This is our last week of hallway track coverage at The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America 2023 in Vancouver, Canada. Today’s anthology episode features: Jeffrey Sica (Developer Experience & Programs @ CNCF), Eddie Zeneski (Kubernetes SIG CLI), Yaron Schneider (Co-creator of Dapr and Founder and CTO at Diagrid).
Special thanks to our friends at GitHub for sponsoring us to attend this conference as part of Maintainer Month.
We’ve all experienced pain moving from local development, to testing, and then on to production. This cycle can be long and tedious, especially as AI models and datasets are integrated. Modal is trying to make this loop of development as seamless as possible for AI practitioners, and their platform is pretty incredible!
Erik from Modal joins us in this episode to help us understand how we can run or deploy machine learning models, massively parallel compute jobs, task queues, web apps, and much more, without our own infrastructure.
Service Weaver is a programming framework for writing, deploying, and managing distributed applications in Go. With Service Weaver, you write your application like it is a traditional, single-process Go executable that runs on your local machine. Then, you deploy it to the Cloud, and the framework breaks it down into a set of connected microservices and integrates it with the cloud provider (e.g., monitoring, tracing, logging).
MRSK deploys web apps anywhere from bare metal to cloud VMs using Docker with zero downtime. It uses the dynamic reverse-proxy Traefik to hold requests while the new application container is started and the old one is stopped. It works seamlessly across multiple hosts, using SSHKit to execute commands. It was built for Rails applications, but works with any type of web app that can be containerized with Docker.
Watch the screencast or check out the code & docs.
The rough math goes like this: We spent $3.2m on cloud in 2022. Just under a million of that was on storing 8 petabytes of files in S3, fully replicated across several regions. So that leaves ~$2.3m on everything else: app servers, cache servers, database servers, search servers, the works. That’s the part of the budget we intend to bring to zero in 2023. Then we’ll worry about exiting the 8PB from S3 in 2024.
David spoke at length on this decision when he was on Ship It! late last year.
StackQL allows you to create, modify and query the state of services and resources across all three major public cloud providers (Google, AWS and Azure) using a common, widely known DSL…SQL.
I have to admit, it does look pretty darn simple:
SELECT * FROM google.compute.instances
WHERE zone = 'australia-southeast1-b'
AND project = 'my-project';
This week we’re talking about mainframes with Cameron Seay, Adjunct Professor at East Carolina University and a member of the Governing Board of the Open Mainframe Project. If you’ve been curious about mainframes, this show will be a great guide.
Cameron explains exactly what a mainframe is and how it’s different from the cloud. We talk COBOL and the state of education and opportunities around that language. We cover the state-of-the-art in mainframe land, System Z, Linux on mainframes, and more.
Narayanan Raghavan leads the global SRE organization that runs Red Hat managed cloud services including OpenShift Dedicated, Azure Red Hat Openshift, Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, and Red Hat OpenShift Data Science among others across the three major cloud providers: AWS, GCP & Azure. We start with a high-level discussion about DevOps, SRE & platform engineering, and then we dig into SRE specifics, including what it takes to safely roll out updates across many tens of thousands of OpenShift clusters.
15 years ago, Gerhard discovered magic in the form of Ruby on Rails. It was intuitive and it just worked. That is the context in which Gerhard fell in love with infrastructure and operations.
Today, for special episode 77, we start at Seven Shipping Principles, and, in the true spirit of Ship It, we’ll see what happens next.
Our guest is David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, co-founder of Basecamp & HEY, and a lot more - check out dhh.dk.
TLDR: AWS is super-expensive at scale.
Of course it’s expensive to rent your computers from someone else. But it’s never presented in those terms. The cloud is sold as computing on demand, which sounds futuristic and cool, and very much not like something as mundane as “renting computers”, even though that’s mostly what it is.
But also:
It’s also about what kind of internet we want to operate in the future. It strikes me as downright tragic that this decentralized wonder of the world is now largely operating on computers owned by a handful of mega corporations. If one of the primary AWS regions go down, seemingly half the internet is offline along with it.
Methinks this will become even more of a trend in the coming months and years.
Few genuinely need a multi-cloud setup. There is plenty of advice out there which mostly boils down to don’t do it, you will be worse off. Vex.dev is a startup that provides APIs for video and audio streaming. The hard part is real-time combined with massive scale - think hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections. They achieve this by using a combination of Fly.io, AWS and GCP. Jason Carter, founder of Vex Communications, is joining us today to talk about the multi-cloud setup that vex.dev runs.
It is just not about redundancy. In this post I cover how having more AZs mean you need fewer nodes to achieve higher availability.
This lets you do so many cool things, even joining across disparate services:
select
aws.name aws_user_name,
slack.id as slack_user_id,
slack.display_name as slack_name
from
aws_iam_user as aws,
slack_user as slack
where
aws.name = slack.email;
+--------------------------+---------------+------------+
| aws_user_name | slack_user_id | slack_name |
+--------------------------+---------------+------------+
| dwight@dundermifflin.com | U2EMB8HLP | dwight |
| jim@dundermifflin.com | U02HE4Z7E | jim |
+--------------------------+---------------+------------+
Useful for compliance, security, ops, and cost management.
