Just when the tech world was starting to get their heads around containers, along come unikernels. Like containers, unikernels have been around in some form or another for quite awhile. Their resurgence has to do in large part to their container-like functionality. In a nutshell, unikernels combine an uber-stripped down version of an OS packaged with an individual app or service, providing a unit even smaller and more agile than a container.
Back in January Docker, seeing the strategic importance (threat?) of unikernels, acquired Unikernel Systems. Unikernel Systems, based in Cambridge in the UK, is made up of former developers of the Xen hypervisor project.
At OSCON I caught up with Richard Mortier formally of Unikernel systems and now a Docker employee, to learn about the wild and wacky world of unikernels.
Some of the ground Richard covers
What is a unikernel?
How is Docker positioning unikernels within its portfolio?
How unikernels augment, rather than replace containers
Unikernels: love em? hate em?
Unikernels are not without their vehement detractors. Roman Shaposhnik, in his post “In defense of unikernels” does a pretty good job of laying out the good and the bad. Roman’s conclusion:
….unikernels are not a panacea. Nothing is. But they are a very useful building block that doesn’t need any additional FUD. If you really want to fight something that is way overhyped you know where to find linux containers.
Extra-credit reading
Introducing Unik: Build and Run Unikernels with Ease – Linux.com
Docker bags unikernel gurus – now you can be just like Linus Torvalds – The Register
‘Unikernels will send us back to the DOS era’ – DTrace guru Bryan Cantrill speaks out – The Register
Docker kicks off the unikernel revolution – InfoWorld
This morning at OSCON a special event was held to announce the launch of Kubernetes 1.0 (Google’s open source container management framework) as well as the introduction of the Cloud Native Computing foundation.
One of the key speakers at the event was Craig McLuckie of Google who is a founding member of Kubernetes’ team. Craig has also been working with the Linux Foundation to set up the Cloud Native Computing foundation.
I sat down with Craig for a quick chat regarding both of these efforts.
Some of the ground Craig covers:
Craig’s role at Google and his relationship with Kubernetes
Today’s announcement as it relates to both Kubernetes 1.0 and the Cloud Native Computing foundation.
Where does Craig see Kubernetes going over the next year and what new workloads will it run
Extra-credit reading:
As Kubernetes Hits 1.0, Google Donates Technology To Newly Formed Cloud Native Computing Foundation – TechCrunch
Cloud Native Computing Foundation seeks to forge cloud and container unity – ZDNet
Linux Foundation wrangles app container wranglers into new org – The Register
While I interviewed a bunch of folks at OSCON, I also got the chance to be on the other end of the camera. On Thursday of the event I sat down with Meghan Blanchette, editor at O’Reilly media and we talked about Project Sputnik, where it’s been and where it’s going. Check it out:
Our recently announced 3-free months on the Joyent Cloud
Getting some help from an internal development team
Update re Profile tool help
The internal team that I mentioned in the video is gearing up to get cracking on the profile tool. The idea is first to gather requirements and user stories and then get jammin’ with design and development sprints. It looks like after a bunch of false starts we are ready to push this in to high gear. Look for an update next week.
Extra-credit reading
Will Developers Move to Sputnik? The past, present, and future of Dell’s project – O’Reilly programming
Connecting the client to the cloud, The Sputnik Story – Slideshare
Last but not least in my series of video from last month’s OSCON is an interview I did with Steve Citron-Pousty, Developer Evangelist for Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS.
Take a listen to what the ever-entertaining Steve CP has to say:
Note: As with my interview with Neil of Inktank, I used Youtube’s feature that is supposed to fix an unsteady camera and the result gives the video a hallucinogenic feel (witness the slightly undulating stairs).
Some of the ground Steve covers:
What is OpenShift and Platform as a Service? How is OpenShift different from other PaaSs?
OpenShift is “polyglottal:” it supports PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Node js and Java (with Java you get JBoss and Tomcat). It also supports MySQL, Postgres and MongoDB right out of the box.
