As a Professional Problem Solver, much of my work deals with installing, configuring, and managing the Operating System layer of an application stack.

Managing the OS layer has been the work of System Administrators for many years. With the advent of virtualization, it became relatively easy to create and destroy virtual machines. With the “cloud” many of us no longer even own physical servers. With DevOps tools and configuration management, we’ve created abstractions for configuration and automated provisioning.

Yet…

The operating systems have remained relatively the same. When we’re not using a PaaS like Heroku, our application servers are often full Linux VMs. Even with containerization tools like Docker, the underlying OS is fundamentally the same. The advent of virtualization brought many changes, but we still haven’t seen the full impact of this paradigm shift.

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