The morning started with the usual set of keynotes. Dan Kohn and Cheryl Hung filled us in on what is happening in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) space, sharing details about the increase in membership and contributors since the last conference. Of note, there are 7700 attendees at this years conference in Barcelona. I believe last year’s attendee count in Copenhagen was just over 4,000, based on some searches that I did. That’s a pretty significant increase in attendee numbers once again.
Then it was onto VMware’s very own Bryan Liles to fill us in on what is happening with the various CNCF projects. The projects were broken out into Sandbox, Incubator and Graduated categories.
In the Sandbox stage, CNCF has just added OpenEBS. OpenEBS is a Container Attached Storage (CAS) solution, which I haven’t looked at in too much detail yet. From my limited understanding, it seems that they have a control plane for provisioning volumes and implementing various volume actions such as taking snapshots and making clones. From the data path perspective, an application running in a container accesses persistent volumes via an iSCSI target container which in turn accesses one or more Storage container(s). They also offer a choice of different storage engine implementations.
OpenEBS have also just announced a plugin for Velero, to allow snapshots to facilitate backup and restore of applications using OpenEBS storage. On that note, Velero 1.0 just GA’ed this week. Congrats to the whole Velero team on that achievement.
Bryan went on to tell us about a number of CNCF projects that were in the Incubator stage. There are quite a few. These included Linkerd (Secure Service Mesh), Helm v3.0 (application packaging), Harbor v1.8 (container repository), Rook 1.0 (storage orchestration), CRI-O (container run-time), and finally the merging of OpenCensus and OpenTracing into a new product called OpenTelemetry. Interestingly enough, CRI-O is RedHat’s Lightweight Container RunTime which will now become the only Container RunTime supported in OpenShift (if I understood the presenter correctly).
Now, as Bryan said, there are far too may features in each of these project to talk about in the keynote. The same is true here in this post. Therefore I’ve tried to add links to additional blogs and sites which discuss these new features.
The last project that was mentioned by Bryan was a ‘Graduated’ project. This project is fluentd. We had Eduardo Silva from ARM deliver this presentation. This was great to see, as I also attended Eduardo’s very good presentation on fluentd last year at KubeCon. He told the audience that fluentd now has over 1000 plugins and is the de-facto for all cloud providers.
To recap, Bryan highlighted that there are now 16 sandbox + 16 incubator + 6 graduated CNCF projects – a total of 38 in all.
Before lunch, I went along to the Kubernetes Stateful Storage Workshop. This was hosted by David Zhu and Jan Safranek. They took us through the deployment of static and dynamic persistent volumes, touching on persistent volumes, persistent volume claims, and storage classes. We also looked at the difference between deployments (scaling of Pods only) and stateful sets (scale of Pods and volumes together). Lastly, we touched on the different sorts of services one could have for your cloud native application. There is standard which provides internal IP and DNS to Pods but no external access, there is load-balancer which provides internal IP and DNS to Pods with external IP access to the application, and then finally there is headless, where there is no internal IP and DNS handling but it does provide external IP access. We then provisioned a counter as a service, along with a cassandra cluster, and looked at all of these concepts. Pretty nifty 101 session.
Steve then went on to share a number of roadmap items that we have planned, many of which are also roadmap’ed in the CSI specification. These include volume resize, volume clone, snapshots, read/write for many volumes and also plans on how to migrate from the older VCP/Hatchway driver to the new CSI driver. As mentioned, I hope to write about this much more when we closer to GA. So be aware – if you are using an in-tree driver from any vendor, eventually you will have to consider moving to the new CSI format.
What was more interesting for me is the ecosystem that Rook are building. Ceph is now considered stable for use with Rook, EdgeFS is considered beta, with Minio S3 Object Stores, NFS, Cassandra and CockroachDB all in alpha.
All in all, a very good day indeed. I’m looking forward to the next couple of days as there are lots more storage related sessions on the agenda.