Blog
Dustin Kirkland

Dustin Kirkland

39 posts

Ubuntu Product and Strategy

Dustin Kirkland is part of Canonical's Ubuntu Product and Strategy team, working for Mark Shuttleworth, and leading the technical strategy, road map, and life cycle of the Ubuntu Cloud and IoT commercial offerings. Formerly the CTO of Gazzang, a venture funded start-up acquired by Cloudera, Dustin designed and implemented an innovative key management system for the cloud, called zTrustee, and delivered comprehensive security for cloud and big data platforms with eCryptfs and other encryption technologies. Dustin is an active Core Developer of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, maintainer of 20+ open source projects, and the creator of Byobu, DivItUp.com, and LinuxSearch.org. A Fightin' Texas Aggie Class of 2001 graduate, Dustin lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife Kim, daughters, and his Australian Shepherds, Aggie and Tiger. Dustin is also an avid home brewer.

Dustin Kirkland
10 February 2016

Docker, Alpine, Ubuntu, and You

Cloud and server Article

There’s no shortage of excitement, controversy, and readership, any time you can work “Docker” into a headline these days. Perhaps a bit like “Donald Trump”, but for CIO tech blogs and IT news — a real hot button. Hey, look, I even did it myself in the title of this post!Sometimes an article even starts out about CoreOS, but gets divert ...

Dustin Kirkland
20 January 2016

Data Driven Analysis: /tmp on tmpfs

Cloud and server Article

tl;drPut /tmp on tmpfs and you’ll improve your Linux system’s I/O, reduce your carbon foot print and electricity usage, stretch the battery life of your laptop, extend the longevity of your SSDs, and provide stronger security.In fact, we should do that by default on Ubuntu servers and cloud images.Having tested 502 physical and virtual se ...

Dustin Kirkland
22 December 2015

More people use Ubuntu than anyone actually knows

Cloud and server Article

People of earth, waving at Saturn, courtesy of NASA.“It Doesn’t Look Like Ubuntu Reached Its Goal Of 200 Million Users This Year”, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix, in a post that it seems he’s been itching to post for months.Why the negativity?!? Are you sure? Did you count all of them?No one has. And no one can count all of the Ubuntu ...

Dustin Kirkland
5 November 2015

LXD in the Sky with Diamonds

Cloud and server Article

Picture yourself containers on a server With systemd trees and spawned tty’s Somebody calls you, you answer quite quickly A world with the density so high – Sgt. Graber’s LXD Smarts Club Band Last week, we proudly released Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily) — the final developer snapshot of the Ubuntu Server before we focus the majority ...

Dustin Kirkland
12 August 2015

Ubuntu and LXD at ContainerCon 2015

Cloud and server Article

Canonical is delighted to sponsor ContainerCon 2015, a Linux Foundation event in Seattle next week, August 17-19, 2015. It’s quite exciting to see the A-list of sponsors, many of them newcomers to this particular technology, teaming with energy around containers. From chroots to BSD Jails and Solaris Zones, the concepts behind containers ...

Dustin Kirkland
10 August 2015

Golden Ratio calculated to 2 trillion digits, on Ubuntu, in the Cloud

Cloud and server Article

The Golden Ratio is one of the oldest and most visible irrational numbers known to humanity. Pi is perhaps more famous, but the Golden Ratio is found in more of our art, architecture, and culture throughout human history.I think of the Golden Rat ...

Dustin Kirkland
3 August 2015

Packaging a Java application for Snappy Ubuntu is this easy…

Internet of Things Article

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Dustin Kirkland
20 July 2015

Prime Time: Docker, Juju, and Snappy Ubuntu Core

Cloud and server Article

As you probably remember from grade school math class, primes are numbers that are only divisible by 1 and themselves. 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11 are the first 5 prime numbers, for example.Many computer operations, such as public-key cryptography, depends entirely on prime numbers. In fact, RSA encryption, invented in 1978, uses a modulo of a p ...

Dustin Kirkland
22 June 2015

Container-to-Container Networking: The Bits have Hit the Fan!

Cloud and server Article

A thing of beautyIf you read my last post, perhaps you followed the embedded instructions and ran hundreds of LXD system containers on your own Ubuntu machine.Or perhaps you’re already a Docker enthusiast and your super savvy microservice architecture orchestrates dozens of applications among a pile of process containers.Either way, the m ...

Dustin Kirkland
22 June 2015

The Fan overlay network for container addresses, from Canonical

Cloud and server Article

Today, Canonical introduces the Fan overlay network system in Ubuntu in test images for Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine, delivering the fastest and most scalable address expansion mechanism in the container world. The Fan enables cloud users to grow the number of Docker and LXD containers they can address in a single cloud e ...

Dustin Kirkland
11 June 2015

How many containers can you run on your machine?

Cloud and server Article

652 Linux containers running on a Laptop? Are you kidding me???A couple of weeks ago, at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Canonical released the results of some scalability testing of Linux containers (LXC) managed by LXD.Ryan Harper and James Page presented their results — some 536 Linux containers on a very modest little Intel server ...

Dustin Kirkland
4 November 2014

LXD – the Linux container daemon

Cloud and server News

Dustin Kirkland, Product Manager at Canonical introduces LXD (lex-dee), a new hypervisor that delivers capabilities to LXC containers that cloud users demand in scale out infrastructure. LXD is a persistent system daemon developed to enable the secure management and live migration of LXC (lex-cee) containers via an easy to use command lin ...