Slim device software with systemd targets and nspawn (asg2025)

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It has been 10 years since Axis Communications had a presentation at the systemd conference. Back then, we have shown how we have increased our product quality, stability and boot times by porting our platform to systemd. 10 years later, we had different challenges to keep the resource usages and boot times under control. We have started from bottom up and sliced our software for this purpose. This work also got us inspired to create virtual versions of our hardware products that we cluster deploy using systemd's nspawn. We have hundreds of engineers working on a software platform that is the base for different product types. It is a different challenge to keep the resource usages of different software composition when so many independent engineers collaborate together. We have applied a different strategy to keep our products as slim and as optimized as possible using different systemd principles like targets, slices, resource prioritization. As a side effect of this work, we have started from ground up and started to virtualize our products using systemd-nspawn. The next step for us was to figure out how in best way to cluster deploy our virtual products so that we can increase the quality of our end to end systems. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/de/ about this event: https://cfp.all-systems-go.io/all-systems-go-2025/talk/Z3NGWJ/