As a middleware (to use a fading term) or technical architect, I preferred not to get too involved in the detailed OS layer considerations when it can be helped (my Infrastructure Architect colleagues will always know more about NICs, port bonding, kernel versions etc etc than I ever will) and why I prefer to work with PaaS over IaaS.

But there is an undeniable trend where having a greater understanding of the OS is necessary, this is because we’re seeing PaaS expanding to cover code abstracted solutions such as Oracle’s Integration Cloud, Mulesoft, Dell’s Boomi etc. down to every things as code in the form of Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker and of course  microservices.

So what does this have to do with OpenShift?  Well to apply those heady aspirations we’ve had with middleware of “I can build my solution and run it on my platform anywhere” means in the world of microservices I need to find a common denominator on which I can be portable.  This comes in the form of Kubernetes and Docker and we’ll probably see service meshs in due course (Istio, Linkerd etc). Docker obviously brings the need to understand the OS albeit not at the level of bonding network connections, but still a good level of OS knowledge to do things properly. Over the last couple of years there has been a fair bit of work to achieve this with the inertia of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Open Container Initiative (OCI).

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