It's difficult to believe that this year is the 15th anniversay of ADMIN. I've written for almost every issue and am pleased to be involved. I still remember in 2010 when Editor in Chief Joe Casad first contacted me about the new magazine that was to "focus on system administration," which he knew was smack dab in the center of my wheelhouse. Joe knew me from writing for other publications under his editorial control and thought I'd be a great fit. He was right, and the rest is history – 15 years of history.

Also of note is that Linux Magazine also reached its 25th anniversary this year. It's been a great run of publications for Linux New Media, and I congratulate Joe and the rest of the team for curating, editing, and elevating open source and technical IT content for us all. I'm proud to be part of this tech history.

I've been here since ADMIN launched, having written an article about OpenSolaris Zones in that first special issue, referred to as issue 0. And that's a funny, wonderful thing about technology: a 15-year-old article can still be relevant – or one that someone published a month ago can be outdated. Zones, jails, and containers, which are all implementations of the same concept, have found new relevance in contemporary IT shops. I thought that perhaps we would have evolved past containers by now. They were a hot topic 10 years ago once Docker and Podman hit the virtual pavement, but interest seemed to wane as fast as it gained focus. Now, however, even the government is moving to containers and containerizing many of its workloads as part of a movement called Zero Trust.

Alas, I'm not a fan of dockerized workloads. Podman and Docker are sold as being more secure, but they really aren't on their own. To make them secure, you must do a bit of kernel hardening and combine multiple other technologies to improve security, such as AppArmor/SELinux, syscall filtering, namespaces, cgroups, and more. It's applying a pound of prevention for an ounce of cure compared with the relative ease of implementation of BSD jails and zones or standard chroot containers. As I've written in this Welcome column before, however, when one IT shop does something and gets some notice for it, everyone else jumps into the fray as in the myth of lemmings jumping off a cliff.

You see? In a decade and a half, certain technology solutions haven't evolved much. But, I digress. My point is that ADMIN has provided you with excellent technology information for an incredible 15 years and will continue to do so. Even as a seasoned system administrator and cross-platform know-it-all, I've spent countless hours with the magazine next to me at my desk (yes, I love the print version) while I enter code, try commands, and install packages hoping to replicate the often highly technical and always informative solutions from our contributors.

The success of ADMIN can be attributed to its gap-filling presence. The writers are all practicing technology professionals – which makes a big difference to those of us who are in the trenches – supporting multiple applications, distributions, versions, and environments. Being a system administrator isn't for the faint of heart, but our contributors' articles can take some of the sting and frustration out of it. That's our mission and it's stated succinctly on the http://admin-magazine.com site: "Founded in 2010, ADMIN is the source for technical solutions to the real-world problems sys admins face every day."

I'd like to thank all of those responsible over the years that have made this anniversary possible: Brian Osborn, Publisher and Linux New Media CEO; Joe Casad, Editor in Chief; Rita L Sooby, Managing Editor; Dena Friesen, Layout; Lori White, Managing Editor, Layout, and Ken Hess Wrangler; Amber Ankerholz, News Editor; Ian Travis, Localization and Translation; and Amy Pettle and Aubrey Vaughn, Copy Editors. Without this team, there would be no anniversaries. Without the great writers and contributors, there would be no content. And without you, the loyal system administrator, reader, and subscriber, there would be no need to publish.

Ken Hess * Senior ADMIN Editor