Readout from Kubecon 2019: Keith Townsend and Alex Ellis
Transcript
hey how's it going to ski Towser from the CTO of Iser and you're watching I think this is the first time I've done a CTO dolt remotely but I think this is a pretty good reason I have on the other end Alex Ellis good friend of Mines and community leader for open fires Alex how's it going it's going great looking forward to chine T about keep calling about open fires what were what we're up to and a piffle ins gonna have a great holiday villa in
the US all right speaking of holiday over in the US you say that because you're obviously your accent that people might have thought it was from Texas but it's not is you you're over in the UK so we appreciate you wrapping up you this is the end of your day kind of the beginning of mainz by time you go for your sleep this should be out actually great we both cross sorts a little bit over at cube con in san diego we don't get a chance
to see each other too often in person and cube con I think was a really great excuse overall what what did you have gone on at coupon this year so that's a very busy week it was really expensive together and I wanted to get maximum Valley so it started off for me with Saturday at the cloud native rejects conference and this is this is the second time it's run it's a pre-event and it's run by Chris Cole of Kim bulk and basic idea is if you
didn't get your paper and by the way I think 80% of paper submitted didn't game there's a high chance of that you get a chance to have an audience and get together with some folks that are coming a little bit early talk to them about your idea and it was a great atmosphere the other thing that that event does is it allows people that have got new stuff that basically came out before the CFP ended for the coop gone they can come to and so that
was my category and I rocked up and I spoke about inlets which is a service tunnel and a reverse proxy that that I think is is going to be exciting when people start to realize the kind of things they can do it so briefly I know you you sent me a little info on inlets why why do you need a yet another reverse proxy like what's unique about inlets we'll ilet's what problem does it solve it's goes back to when I was still VMware last year
and over the holidays about a year ago now we have this problem where the team needed to be testing web hooks to integrate with github and other services and there was just simply no way of getting them from the internet from a third-party service to their laptop where they were developing on kubernetes locally there was some existing tooling like in grok that many people may know but there's just absolutely no way you're getting networking in a corporate environment and so what I wanted to do is
just see if I could spend a week just messing about see if I could create some things that would work for that and that became in let's the story of how many open-source projects not just open-source projects but companies are are birthed there was a problem that you needed to have solved unique to you you found out you're not the only one that had that problem yeah at the time I was happy if it was just gonna help our team get you know get the job
done and then I put it on to Hockey News and it got like two two and a half thousand stars very quickly gave it a couple of months or so and spoke to Darren Shepherd he had some ideas of how we could refactor it new some of the kubernetes code inside of it put up version 2.0 and got up to almost 5,000 stars after that and then people started messaging me about stuff they were doing with it one guy copied a VM image from his nas
across the internet to another location securely and he was able to do that in a few minutes um other folks are looking at command and control at the edge of a company that's working through my consultancy right now the recline and they have different cinemas where they've got point of sale devices they want some way to kind of manage them centrally so the problem is that you can traditional e not get into those firewalls and networks you may not even have any control over them so
if the client talks first you can pretty much always initiate HTTP traffic you can always get out and then once you're out you can have a full connection so this I think is a great gateway to talking about cube con in general the the whole thought of that like my network admin network engineer days screams like oh my god this is this is horrible from a network security traditional sense where the network is the hard shell and I'm the network infrastructure guy and I control all
of that cube Kahn was and I think it's more apt to call it cloud native conference was just full of stuff like that it was just project at the project there the control of the infrastructure was pushed closer to the developer and the application is that Fred fair to say that's a pretty good I think that's pretty fair to say that and you know what I noticed this cubicle more than any ever been to you before an event he you know if you know is that
there's so much content that there's now pre conferences dedicated just one topic so I'm pretty sure it was the service mesh corn was the biggest that we had it was also running observability and I was a member of the service practitioner summit and also helped to co-organized that so actually on the day there we had a we had a talk from the Oakland vast community and I gave a talk on what I'm calling the plunk stack and the plug sack is a number of cloud native
projects and the idea is to try and reframe serverless is something that kubernetes operators and developers can make use of because quite often I'll hear this term and I don't think people really know what they mean when they say it but they're like we're implementing kubernetes we're not ready for service yet and so I wanted to try and reframe service on kubernetes is really just an application stack that you can use just move a bit quicker Yod that people say there because I go into a
show like cube con and it's a bunch of building blocks there's a bunch of bricks that you can put together to make something complex and for those of you new to me analysis relationship by sponsors the open fast home page not because I'm a big lover of kubernetes I look at kubernetes is kind of a break that I need to use to get to server list so serverless I think is the ultimate ultimate goal of many of the application architectures and Alex's project open fast basically
