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This lecture is mainly about a development direction of containerization technology on Linux - pet container.

Traditionally, containers should be stateless and have a short life cycle, one service for one container. The user should build the container and replace it when its contents need to be updated, not update it interactively. The pet container, on the contrary, has a long life cycle, the user uses and updates it interactively, and it can contain multiple services.

The mutable container on the immutable system is an example of a pet container. The immutable distributions launched by Fedora and openSUSE use pet container to provide flexible software installation methods and development environments on the immutable system. However, I have found that these tools have some flaws and problems. For example, the pollution of the host environment (this is completely contrary to the purpose of container sandboxing), the created container can no longer be adjusted, etc. Moreover, the existing container tools do not provide sufficient support for the application scenarios of pet containers.

This presentation aims to explore the possibility of developing a new tool for pet containers, or modifying an existing tool, and what kind of work would be required to do so.