Operations without the Operating System

Talk from the Operability conference in London about fundamental problems with the evolution of infrastructure, and how new operating systems and unikernels might provide a solutions.

Some truth and lots of speculation about the future of operations.

Transcript

1. Operations without the Operating System Puppet Labs Gareth Rushgrove Ops People and Future Technology
2. Gareth Rushgrove @garethr
3. Gareth Rushgrove
4. First, some quotes
5. These systems had never been designed with security in mind and now were becoming hugely complex Gareth Rushgrove
6. The dense complexity and increasing length of computer code as computers where asked to do more and more would make malicious code increasingly hard to find Gareth Rushgrove
7. Written in 2014 Gareth Rushgrove
8. Not about Heartbleed Gareth Rushgrove
9. In a history book about the 1970s Gareth Rushgrove Intercept: The Secret History of Computers and Spies by Gordon Corera. Specifically about the Anderson Report, 1972
10. This talk
11. Lots of new operating systems have appeared in the last year Gareth Rushgrove
12. Speculation Klaxon
13. The age of the general purpose operating system is over Gareth Rushgrove
14. What does that mean for operators? Gareth Rushgrove
15. A New Breed of OS Smaller, faster, more productive?
16. What server operating systems are you running? Gareth Rushgrove
17. Gareth Rushgrove I’m guessing most people said:
18. Gareth Rushgrove Someone will try and be smart and say:
19. Gareth Rushgrove And someone will hide the fact they’re running:
20. But elsewhere on the internet… Gareth Rushgrove
21. Gareth Rushgrove From RedHat, uses RPM-OSTree under the hood
22. Gareth Rushgrove Built-in service-discovery and clustering support
23. Gareth Rushgrove Snappy from Ubuntu, basically replaces apt-get with containers
24. Gareth Rushgrove Docker running on Docker running as PID 1
25. Gareth Rushgrove Nano is a tiny alternative to Windows Server 6
26. Gareth Rushgrove Bonneville provides containers that are really virtual machines
27. Gareth Rushgrove Clear Linux provides hardware isolation guarantees to containers
28. Common themes Gareth Rushgrove
29. Cluster native Read-only file systems Transactional updates Integrated with containers Gareth Rushgrove
30. We’ve seen some of this story before Gareth Rushgrove
31. Gareth Rushgrove
32. ESXi, XenServer Gareth Rushgrove
33. Gareth Rushgrove
34. What plays out the same and what different is interesting Gareth Rushgrove Note, everyone wants to be the VMware of containers
35. Why The Interest in New Operating Systems And why now?
36. Lots of homogeneous workloads Gareth Rushgrove
37. Security is front page news Gareth Rushgrove
38. I just want somewhere to run my containers Gareth Rushgrove
39. Size as a proxy for complexity Gareth Rushgrove Can you name the 184 default packages in Ubuntu?
40. Utilisation matters Gareth Rushgrove Only to large organisations who pay for software mind
41. Increasingly interacting with higher level abstractions anyway Gareth Rushgrove Mesos, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry
42. Piling up Abstractions A brief history of infrastructure
43. Gareth Rushgrove Operating system Hardware Application Once upon a time…
44. Gareth Rushgrove Operating system Hardware Runtime Application But your application might need a runtime so lets add that
45. Gareth Rushgrove Operating system Hardware Runtime Application Application Application Application Application Application Runtime But hardware is expensive so lets run multiple applications
46. Gareth Rushgrove Operating system Hypervisor Hardware Runtime Application Applications need isolating so lets use virtualisation
47. Gareth Rushgrove Operating system Hypervisor Hardware Runtime Application Operating system Runtime Application Operating system Runtime Application Run multiple virtual machines! Each with there own copy of the OS
48. Gareth Rushgrove Operating system Hypervisor Hardware Runtime Application Operating system Runtime Application Application Application Application But the overhead of virtualisation is expensive so run multiple apps per VM
49. Gareth Rushgrove Operating system Hypervisor Hardware Container Operating system Runtime Application Container runtime I heard you like containers
50. Gareth Rushgrove Operating system Hypervisor Hardware Container A different OS Runtime Application Container runtime Container Operating system Runtime Application Container Even more OS Runtime Application
