[Wolves] openSUSE MicroOS

[Chris Ellis]

Recently I've been playing with openSUSE MicroOS, It's quite an
interesting modern spin on the Linux distribution.  It's mostly
designed for running containers, so won't be everyone's cup of tea.

What makes it a bit different:
 * It's filesystem is read only
 * It's based from Tumbleweed (openSUSEs stable yet rolling release)
 * Comes with podman out the box

This leads to some interesting features.  Since the root filesystem is
readonly, software updates are performed in a new read-write snapshot
of the root volume.  In what is dubbed: transactional-update.  This is
a bit of an extension on some of the cool stuff SUSE has done for
years with snapshots.  Once software updates have been installed, the
system is rebooted.  Should the reboot fail, the last working snapshot
is automatically used.  There is a service which you can configure
reboot windows in.

I'm using it on my Bergamot Monitoring dev setup, and find that the
servers update and reboot roughly every other day.  This is pretty
awesome for keeping a fleet of servers upto date without any effort.

Since the main filesystem is readonly, the out of the box server is
pretty spare in terms of tooling.  The idea being that services are
deployed as containers over the top.

MicroOS came out of the openSUSE Kubic project, which is openSUSE's
Kubernetes platform, hence the container slant.  However some people
in the community are using it for desktops.

Arguably this approach comes out of chaos engineering, if you're
always designing for failure, you're more likely to survive a real
failure.

Rich Brown (former chairman of openSUSE) has some petty strong views
on the approach and see it as the future of Linux distros:
https://rootco.de/2020-02-10-regular-releases-are-wrong/

More info: https://en.opensuse.org/Kubic:MicroOS

Try it out: https://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/iso/openSUSE-MicroOS-DVD-x86_64-Current.iso

Regards,
Chris