How they work with APIs and how APIs allow devs to create “situational apps.”
Steve’s Crystal Ball time: in 3-5 years all developers will be using a PaaS (witness their wins with Ebay/PayPal, Accenture and DoD) + Git + a NoSQL data store.
Im now at the penultimate interview in my video series from OSCON 13. Today’s installment features Puppet Labs‘ Andrew Parker, team lead for the core platform team. Check out what Andrew has to say:
Some of the ground Andrew covers
What is Puppet and how does it work?
DevOps: How does Puppet help bridge the divide between Dev and Ops?
Puppet’s key crowd is hands-on operation types but business and devs play big roles as well.
As we get further into a cloudy world, what implications does that have for the Puppet platform?
For more Puppet goodness, check out PuppetConf this week in San Francisco. If you cant make it there is also a live stream set up.
Today’s OSCON interview takes us into the land of application performance modeling and features Dustin Whittle, Technical Evangelist at AppDynamics. AppDynamics provides performance management for Java, .Net and PHP applications. Check out what Dustin has to say about the wild and wacky world of APM:
Some of the ground Dustin covers
What does AppDynamics do? Spoiler alert: It helps you figure out what “healthy” looks like for your application and gives you line of code visibility into your production app from the client to multiple tiers of your server and then down into the database.
Who looks at/uses the data AppDynamics generates?
How does the cloud change application development? And what about those “noisey neighbors”?
APIs, SDKs and the recently launched AppDynamics X.
Tune in next time to see the next in my OSCON interview series. Still left are RedHat’s OpenShift and Puppet.
The next in my series of interviews from last month’s OSCON features the ever affable Neil Levine of Inktank. Neil, who has been with the company nearly a year, heads up product management and we talked about Ceph, the company and where its going.
Warning: I used Youtube’s feature that is supposed to fix shaking and the result gives the video a hallucinogenic feel (Timothy Leary would approve).
Some of the ground that Neil covers:
Inktank as the primary sponsor of Ceph, a scale-out open source software defined storage solution
Other similar solutions
Selling to cloud devops teams rather than traditional storage teams
What’s next? tiering, deeper integration with OpenStack, pushing out more APIs to build up their dev community etc.
Extra-credit reading/viewing:
Press Release: University of Hawaii at Manoa Deploys Ceph Storage With OpenStack
OSCON 2013 – My video playlist: Enstratius, Dasein, Citrix, Mark Hinkle’s keynote, Apigee, Inktank, OpenShift, AppDynamics and Puppet
Last month at OSCON, after his keynote “Creating communities of Inclusion,” I caught up with Mark Hinkle, Senior Director of Open Source Solutions at Citrix. We chatted about about the talk he delivered and what he and Citrix are up to in the world of Open Source.
Some of the ground Mark covers:
Getting in ruts in the open source community and how we can refactor
Open source is not a zero sum game
Open source developers are not always the best at asking for help
Mass collaboration like that seen in open source can benefit other industries as well
The week before last when I was out at OSCON I caught up with Sam Ramji VP of Strategy at Apigee. I got Sam to tell me about his company and the future of APIs. Here’s what he had to say:
Some of the ground Sam covers:
What does Apigee do.
How well is the importance of APIs understood in enterprises today
Using business people as their entry point into the enterprise but also catering to the developer.
Whats the big thing in the world of APIs in the next year
Last week at OSCON.I grabbed some time with my new Dell co-worker, James Urquhart. James became a Dell employee not too long ago when Dell acquired Enstratius. I wanted to hear straight from the horses mouth about the Dell Multi-Cloud manager and the Open Source project, Dasein Cloud. Here’s what James had to say:
Some of the ground James covers — Dell Multi-cloud Manager
James initial impressions of Dell
Where does the Multi-cloud manager fit within the Dell cloud portfolio
This is used by both developers and ops so how do they position it to each of those audiences.
