“Linux is a Unix-like, open source and community-developed operating system (OS) for computers, servers, mainframes, mobile devices and embedded devices.”
We’re long past the Linux vs windows days and now, Linux established itself as the operating system to go to for server systems, especially the large-scale ones like cloud. It’s even hard to mention any product without its involvement let alone talk about it as a distinct technology. Nevertheless we make use of a lot of the bundled features to skip it without a hat tip. Those range from bridges and bond interfaces to iptables powered security policies to ipvs load balancers to kvm and of course containers.
We install Ubuntu when we can, generally utilizing MaaS to deploy hundreds of nodes without any human intervention. But as any seasoned systems engineer would know, the real work starts on day 2. We need to maintain the nodes, keep them up to date and troubleshoot when something out of the ordinary happens. That’s when we go to basic tools like top, vmstat and iostat or for more advanced cases ftrace and eBPF.
