Systemd Introduces "Portable Services" Functionality, Similar To Containers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Systemd Introduces "Portable Services" Functionality, Similar To Containers

The past several months Lennart Poettering has been working on a "portable services" concept and that big ticket new feature has now landed in Systemd. Portable services are akin to containers but different...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Systemd-Portable-Services

[johanb]

I don't see the point of these "Portable Services", could someone explain?

It's a container which isn't properly isolated and doesn't work for userspace apps, so it is neither a competitor to flatpak/snap nor docker?

[treba]

If I get it right, it can be a competitor for certain snap use cases, like canonical-livepatch. Or to chrooted applications like postfix (on debian distributions, don't know for others).
So this is probably to complement flatpak, which focuses on the desktop/user. And it could fit well into fedora atomic hosts.

[fazalmajid]

I don't see the point of these "Portable Services", could someone explain?

The authors of systemd believe if they piss on something, it improves the flavor, and won’t rest until all system functionality is subsumed by their bloatware.

[Delgarde]

I don't see the point of these "Portable Services", could someone explain?

It's a container which isn't properly isolated and doesn't work for userspace apps, so it is neither a competitor to flatpak/snap nor docker?

Reading the article, the use case seems to be a middle ground between traditional UNIX services being isolated only by userid (and maybe chroot), and the greater isolation of containers. I'm not quite clear on where it fits into the picture though, since systemd already covers that space pretty well...

[tobias]

Apparently there are many people that use containers as a way to package things for easier distribution and do not care for the isolation too much. This is the target audience for portable services: They can now bundle up everything their service needs into one file and ship that.

Users can then attach that file to their systems and work with that as usual.

Benefit: Less infrastructure needed to run those service. Disadvantage: Less infrastructure available to facilitate things like distribution of images, updates, etc.

[GunpowaderGuy]

Wasn't this supposed to be an init system ?

[RahulSundaram]

Wasn't this supposed to be an init system ?

It hasn't been just an init system pretty much since it started. It is an umbrella project that has many tools including an init system

[lucrus]

The authors of systemd believe if they piss on something, it improves the flavor, and won’t rest until all system functionality is subsumed by their bloatware.

While I was reading the article I was thinking just that: "guess how long will it take before some demented comment about systemd stuffing things down the throats arrives?". I wasn't fast enough to post this before said demented comment arrived...

[tg--]

Wasn't this supposed to be an init system ?

Nope, as the name implies it was from the start intended to be a system and service management daemon.