solve dependency-hell problem, because it is about standardized, well-defined, stable interfaces (like BSDs or Plan9 are trying to maintain), not file systems or VMs.

dmix7• 12 years ago

Any word if these kernel updates will support EFI secure-boot or dm-verity [0]? This is pretty essential these days given how EFI bootkits are a very real threat.

This has been part of the kernel and Ubuntu for a while but this new workflow changes this up a bit.

The only mention of security is the use of user-space AppArmor MAC and sandboxing but no mention of whether image-based updates can support updating a block signature.

[0] http://lwn.net/Articles/459420/

kodeinfo• 12 years ago

wow . That looks great

comice• 12 years ago

Canonical have an official cloud partnership scheme, so why is Ubuntu doing an exclusive launch-day cloud image deal with Microsoft Azure and not their other cloud partners?

pritambaral• 12 years ago

Images on other services are coming soon. I guess Azure guys just made it happen sooner; either way, I'd rather have one cloud service to test today than none.

NateDad3• 12 years ago

When you're dealing with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc etc.... someone's going to be slow, someone's going to be fast. Maybe Azure paid for first dibs, I don't know. From experience I'd say probably Azure just was fastest to say "ok". The mechanics behind delivering new images is pretty minimal, especially compared to the lawyers and politics.

disclaimer: I work for Canonical, but not on anything at all related to this, though I do really love the sound of it.

socceroos2• 12 years ago

May I ask what you do work on?

finid• 12 years ago

I love this already, though I'm yet to play with it.

That should change within the hour, as I'm in the process of installing Ubuntu Core on my lappy.

duggan3• 12 years ago

A VirtualBox disk, for those on OS X or other systems without kvm support - https://hostr.co/1mw2Hg3JIvJi

Or if you want to do it yourself:

1) brew install qemu # and prepare to wait!

2) qemu-img convert -O raw ubuntu-core-alpha-01.img ubuntu-core-alpha-01.raw

3) VBoxManage convertfromraw ubuntu-core-alpha-01.raw ubuntu-core-alpha-01.vdi

president• 12 years ago

You can also convert to vmdk (for VMware):

qemu-img convert -f raw -O vmdk ubuntu-core-alpha-01.img ubuntu-core-alpha-01.vmdk

duggan3• 12 years ago

The vmdk probably makes more sense, since it works with VirtualBox too.

https://hostr.co/86EDIcFMF7QH for the lazy ;)

duggan3• 12 years ago

And finally, a Vagrant box! https://atlas.hashicorp.com/duggan/boxes/ubuntu-core-alpha

(Guest additions was trickier than usual).

diltonm• 12 years ago

Potentially this is a good idea, not sure about the branding, might be a bit confusing but looking forward this. I'll read some more about it tonight but is the idea that this would replace apt-get? If so, why not keep apt-get and make this new technology available as new options to apt-get and push the whole thing up to Debian so they can benefit too? Let's not eradicate Debian.

rlpb4• 12 years ago

If so, why not keep apt-get and make this new technology available...

That's exactly what's happening. You don't have to use this new stuff. If you want to continue doing things the traditional way, you can continue doing so.

...as new options to apt-get...

This isn't technically feasible IMHO, as somebody who has hacked on apt-get code. apt-get and dpkg work quite fundamentally differently, at package level. Snappy works on full system image level. It necessarily must be a separate thing.

...push the whole thing up to Debian so they can benefit too?

This might well be possible in the future, but it needs adoption at the system and image publication level, rather than just as features in a few Debian packages. It's a very fundamental paradigm shift. This is something that Ubuntu's development model excels at, and the sort of change that only happens in Debian at a glacial pace and with a team willing to put a huge effort behind it. But the code is Free Software and is already available; it would just need the political will and the integration effort. So while I'd like it to happen, I'm not sure that it will, just because of both the technical effort and politics involved. I'd be happy to be proved wrong, though.

jpalmer• 12 years ago

Looks a lot like Red Hat's Project Atomic (http://www.projectatomic.io/)

