In this talk, we’ll explore some history of workload isolation from the 1960s to date, take a peek under the hood of popular workload isolation mechanisms(Linux containers, MicroVMs…) and discuss the standards that make them play well across multiple vendors.

Abstract

Isolation, when it comes to humans is a grave punishment. Turns out, for software workloads, this is a highly sought after feature to effectively utilize infrastructure resources(compute/storage/network, etc.) and to lower the cost of operation.
When you throw a container image or a function at a public cloud provider, they are glad to run it for you at affordable rates because of advancements in workload isolation. Similar isolation primitives are what enable you to replicate your application’s entire infrastructure with just a `docker-compose up` command.

Bio

Praveen Kottarathil is a software engineer by trade and currently focuses on the operational reliability of software systems.
He is a part of ING’s Cash & Devices team, responsible for the software systems that handle deposit, withdrawal, and bulk orders of physical cash (The money you can touch!). Praveen has clocked up over 15 years of industry experience in designing, building, and operating software systems. He enjoys wearing multiple hats as an architect, developer, or operations/reliability engineer. He genuinely cares about continuous delivery, human factors in operational reliability, and nurturing psychological safety in teams. Praveen aspires to be a stand-up comedian someday.