Maybe it’s the Californian sun. Or perhaps it’s the time spent at Disney Studios, the home of the best stories. One thing is for sure: Taylor Dolezal is one of the happiest cloud native people that Gerhard knows.
As a former Lead SRE for Disney Studios, Taylor has significant hands-on experience running cloud native technologies in a large company. After a few years as a HashiCorp Developer Advocate, Taylor is now Head of End User Ecosystem at CNCF. In his current role, he is helping enable cloud native success for end-users like Boeing, Mercedes Benz & many others.
As best I can tell, this provides simplified search across your infra, generates reports so you can easily audit resource usage, and lets you create/trigger jobs such as cleaning up unused resources and enforcing tag structures.
The search looks pretty powerful and you can pipe search results directly to jobs for quick processing:
search is(resource) and tags.owner==null | tag update owner "John Doe"
eBPF is a revolutionary kernel technology that has lit the cloud native world on fire. If you’re going to have one person explain the excitement, that person would be Liz Rice. Liz is the COSO at Isovalent, creators of the open source Cilium project and pioneers of eBPF tech.
On this episode Liz tells Jerod all about the power of eBPF, where it came from, what kind of new applications its enabling, and who is building the next generation of networking, security, and observability tools with it.
Tammer Saleh, founder of Super Orbital, a tiny team of exceptional Kubernetes engineers and teachers, is joining us today to talk about what is cool in the Cloud Native world. Yes, it’s the same Tammer that we had the pleasure of on shipit.show/31 - Is Kubernetes a platform?
In today’s episode, we also cover two great blog posts:
We wrap up with ✨ The Cool Wall of Cloud Native ✨
We know that many of you listen to this podcast while running 🏃♀️ or cycling 🚴♂️ Hey Dan!
How many of you cycled to a conference? Gerhard knows a single person that cycled 764 miles for 8 days straight from Switzerland to Spain for this year’s KubeCon EU. His name is Johann Gyger, a CNCF ambassador & a cloud consultant at Peak Scale. Johann is a cloud engineer at heart that is all in on sustainability. He is the main reason why Gerhard is super excited to talk about electric cars & Dagger at the Swiss Cloud Native Day this September.
I won’t call SQLite’s current moment a comeback, because the most used database engine in the world doesn’t have anything to come back from. I’m going with “renaissance”, because despite its already mass adoption, there has been something of a rebirth of interest from one software sector that had previously relegated it to dev & test environments: web apps
YouTubeDrive is a Wolfram Language (aka Mathematica) package that encodes/decodes arbitrary data to/from simple RGB videos which are automatically uploaded to/downloaded from YouTube. Since YouTube imposes no limits on the total number or length of videos users can upload, this provides an effectively infinite but extremely slow form of file storage.
Filed under: ways-no-youtube-engineer-ever-imagined-people-would-use-their-software
Spacedrive helps you organize your files across many devices in one place. Here’s the motivation:
Many of us have multiple cloud accounts, drives that aren’t backed up and data at risk of loss. We depend on cloud services like Google Photos and iCloud, but are locked in with limited capacity and almost zero interoperability between services and operating systems. Photo albums shouldn’t be stuck in a device ecosystem, or harvested for advertising data. They should be OS agnostic, permanent and personally owned. Data we create is our legacy, that will long outlive us—open source technology is the only way to ensure we retain absolute control over the data that defines our lives, at unlimited scale.
A short, cogent argument why hosting your own cloud services is worth the time/effort:
Consider this, you carefully curate your playlists on Spotify but every now and then you see a certain song missing from your playlist. Same goes for videos saved in your YouTube playlists or other music/video streaming services. Then there is also the case of OTT streaming platforms where the show you were going to watch over weekend has now disappeared.
The author points to r/selfhosted and this awesome self hosted list as good resources to get started.
Rich Burroughs:
When you hear the phrase “cloud native,” is Kubernetes the first thing that comes to your mind? It is for me, and I expect I’m not alone. Kubernetes is now the second-largest open source project after Linux, and it’s the big fish in the cloud native pond. But there are many other projects in the CNCF landscape and the broader cloud native community.
So, I thought I’d list some cloud native tools that can be very useful for teams that aren’t using Kubernetes or aren’t using it for every workload. Here are 7 of them that I like a lot.
If Rich’s name rings a bell, that’s because he was just on Ship It! last week. 😉
One of the things we discussed with Paul Copplestone from Supabase was what, exactly, might a cloud native Postgres look like? Well, perhaps it will look like OrioleDB:
A new storage engine for PostgreSQL, bringing a modern approach to database capacity, capabilities and performance to the world’s most-loved database platform.
OrioleDB consists of an extension, building on the innovative table access method framework and other standard Postgres extension interfaces. By extending and enhancing the current table access methods, OrioleDB opens the door to a future of more powerful storage models that are optimized for cloud and modern hardware architectures.
I came across an interesting use case for edge compute the other day: cookie management at the edge. It probably won’t be super relevant to a ton of people, but it’s an interesting use case I wanted to share, nonetheless.
