[systemd-devel] Targeting `systemd --user` for a distributed app without root access: dead-end or neat?

[sbaugh at catern.com]

Hugues Malphettes <hmalphettes at gmail.com> writes:
> Hi,
>
> We are discussing adding support for coreos's fleet to control a user
> session of systemd.
> On paper it is perfect to run a distributed application in an
> infrastructure without root access.

This would be extremely helpful for some projects of mine.

For a while I've been providing to my users a group of high-powered
machines with a common user database, which they can log into as their
(unprivileged) user and use (unprivileged) virtual machines or run
distributed applications. Still, they had to manually distribute their
applications across the machines.

I've been planning to write a cluster manager that can operate on
individual user accounts rather than whole hosts, so that this cluster
is more useful. Indeed, in my idle thoughts on the matter I planned to
make use of systemd --user as the user-account-local supervisor. If you
taught Fleet how to do this, that would be perfect for my deployment!

> So what is the future for this part of systemd?

Not being a systemd developer, I can only hope that systemd --user stays
around; it's a great movement in the right direction, of putting more
capability in the hands of unprivileged users. Using it as a component
in a cluster manager like Fleet is an important part of this.