Things will Change

Eric Windisch UCSM’14

June 19th

Visionary

• Built wearable computer in 2000

• Began building and selling PaaS-like solutions in 2002

• Began selling VM-based VPS in 2006;

• Began architecting “cloud” IaaS in 2007 at historic price-points ($5/mo VMs!)

• OpenStack contributor since Q1 2011

• Joined Docker in January 2014

@ewindisch

Configuration management

Containers

Microservices

“The Operating System is Dead”

“Two years ago, I said to a colleague: The kernel is dying.Now I fear the distribution is dying.”

“Containers technology finally leverages the things the kernel does well.”

“There is, of course, the matter of orchestrated per-tenant VM clusters which run clouds of containers — such as Google does.”

“Its close alignment to the Internet of Things is the disruptive elementof the microservices movement”

Things

“It’s no surprise that embedded network programming is usually bad, if most developers are work ing , not on ly with 80’s hardware, but with developer libraries of a similar vintage — as far as networking is concerned.”

The Cloud

ShoudThingsChange?

“There is no such th ing as stateless.”

“However, we can not prevent state from changing. We cannot kill the Chaos Monkey.”

“It is naive to think we can simply throw away VMs or containers — we want to preserve their state for archival and analysis.”

“The biggest problem with blind a d h e r e n c e t o i m m u t a b l e infrastructure & 12-factor… is ignorance of the importance of the implicit state of a system which should not be deemed disposable.”

Thingswill Change

“We cannot control change, we can only effect it and manage it.”

Microservices will Change

“APIs and sensors, both, are inputs.”

Containerswill Change

“We need to manage containers like we manage Things. Products that do not do this are not good long-term solutions for managing containers.”

Distributed SYSTEMS

C

A P

“Because we cannot kill the Chaos Monkey, we need to know how to collect its droppings.1 2 - f a c t o r a n d i m m u t a b l e infrastructure fail to acknowledge this.”

“We need to manage change, not prevent it”

Puppet?Chef? Ansible? Salt?

“They are not designed for microservices. They are not designed for Things. They are designed for creating change, not for capturing it.”

“My fear is less that they’ll fail to evolve, but that they’ll lose their identities in the process..”

“One could… use Chef as a cloud orchestration solution — in fact, this was the initial scheduling for the Deis project.”

“The new pattern wil l be to configure Things through their own APIs, rather than through custom agents.”

“This [new fashion of configuration management] will work on all Things, all devices, and across Operat ing Systems — even Windows.”

“ We c a n n o l o n g e r a b i d e configuration management tools that use specialized agents.”

The future of management services

“Application-specific discovery and inventory mechanisms won’t go away, no more than Gopher has.”

“Just as Hypertext provided an implicit graph, linking and building relationships between websites — our next generation of web technologies will offer an explicit graph to provide discovery and inventory.”

Changing Things

“The worst thing I have to say about Heat is that OpenStack as a whole tends to be overly insular, m a k i n g t h e a d h o c u s e o f components such as Heat, an uncommon exercise. Still, Heat supports standalone installation.”

“In some ways, Chef might already offer many of the right things for the next generation, if only at a relatively local, non-global scale.”

Now you have 2TRILLIONProblems

”What we need today are hyper-connected Things”

“MQTT solves important problems related to accessing sensor data, but not all the problems of accessing and controlling things.”

Things at REST…

“The primary issue with REST is that it’s not a protocol. It is at best a guideline. That’s not strict enough for building a hyper-connected web.”

“Protocols such as MQTT provide value as a buffer to support idempotency for REST access to Things, but this works better for retr ieving data, rather than creating or updating it.”

Things as Services

Proto-types

“MQTT itself is a protocol, not a document-type… but if it doesn’t do all the things we need, we either need a different protocol, or multiple.”

“Every time you create a new standard to solve a problem, you have two problems.”

Upgrade the Internet

“We want to do more. We want devices to connect. We want those devices to know not just who to speak to, but how to speak to others.”

“Google could be

super seded by

t h e S e m a n t i c

Web”

— Tim Berners-Lee

“Recognizing that what we want is a Semantic Web, gives us context for researching and understanding the efforts that have come before.”

Semantic Web

“The RDF and OWL efforts have been nearly complete failures.”

“The Semantic Web should not just express the context of things, but provide discoverability.”

Now… time for something different.

“libswarm builds libchan, which builds on top of existing protocols such as SPDY and HTTP2, or WebSockets.”

“This new Internet, or web, needs to be about all Things, not all Devices. Where all services are Things and all Things are services.”

“We need new services and c o n f i g u r at i o n m a n a g em e nt solutions that work across devices, clouds, and containers.”

“We need to bet on free, open, and semantic hyper-connected protocols — whatever those protocols may be.”

“Today, we are changing our servers, but tomorrow — We want to change the world.”

Thank you.