"An Atomic Host is a lean operating system designed to run Docker containers, built from upstream CentOS, Fedora, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux RPMs. It provides all the benefits of the upstream distribution, plus the ability to perform atomic upgrades and rollbacks"

socceroos2• 12 years ago

Just returned to suggest the same thing. Perhaps the difference being that Ubuntu Core doesn't seem to be built exclusively for Docker, but rather to work with it and it's competitors.

jmnicolas• 12 years ago

Atomic is mentioned several times in the article.

mercurial• 12 years ago

While I welcome the move to a Nix-like transactional package management system, the notion of "bundle everything in your app" leaves me extremely queasy. How are you going to guarantee that individual application developers update insecure versions of bundled third-party libraries in a timely manner?

lamby• 12 years ago

Indeed. Somewhat related, but here's Debian's list of embedded code copies:

https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/secure-testing/data/embedd...

Lots of these have colourful/active security histories (esp. poppler, zlib, pcre, libpng...)

venomsnake• 12 years ago

What if your cloud instances could be updated with the same certainty and precision as your mobile phone – with carrier grade assurance that an update applies perfectly or is not applied at all?

Worst pitch analogy ever. You mean 2 years late to the party if at all? The reason the iPhone works so good is that carries have nothing to do with the phone.

marcoceppi• 12 years ago

Not had this problem as I always get my phones unlocked from the vendor, but I believe the pitch was more along that line rather than the persistent joy of waiting months after an update lands only to find out Verizon isn't going to patch their version of the mobile operating system and push the update.

RehnoLindeque• 12 years ago

Can anyone provide a comparison with Nix? I wonder if they considered working with the Nix developers, sharing is good for the ecosystem :)

Lethalman• 12 years ago

To my understanding, Ubuntu Core is much similar to the idea of Lennart: http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linu...

I don't feel saying them as either bad or good compared to Nix. Until you try a system, there's little to say only from the theory.

We'll see how Ubuntu Core with snappy performs, and this question will be more relevant in a few months.

Nix is not perfect but certainly has a long story maintaining this kind of packaging.

arjie• 12 years ago

This is fantastic. I've always wanted this sort of thing. `apt-get` based stuff is not transactional (package installation failure can leave things in an inconsistent state), not invertible (arbitrary scripts in the deb can - and do - run weird things), and not idempotent (you can install something, and reinstall and not get the right result).

I will be very pleased with getting the first of these, though the way it's handled, it looks like we get all three. The important thing, though, is having larger transactions (update tools X, Y, and Z at once or fail), and it looks like it should be possible to do this.

hendry• 12 years ago

It would be a lot simpler to do "transactional updates" by using Git FS like Webconverger does to roll out updates.

That way clients can see the exact changes at https://github.com/Webconverger/webc and even roll back or use branches. Not to mention enjoying all the other git compatible tooling.

Also after skimming through http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/tools/snappy (A snappy tour of Ubuntu Core!) it seems that snappy duplicates some of the functionality of Docker.

digital-rubber• 12 years ago

Downloaded, booted, looked around, halted, moved to /dev/null

I can't be the only one that sees a hypervisor (cloud host), virtual machine and docker containers, 3 layers for what? For ease of use?

So you have more infrastructure to monitor/keep updated etc for that same software/service which you used to run on the machine that is now the hypervisor/cloud host? For which again you need more resources, as even though the layers might be efficient, they still require resources.

Why would one want to keep old stuff around? With minor naming differences, creates room for a mistakes too. "oh wait no we should have started version 201401018 instead of 2014010218"

I don't see any benefit over physical machines with some proper thinking before upgrading, preparations.

errordeveloper2• 12 years ago

So, how come we are talking about it being Nix-like here? I don't seem to find any reference to that... And what exactly does "All neat and transactional." imply?

therealmarv3• 12 years ago

I've created a Vagrant Box based on the KVM installation. Try it out: https://bitbucket.org/therealmarv/ubuntu-core-vagrant

"vagrant init therealmarv/ubuntu-core"

Announcing Ubuntu Core, with snappy transactional updates

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