I met Alison Chaiken at LinuxCon 2010 in Boston, not long after she joined Nokia as a Meego technical consultant. A few months later, I interviewed her about her role at Nokia and her predictions about where open source technology was headed in 2011. She predicted an increasing role for cameras and microphones in mobile. “Cameras and microphones are used deliberately to take photos and record voice commands, but in the future they will be always on, gathering ambient data about the environment of users on the go,” she said.

These days Alison is works on automotive Linux systems programming at Mentor Graphics’ Embedded Software Division, and she spends a lot of time working with, contributing to, and speaking about systemd. She’ll be leading a training session, systemd, the Next-Generation Linux System Manager, at LISA15 in Washington D.C. on November 9. In this interview, she makes another prediction—that sys admins will enjoy using systemd.

What are a couple of considerations for sys admins before they transition to systemd?

For all the FUD generated by the systemd transition, most users and sys admins will simply not notice as the change takes place. The systemd team has made some effort to preserve compatibility with SysVinit, allowing the transition to be gradual. On the other hand, sys admins who learn to use the new features of systemd, especially those regarding resource allocation and security, stand to gain a great deal of benefit. The systemd journal is another tool that requires some adjustment, but will be simpler to integrate into testing and monitoring in the long run.

How does systemd improve lives for Linux admins? Does it make anything harder?

The brevity and uniformity of the systemd units and configuration files will make life simpler in the long run. Some individual packages may provide new systemd unit files that are poorly designed or erroneous, and sys admins may end up having to fix them.

When you’re not teaching the systemd session, which talks or sessions are you most looking forward to attending?

Since I’m an embedded developer working on automotive Linux, I look forward to learning more about profiling, tracing, and performance optimization.

What would you tell sys admins who’ve never attended a LISA conference about why it’s a “must do” event.

Bill Bradley, as quoted by John McPhee in A Sense of Where You Are:

Whenever you’re not practicing, somebody somewhere is, and when you meet, they’ll beat you.

Just so. If you are paid more than colleagues in other countries who perform similar work, then you’d better try to be worth more.

Do you have any final thoughts?

I admire the cleverness of many of the systemd features. While there are legitimate grounds on which to criticize systemd, it is a clean, well-designed tool with lots of intuitive features and excellent documentation. Sys admins who gain some familiarity with systemd will soon begin to enjoy using it.

LISA15
Series

This article is part of the LISA15 Series for LISA15, which will be held November 8-13, 2015, in Washington, D.C. LISA is an annual event where systems engineering and operations professionals share real-world knowledge about designing, building, and maintaining the critical systems.