Some of the ground James covers — Dasein:
What is Dasein Cloud and does it work (hint: its more than API mapping)
Hows the community and which companies are supporting it
In addition to talking about Project Sputnik, we gave away three of the XPS 13 developer edition systems. Here is the crowd waiting for us to draw the winner at the Dell booth:
The Sputnik drawing at the Dell booth.
And here is the lucky winner, Katrina Prosise, a comp sci student in Portland.
L->R: Barton George (Dell), Katrina Prosise (the lucky winner), Joseph George (Dell)
Stay tuned to this blog over the next week or so as I will be sharing a bunch of the video interviews I conducted while at OSCON.
Next week, myself, Michael Cote and a whole other bunch of Dell folk will be heading out to Portland for the 15th annual OSCON-ana-polooza. We will have two talks that you might want to check out:
And speaking of Project Sputnik, we will be giving away three of our XPS 13 developer editions: one as a door prize at the OpenStack birthday party, one as a drawing at our booth and one to be given away at James and Joseph’s talk listed above.
We will also have a limited amount of the shirt to the right so stop by the booth.
But wait, there’s more….
To learn firsthand about Dell’s open source solutions be sure to swing by booth #719 where we will have experts on hand to talk to you about our wide array of solutions:
OpenStack cloud solutions
Hadoop big data solutions
Crowbar
Project Sputnik (the client to cloud developer platform)
Dell Multi-Cloud Manager (the platform formerly known as “Enstratius”)
The conversation below took place right after Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote. Tim and Mark start off by talking about Mark’s persistence of vision and what keeps driving him. At the 2:00 minute mark they talk about Project Sputnik, the buzz around it at OSCON and where it has the advantage over Mac OS. From there they talk about bringing the cloud right to the desktop via Juju.
On the Thursday at OSCON, Ubuntu and Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth gave a great keynote entitled, “Making Magic From Cloud To Client.” He did the entire keynote and live demo on a project Sputnik laptop (a Dell XPS13 running Ubuntu 12.04LTS)!
Here it is in its entirety:
Some of the ground Mark covers:
A fantastic demo on Juju and writing Juju charms showing how you can design a complex topology, deploy that in memory on your laptop and then map the whole shebang to the cloud.
How JuJu charms allow for “encapsulation and reuse”
The idea of crowdsourcing ops
A demo showing how, in realtime, you can map actual running infrastructure from one cloud to the next (in his demo he mapped it from EC2 to an HP cloud)
The idea behind Unity and the principle of having one UI that works across phones, tablets, desktops and even TVs.
The week before last I had a fantastic time at OSCON, seeing old friends and making new ones. As always, the hallway track was the one I found most enlightening.
On the second day we announced that project Sputnik would be going from project to product in the fall and got a fantastic response (see some of the articles written about it at the end). On the day of the announce Mike Hendrickson, O’Reilly’s VP of content strategy, interviewed me about the project (check out Mike’s project Sputnik review). That video is the first one below.
I also did a “cliffs notes” version with Janet Bartleson which clocked in at one minute and 47 seconds so if you’re short on time you can check out the second one.
Extra-credit reading
Slideshow: Linux, Open Source & Ubuntu: OSCON 2012: The Open-Source Creative Engine Drives the Economy – eWeek
A couple of weeks ago we announced a Beta program for the four-month old Project Sputnik — an effort to investigate creating a developer focused laptop based on Ubuntu and Dell’s XPS13 laptop.
Since the beta announcement we have received thousands of applications from around the world. This tremendous response, on top of fantastic amount of input we have received on the Project Sputnik storm session, has convinced us to take this project from pilot to product.
This fall we will be offering an Ubuntu 12.04LTS-based laptop pre-loaded on Dell’s XPS13 laptop.