enables enterprises to have service functions so a lot of kubernetes and koukin was about builders building different things and for my little I call it my little monkey enterprise brain I have to have you know in products and projects that leveraged this stuff I'm not a builder in that traditional open source and cloud need a func way so I need projects like open fast to kind of wrap my head around it so with that said what what were some of the open fares related talks you
gave a coupon yes so there was a there was a friend a friend a friend of mine from a company called oak tato and they were in the service summit and showed us how you can get this what's been called inner loop development with open fires and they can apply that to keeping a TC the idea is as fast as you can tighten code the kubernetes cluster can reload it so that you can debug it and you can get this fast experience when you're building out
your code and traditionally you're gonna have like a lag of 2 to 5 to 10 15 seconds depending on what it is you're building and reloading in the cluster so from a workflow perspective how does that because as I think about typing cold live I'm not a colder but you know I I do scripting and whatever I need to do for infrastructure stuff and as the type of code that I create like I don't see the immediate benefit of applying that live because most of and
this is I think it's a great difference between legacy approaching to application building and modern application building with serving service constructs the type of coding that I do is normally batch processes so I don't need to see a I don't need to see a live representation of that cold how does that give me an example of how does that help a modern application developer yeah I mean I think that's fair from that perspective however um when you're batch job is failing in a way that you
didn't expect mm-hmm being able to get live into the code and put a breakpoint and hit that line and see what the values are in the memory that could be really invaluable especially if it's like costly to run that operation okay so say I'm making a call to a service that transfers data and that every time I make a call to that service there's a cost associated with it and that's where the cold is breaking we're like every time I complete the batch process I have
to pay to have that test done so as opposed to that this just will help me a bit let's say what you're actually moving money every time let's say you're doing payments on strike but some of the time it fails so you can attach a debugger and start to get some data out of that it's not the only mechanism that exists the other one is if let's say you're rendering a web page and you want to keep making incremental changes shift the left a little bit
left a little bit more like when we added the CTO advisor logo to the home page you know the workflow is add it preview move it a bit preview changes CSS preview and so for front-end developers it can be pretty important to have that and some of my friends at garden are building similar products that gives you this inner loop and another company's tilt and so there's three big companies I'm aware all four or big efforts and they're really concentrating just on that developer experience whereas
traditionally in open fires what we've been focusing on like with a plunk stack is giving you some abstractions to to work faster fact in the presentation I gave there was like 10 or 12 files 300 lines of text you needed to say hello world on kubernetes HTTP server in open first we could reduce the code like eight lines so as interesting you say I watched the in one of the sessions from a chat from Google and he was basically saying the exact same argument and he
talked about how servers speeds up development on kubernetes and open fast was one of the projects that he mentioned that tweeted it out is really interesting expect you see coming from Google who's kind of behind quenette native and for those of you don't know the politics of open source Kay native is a competing framework actually for service yeah there's a lot of politics around that but we'll yeah it's very similar effort and I think you're speaking about evidence and he is a really bright guy and
I got a chance to meet him and the rest of the Kay native team um a cute corner interestingly enough many of them have been hired over to VMware where the job the work that's that's their fault that's a story over drinks yes I'm looking forward to see to seeing you know what will come of that perhaps something with Pacific now you know this event had 12,000 people apparently and you know you and I both bumped into each other very randomly and I think we were
in the gangway and there was this huge throng and noise coming out of the expo area I mean how did you find just being in such a massive event so you know that I've gone to reinvent I've gone to vmworld and I've gone to other events that are a little bit bigger so the size didn't bother me what was kind of off-putting or shocking was the number of sponsors they're collecting lead leads so it was kind of a it was a shot cuz it's my first
open-source conference and my keynote experience was very very different than what my traditional enterprise IT show keynote experiences were but the show floor was exactly the type of show floor that I expect to see at an enterprise IT conference and the online Twitter chatter was kind of it muddied the online Twitter channel because I expected after seeing the show floor I expected an Enterprise conference it was an enterprise conference it was a open source conference and the two worlds kind of colliding for me what about
you yeah well I haven't been to VM wild or reinvent you know I think what are we cooking 20 20 70 thousand people at those yeah so duh Lyon world at its height is twenty four thousand and then I think rear band is expected to be somewhere between fifty and sixty thousand people I just can't imagine how you'd operate in a conference of that size I mean the first when I went T big one was a docker corn in 2016 at the first time going to
tech event in the US and I was pretty overwhelmed and I think it was a couple thousand four thousand then to go three four times that I sort of hardened my my shell if you like but I still find that I don't get to see what I want and most of my time is spent chatting with people that I know or getting new connections in we call it like the hallway track right or dropping into I do like to go to the keynotes I'm not quite
