Distributed management software for operating systems hasn’t changed in any significant way for the past 20 years, according to Josh Berkus, Project Atomic community lead at Red Hat Inc. There have been some smaller shifts, such as the addition of configuration management, but in the broader sense the software has remained unchanged. Moving to an OS based on an image tree really changes that Berkus said.

Berkus was joined by Pradeepto Bhattacharya, principal software engineer of Developer Tools at Red Hat during an interview with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during KubeCon 2016 in Seattle, WA.

Managing individual hosts as a group

But there is a lot more undergoing a change after a long period of stagnation.

“Ten years ago if you wanted to scale out a system and automate it, you’d hire a bunch of brainiacs at the University and have them make something custom for you,” said Berkus. However, if you’re looking to manage individual hosts as a group, what do you do?

“That’s what Atomic is about. We want to manage the individual hosts en masse,” Berkus said. Even now Red hat is working to add more features, including layering. This allows groups of servers that have special purposes because they need extra or different software. Berkus himself said he’s using it for different versions of Kubernetes, the open-source container cluster management software project by Google.

Growing community and expanding features

Both interviewees were very excited about the conference itself. They’ve been able to see firsthand how the community and industry has grown, and it doesn’t show any signs of stopping.

“It’s amazing that they announced the next conference will be in a year, and it will be two or three times as big,” said Bhattacharya. He added that he was very excited about the revolution to democratize the cloud. “User experience should be really, really simple and easy to use. It should be very simple to teach to anyone.”

Working toward that ease of use for developers is one of Red Hat’s top goals, as is making the tools for learning easy to access. “There is a repository [of information] inside the Red Hat organization, and the ‘readme’ there will tell you everything. We also have a blog link that will teach you some of the programming,” said Bhattacharya.

*Disclosure: The Linux Foundation and other companies sponsor some KubeCon 2016 segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither The Linux Foundation nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE