maintainersummitindia2024

This talk takes you through the journey of Flatcar Container Linux from the eyes of a maintainer. What began as a "friendly fork" of CoreOS Container Linux has grown into a robust, independent, container-optimized Linux OS. The journey kicked off with a red CI dashboard daunting to many, almost-zero platform support, an unstructured release pipeline, a mammoth list of outdated packages, missing support for ARM architecture and more -- hardly a foundation for future initiatives atop. Over the years, countless human hours have been dedicated to transforming Flatcar, and I plan to discuss the initiatives we have undertaken, the war stories along the way, and the lessons we have learned as a team. The talk will also cover how we embrace new innovations and challenges while contributing back to the community. Attendees will gain insight into the challenges and rewards of maintaining a fast-moving Linux distribution and discover avenues to contribute to the Flatcar ecosystem.