at the point where I can just sit in my pajamas and watch it in the hotel room I do want to be there and feel like I'm a part of it and especially now as a scene safe ambassador we get reserved front row seating which is alright makes it easy yeah so this was the first time as a scene chef masa de I know there's there's a whole bunch of us now and that that's nice you know having that group of people to hang around with
and to know at an event you know some events I go to you and I know nobody at all so at least having that common core and the contacts I feel up has really helped me but I could imagine somebody coming for their first time feeling a little bit like a fish out of water so that was my expectation but that wasn't the case I ran into at least 50 60 people that I know at the conference the from the overlap between the kubernetes community and
vendors and customers who are coming to kubernetes are cute con for the first time what was really interesting was the number of people that had the same reaction as I did this again is my first I'm coming from the other end it's my first open source conference and it was just it was surreal and it was strange and I couldn't put into words if my you know if I was in a traditional customer Enterprise role and I came back and I had to give a conference
report and say hey here's what we can benefit and use over the next six to 18 months I would have struggled to come out with a clear message of what we need to do from an enterprise perspective to do it so as if I was a builder and I was building you know if I was building open fires alinker D sed if I was when one of those projects if I was building a cloud native a company that was leveraging cloud native technologies to build a
service there was plenty of stuff but for you know the the regular enterprise consuming products instead of projects it was a show that I struggled to see immediate value yeah I think that's something that you know keep Kony's trying to address and since yeah through the end user talk at the last event we had three or four end-user talks with the open fast community in Europe and I think that really just helps people understand like what can you do that's real and during the talk that
I had with link abhi I showed a story from open Paz limited customer that's doing club migration with us and I showed an example from the community to try and give a bit of a balance between the commercial real life enterprise and the community open-source side of things but directly on the Wednesday and I spoke with buoyant from buoyant and a and a field engineer named Charles and really what we were looking to do is tell this story of how you can get a multi-user platform
that's secure pretty much out of the box I mean there's always some things you can tune but Ian cold water in the keynote I think on Thursday mentioned how keeping it just isn't secure out the box right ever we can to kind of lock it down and then the idea is that an IT operator or a platform engineer could deploy open fast cloud or maybe a managed kubernetes service that's what DX is doing and then their engineers as they come they only need to deploy their
code into a github repo they don't actually need to really think about docker images or kubernetes and a lot of that is offloaded right so as closest we can get to the managed experience that you see in Google cloud run or maybe in AWS lunda can recreate that for a team or for a company yeah if anything I walked away from cube con excited hmm because there's a lot of effort between C and C F and you know sat down and talked with Brian Lau's who's
the co-chair of Q con release was the co-chair a coop time and the desire to get value on both sides of this community one side of the community are the builders and and open-source project participants and then the other side of the is the consumers the end user the end customers who just simply want a product and then I think there's a squishy middle which is a lot of people that I knew which are you know enterprises that are giving back to open source and that
nothing that's probably the best model enterprises that's giving back to the open source community with vehicle contributions donations etc and that are really involved that I think that's the model that I'm trying to take by even sponsoring all the open files home pages say that you know what I want to be involved in the process the way that I can and and I think this is the model that I'm monitoring not only for people that either that I advise you know I think that's great a
great way to to go about and if you if you know of some companies that might want to chat with us let you know do let me know something that comes to mind is you know there's a company called weave works and I know Alexis Richardson the CEO pretty well he's a friend of mine and he he and his company built out this talk with flux which is for enterprises to use and it's similar to open fast cloud in that you put all of your code
in one place and flux will then apply it to your cluster if you have a disaster and you lose your whole cluster you bring a new one up flux will restore everything back to where it was now over into it a traditional enterprise company a bit like ADP that I used to work for they're actually probably an early adopter and they built their own product just like flux and so this is what you're talking about you have this early adopting enterprise that built this open-source project
you have this kubernetes consultancy on the cutting edge and the two have actually come together and merge the projects as our go flux and the panel that spoke about detox was so popular that they had to move it to the main Kino room Wow that is and I think that that I think that's a validation of that model that I've even before kubernetes in going back to OpenStack and pretty old mistake I kind of promoted this idea there enterprises have to start to develop their own
chops and be able to contribute back to open-source projects and use these projects and a way to differentiate their businesses I have questions and doubts on my own if most enterprises can scale that because of the shortage of the cross-domain talent that's needed to do that but I think that's the best model and I think that's the ideal model so let's close out with this question on focusing on open fast because we both have a vested interest in open fast being a successful project if people
