systemd is a service manager for Linux. It is the first process that runs on many Linux distributions and manages all other user processes. It includes utilities for logging, process isolation, process dependencies, socket activation, and many other tasks.
psystemd is a python library to communicate with systemd over dbus from python as an alternative to shelling out from an application to control services.
Anita Zhang is an engineerd managerd at Meta and Alvaro Levia is a production engineer at Meta.
I attended their systemd workshop at the Southern California Linux Expo.
Topics covered:

What's systemd?
Giving talks and workshops
cgroups and namespaces
systemd timers vs cron
Migrating from CentOS 6 to 7
Production engineers need to go lower in the stack to debug applications
Meta's Linux userspace team
Use of public cloud at Meta
Meta's bootcamp
Pystemd

Mastodon

Anita Zhang
Alvaro Leiva

Workshop

systemd workshop

Conference talks

Journey into the Heart of systemd - Scale 19x
Systemd: why you should care as a Python developer - PyCon 2018
Move Fast without Breaking things - Scale 18x
Solving All the Problems with systemd - LISA18
Using systemd to high level languages - All Systems Go!
The Curious Case of Memory Growth - Scale 19x

Related Links

systemd
psystemd
systemd-run
systemd-timers

Transcript
You can help edit this transcript on GitHub.
Introductions
[00:00:00] Jeremy: So today I'm talking to Avaro Leiva and Anita Zhang. Avaro is the author of the pystemd library and he's a production engineer at Meta. And Anita is an engineerd managerd at Meta, and I'll let her explain that further.
[00:00:19] Jeremy: But thank you both for joining me today.
[00:00:21] Anita: Yeah, thanks for having us.
[00:00:24] Jeremy: I guess where we could start, Anita, maybe you could explain a little bit your, your title that I just gave you there.
engineerd managerd
[00:00:31] Anita: Yeah, so by default I, I should be a software engineering manager, but when I transitioned to management, I was not, Ready to go public with, um, my transition.
So I kind of hid it by, changing the title. we have some weird systems in place that grep on like the word engineer. So I had to keep engineer in there somehow. and so I kind of polled my friends what I should change my title to, and they're like, oh, you're gonna support the systemd team, so you should change it to like managerd.
So I was like, sounds good. engineerd, managerd.
I didn't wanna get kicked out of any workplace groups, for example, that required me to be an engineer.
[00:01:15] Jeremy: Oh, okay.
[00:01:17] Anita: Or like engineering function, I guess.
[00:01:19] Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah. And you just gotta title it yourself, so as long as you got engineer in it, you're good.
[00:01:24] Anita: Yeah, pretty much. Some people have really fun titles like Chief Potato Officer and things like that.
[00:01:32] Jeremy: So what groups does the, uh, the potato officer get to go in?
[00:01:37] Anita: Yeah. Not the C level ones. (laughs)
What's systemd?
[00:01:42] Jeremy: I guess maybe to, to start, we should explain to people who aren't familiar, uh, what systemd is. So if either of you wanna wanna take that one.
[00:01:52] Alvaro: so people who doesn't know, right?
So systemd is today is your init system, right? Is the thing that manage your, your process. and the best way to understand this, it is like when your computer, it needs to execute something. And that's something is what we call pid one. And that pid one is the thing that is gonna manage everything from now from there on, right?
Uh, in the most basic level, if you remember how to, how does program start, how does like an idea becomes a program? Uh, you need to fork exec, right? So that means that something has to be at the top of that tree and that is systemd. now that can be anything, right? So there was a time where that was like systemv and there was also like upstart, uh, today's systemd is the thing that, uh, it's shipped in most distri