Empowering Linux Developers for the New Wave of Innovation

Evan Dandrea — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 12:15:15 +0000

New businesses with software at their core are being created every day. Developers are the lifeblood of so much of what is being built and of technological innovation, and they are ever more vital to operations across the entire business. So why wouldn't we empower them?

Machine learning and IoT in particular offer huge opportunities for developers, especially those facing the crowded markets of other platforms, to engage with a sizeable untapped audience.

That Linux is open source makes it an amazing breeding ground for innovation. Developers aren’t constrained by closed ecosystems, meaning that Linux has long been the operating system of choice for developers. So by engaging with Linux, businesses can attract the best available developer skills.

The Linux ecosystem has always strived for a high degree of quality. Historically it was the Linux community taking sole responsibility for packaging software, gating each application update with careful review to ensure it worked as advertised on each distribution of Linux. This proved difficult for all sides.

Broad access to the code was needed, and open-source software could be offered through the app store. User support requests and bugs were channelled through the Linux distributions, and there was such a volume of reporting, it became difficult to feed information back to the appropriate software authors.

As the number of applications and Linux distributions grew, it became increasingly clear this model would not scale much further. Software authors took matters into their own hands, often picking a single Linux distribution to support and skipping the app store entirely. Because of this, they lost app discoverability and gained the complexity of running duplicative infrastructure.

This placed increased responsibility on developers at a time when the expectations of their role was already expanding. They are no longer just makers, they now bear the risk of breaking robotic arms with their code or bringing down MRI machines with a patch.

As an industry we acknowledge this problem—you can potentially have a bad update and software isn’t an exact science—but we then ask these developers to roll the dice. Do you risk compromise or self-inflicted harm?

Meanwhile the surface area increases. The industry continues a steady march of automation, creating ever more software components to plug together and layer solutions on. Not only do developers face the update question for their own code, they also must trust all developers facing that same decision in all the code beneath their own.

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Embracing Snaps: an Interview with Canonical and Slack

Petros Koutoupis — Wed, 27 Jun 2018 12:00:00 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

This year was a big one for companies like Canonical and Slack. It also was a big year for technologies that Canonical created to enable third-party application support—specifically, the snap package.

I'm sure most, if not all, of you have heard about this package manager. In fact, it's been around since at least 2014, but it initially was developed around Canonical's Ubuntu phone operating system. Now, although the phone operating system has since been canceled, snaps continue to dominate the operating system, in both the server and desktop space.

What Is a Snap?

A "snap" application package is a self-contained piece of software, and although it originally was designed to be hosted on Ubuntu, the package will work across a range of other Linux distributions. This isn't your traditional APT or YUM manager hosting DEB and RPM (or other) package formats.

Again, the appeal to snap packages is that they are self-contained (that is, containerized). They are designed to auto-update and are safe to run. A snap package is bundled with its dependencies, which is what allows it to run on all other major Linux distribution without any modification. It also doesn't have any dependency to any package manager or application store. But, don't misunderstand this—a package manager or application store still can host one or more snap packages; however, the snap package is not dependent to that manager.

Snapcraft is the official tool for software developers to package their software programs in a Snap format.

Sitting Down with Canonical and Slack

Earlier this year on January 18th, Canonical announced the first iteration of Slack as a snap. But, why was this announcement so important? I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Evan Dandrea of Canonical and Felix Riesberg of Slack. They gave me the answers I was looking for.

Evan's team at Canonical builds the platform to make everyone's life easier—that is, Snapcraft. And Felix's team leverages that very same platform to bring wonderful applications, such as Slack, to your Linux desktop.

First, for those not familiar with Slack, it's an enterprise software platform that allows teams and businesses (of all sizes) to communicate effectively. It's organized, easily accessible, and more important, it allows for better and more efficient communication than email. Slack isn't limited to just professional use; it also can be adopted for more personal uses.

The Interview

Petros Koutoupis: Why snap?

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