wanted to if people were curious about service and they were curious about having service being portable across cloud providers I think open fast make on projects like open fast make a good argument for adopting that as a solution to questions I get consistently when I was at KU Khan when I was talking to kind of my enterprise folks was one how do I get started and to what a little bit more technical and I looked this up after the the show what are the triggers for
the events or what are the how you trigger a a cold and open fast so first how does the average user get started and then to what is the experience versus land I know I can trigger off AWS events and lambda how do i trigger functions I think that makes a lot of sense something that I covered in a couple of the talks that I gave over the week as well because it is a popular question and it just keep coming back around but one of
the thing one of the things I want to do is trying to segue into that and say that what I'm finding is that people will do almost anything to avoid the full-on complexity of kubernetes right now Baron Shepard over at rancha Labs has been developing something called k3s okay so yeah the three stands for like having the kubernetes down the middle and what that does is it reduces a memory footprint from something like two gigabytes for a master down to 300 and every another called servers
and every agent that you add in every note only takes about 50 Meg's of memory and so you've got this Rush Creek white cluster behind me and I can run a full scale H application on it using k3 s so a lot of the work that I've done is around how can we make k3 s really easy to use for developers particularly so they can try confess whether that's on the Raspberry Pi or on the cloud and also and how can we then go and get
it easy to install all of the parts that you need for a useful open vessel right we can do development we can do production and often there's a few steps involved in between helm just had a release of helm 3 recently and that product is super popular it's a CNC F project now and what you can do is you say I want a reverse proxy I want TLS I want open fires and I want something else the unfortunate thing is is that every project has this
page like this on their docks that's really hard to find and so if you want all of those things you're going to be spending a couple of hours scrolling through and adding them as part of the work that I was doing on k3 has to create a tool called ketchup a picture can create a cluster and join the nodes but the second thing that people don't really know about it yet is it can install a hound chart with one command to any any kubernetes cluster and
so if you want to get started the easiest thing you could do is get ketchup get kubernetes in your favorite place whether that's eks Google or Amazon or ICANN Amazon ec2 and then we'll catch a app install open force and that will bring the helm chart in and deploy it for you of authentication there maybe want TLS certificate with that well you can then do app install cert manager app install nginx and finally we can generate the ingress and issuer for you stuff that's normally like
this much yeah more each we can do in one command with a strongly typed flag and that that means your disco app install open that ingress - - my email - - my domain hmm it's a fairly simple what we did for what we did for kubernetes getting a deployment on kubernetes now done the same for getting all of the ecosystem tools that you need into open fires right so but the second question that I get all the time was triggers what are the triggers for
functions and open fires so there's two models that open source service project use for triggering stuff one is you put a client subscription in your code so if you're coming from Kafka every piece of code you write will have this duplicated code and it's not short and then it will just start pulling in Microsoft have a protocol kada that's how they run and Kay native and open fires both go the opposite way where we deploy a broker that connects to the event source like Kafka and
when it receives a message it looks at what functions and endpoints you've got and triggers it off and that's what we're doing now so there's an SDK and whenever end-user companies form three builder sqs connector we have an SNS example a Kafka example cron and a bunch of others like rabbitmq so really it's down to whatever is in the open source or whatever you want if you can find some code to bind to your event source and a very short period of time you can put
something together that will fire off your functions for you and so basically the only thing that you're a function or open fires has to listen to is to broker itself and just as long as I'm alerting their broker or the broker is is gonna push our pool of the book is the broker Cooley's kind of it's kind of a mix the broker will pull in a list of all the endpoints deployed and look at our patient call topic once you spread that annotation it then goes
right so if I get this topic that function cares about it okay if I get this topic these three functions care about it and so then when it starts receiving messages it pushes them out and your function doesn't have to even know that it came from Kafka or if it came from sqs it will just get the message that is expecting any compressor and then it just and then whatever the function is is whatever its role or micro-service it just does yeah then returns whatever so
that's pretty straightforward I think there's a bunch of follow-on questions and discussions we can have around scale and etc but if people want to become part of the open fast community you guys have a slack or how do you get you know how do you become part of the community yes so if you can't remember this URL just go to open fast call them and you can find it in the docs it's slack open fast or i/o and that will give you a form to fill
out and you'll get an invite within day ot all right Alex I really appreciate you taking time and Lading your your day or on the other side of the Atlantic for those who want to follow you on the web what's the best way to reach you open files or XLS UK and you know if you feel like you need a partner through your cloud native migration if there's problems that you could use help solving just feel free to reach out over the email Alex open Vance
calm and I'll be happy to chat - alright and you can find me on the web I'm at CTO visor on Twitter the CTO advisor calm and if you have questions for me or Alex you can my dams are open on Twitter so talk to you next CTO DOS thanks chief thanks Alex