51. Hypervisor Hardware Gareth Rushgrove Operating system Container Static binary Container runtime Container Static binary Container Static binary Cool folks use static binaries and scratch containers
52. Gareth Rushgrove Operating system Hardware Container Static binary Container runtime Container Static binary Container Static binary Don’t need virtualisation isolation guarantees?
53. Unikernels A library operating system
54. What if there is no OS above the hypervisor? Gareth Rushgrove
55. Gareth Rushgrove
56. Gareth Rushgrove Unikernel Hypervisor Hardware Unikernels compile your application to a kernel, which can run on a hypervisor
57. Compile your application into a Kernel Gareth Rushgrove No userspace
58. Only include the capabilities/ libraries you need Gareth Rushgrove No bash/ssh/sh/apt unless you explicitly include it
59. Hypervisor/hardware isolation Smaller attack surface area Running less code Enforced immutability No default remote access Gareth Rushgrove
60. The promise of containers, but without needing to pretend the intermediary OS doesn’t exist Gareth Rushgrove
61. Gareth Rushgrove MirageOS
62. Gareth Rushgrove HaLVM
63. Gareth Rushgrove Rump Kernel
64. Gareth Rushgrove LING
65. Gareth Rushgrove
66. Gareth Rushgrove
67. What Happens to Operators? Technical operators anyway, service management folks are safe for now
68. Hypervisor as the platform Gareth Rushgrove 1
69. Separate team running a hypervisor as a service Gareth Rushgrove
70. Separate team company running a hypervisor as a service Gareth Rushgrove
71. How many AWS users are Xen experts? Gareth Rushgrove
72. It happened with Type 1 hypervisors, I posit it will happen for Type 2 as well Gareth Rushgrove
73. Everything else as an application Gareth Rushgrove 2
74. Firewalls as an application Gareth Rushgrove
75. Proxies as an application Gareth Rushgrove
76. Network switches as an application Gareth Rushgrove
77. Intrusion detection as an application Gareth Rushgrove
78. Remote shell as an application Gareth Rushgrove
79. Everyone not running the hypervisor is an application developer Gareth Rushgrove
80. Standards, standards and defacto standards Gareth Rushgrove 3
81. We need to start agreeing Gareth Rushgrove I don’t have time here for a rant about the contributors dilemma, initiation bias and how prototypes never die on GitHub
82. Platforms Gareth Rushgrove
83. Containers Gareth Rushgrove
84. Monitoring Gareth Rushgrove ?
85. Gareth Rushgrove StatsD
86. Gareth Rushgrove Metrics 2.0
87. Publish more schemas and fewer incompatible duplicate implementations Gareth Rushgrove We can get to actual Standards after some agreement
88. Infrastructure is code Gareth Rushgrove 4
89. Infrastructure as algorithms Gareth Rushgrove
90. Schedulers Gareth Rushgrove
91. Back pressure Gareth Rushgrove
92. Autoscaling Gareth Rushgrove
93. Composition/configuration Gareth Rushgrove
94. Configuration with static data won’t be enough Gareth Rushgrove
95. Learn to programme. This time we mean it Gareth Rushgrove If you want this future we need to build it. Probably with static types and safer programming languages
96. Revolution not evolution Gareth Rushgrove 5
97. The distance between old infrastructure and new will be huge Gareth Rushgrove
98. Moving between the paradigms will be bigger than moving between Linux and Windows today Gareth Rushgrove
99. Not about tools. About models of interaction and the skills required to operate Gareth Rushgrove
100. We either fix our tech, or the security challenge will result in laws and policy that try and fix it for us Gareth Rushgrove I remember when it was legal to run software I wrote myself without cyber insurance. Ah, happy days.
101. Gareth Rushgrove Remember. Blade Runner is a movie about the Government running around fixing bugs in software
102. Conclusions If all you remember from this talk is…
103. We still have fundamental problems that date back 40 years Gareth Rushgrove
104. We can build better infrastructure Gareth Rushgrove
105. Doing so might mean going down different evolutionary paths Gareth Rushgrove
106. We know many of the patterns we want, but we’re mainly working backwards Gareth Rushgrove Stripping down our current operating systems isn’t sufficient
107. This means throwing away things we care about Gareth Rushgrove What would you say if I said we don’t need Linux for the general case
108. Collaborate on hard problems, rather than marvelling about how easy it is to build your own Docker PaaS Gareth Rushgrove
109. Questions? And thanks for listening