Going from skunk works to mainstream
Back in the Spring, project Sputnik was the first effort green-lighted by an internal incubation program at Dell. Thanks to the incubation program we got a little bit of funding and some executive advisers. This incubation program notwithstanding, project Sputnik has been a pretty scrappy skunk works effort to date.
The idea behind the incubation program is to harness that scrappiness and inventiveness to explore & validate new ideas & products outside mainstream Dell processes. Thanks to the tremendous amount of support both outside (you, the community!) and inside Dell, with today’s announcement, we will begin making our transition to an official, “mainstream” Dell product.
I should also mention, if its not obvious, that we have not been doing the work alone. Canonical has been “scrappin” right besides us, helping to drive the project and doing a ton of engineering on the software side.
Beta program
As I mentioned at the start we have been completely blown away by the number of applications we have received. We’re currently working through logistics of how to handle the tons of applications, we’ll notify all applicants soon, and intend to keep that process and the future product aligned with the spirit of the program.
To make sure that we are listening to your ideas, please continue to post any thoughts about what you would like to see in a developer laptop on our Storm session. If you have an XPS13 running Ubuntu and want to share your experience or report a bug or issue, see our forum on Dell Tech center.
Profile tool: a software management tool to go out to a github repository to pull down various developer profiles e.g. javascript, ruby, android.
Cloud tool: will allow developers to create “microclouds” on their laptops, simulating a proper, at-scale environment, and then deploy that environment seamlessly to the cloud.
Extra-credit reading
Press release: Dell Demonstrates Commitment to Open Source Software, Developer Communities
Dell’s chief architect for big data, Aurelian Dumitru (aka. A.D.) presented a talk at OSCON the week before last with the heady title, “Hadoop – Enterprise Data Warehouse Data Flow Analysis and Optimization.” The session, which was well attended, explored the integration between Hadoop and the Enterprise Data Warehouse. AD posted a fairly detailed overview of his session on his blog but if you want a great high level summary, check this out:
Some of the ground AD covers
Mapping out the data life cycle: Generate -> Capture -> Store -> Analyze ->Present
Where does Hadoop play and where does the data warehouse? Where do they overlap?
Who owns your data? Hopefully the answer is you and while that may be true it is often very difficult to get your data out of sites you have uploaded it to and move it elsewhere. Additionally, your data is scattered across a bunch of sites and locations across the web, wouldn’t it be amazing to have it all in one place and be able to mash it up and do things with it? Jeremie Miller observed these issues within his own family so, along with a few friends, he started the Data Locker project and Singly (Data Locker is an open source project and Singly is the commercial entity behind it).
I caught up with Jeremie right after the talk he delivered at OSCON. Here’s what he had to say:
Some of the ground Jeremie covers:
The concept behind the Data Locker project, why you should care
How the locker actually works
The role Singly will play as a host
Where they are, timeline-wise, on both the project and Singly
Last week at OSCON in Portland, I dragged Josh McKenty away from the OpenStack one-year anniversary (that’s what Josh is referring to at the very end of the interview) to do a quick video. Josh, who headed up NASA’s Nebula tech team and has been very involved with OpenStack from the very beginning has recently announced Piston, a startup that will productize OpenStack for enterprises.
Here is what the always entertaining Josh had to say:
Some of the ground Josh covers:
What, in a nutshell, will Piston be offering?
Josh’s work at NASA and how got involved in OpenStack
Timing around Piston’s general release and GA
The roles he plays on the OpenStack boards
What their offering will have right out of the shoot and their focus on big data going forward
I saw a great talk today here at OSCON Data up in Portland, Oregon. The talk was Practical Data Storage: MongoDB @ foursquare and was given by foursquare‘s head of server engineering, Harry Heymann. The talk was particularly impressive since, due to AV issues, Harry had to wing it and go slideless. (He did post his slides to twitter so folks with access could follow along).
After the talk I grabbed a few minutes with Harry and did the following interview:
Some of the ground Harry covers
What is foursquare and how it feeds your data back to you
Posted by Barton George 
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