Building custom appliance distributions with rBuilder

Posted Aug 8, 2008 18:39 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

It's the natural evolution from running each and every process in a "virtual machine" that we have had for the last 30 years.

I don't know that it's evolution, because in that time we've been moving the point of sharing both up and down the stack. At one time, it was considered a great step forward -- for management purposes -- to take a single computer shared by 100 users and split it into 100 single-person computers. Since then, we've been steadily moving to bind those 100 computers back together into a coherent system, until now we're actually back to having them share the same CPUs.

I think running multiple one-application Linux systems on the same hardware vs running multiple applications on a one-Linux hardware platform is very much like the statically linked vs shared library question.

The statically linked program is definitely simpler to install and simpler to maintain in that you can maintain two programs independently. But the shared library uses less memory and storage space and lets you improve a bunch of programs by updating a single library.