From the Canyon Edge -- :-Dustin

Thursday, October 11, 2018

Google Cloud Next '18 London: GKE On-Prem: Hybrid Cloud Solutions for Enterprise IT

Thursday, September 20, 2018

Google Cloud Next '18 Tokyo: D1-6-S08_GKE On-Prem Kubernetes を利用した企業 IT のためのハイブリッドクラウド ソリューション-auto

Monday, August 20, 2018

Software Defined Interviews Episode 73: Dustin Kirkland on Linux, Cloud Computing and Product Management

https://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/73

I joined Brandon Whichard on his Software Defined podcast, to discuss Linux, Cloud Computing and making wine. I talked about my career journey from entry-level developer to Google Product Manager. He shares his experience working at IBM, Canonical and now Google. Plus, he tells the story of how working on his own open source project helped him land a job at startup.

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

I'm Joining the Google Cloud Team!


A couple of months ago, I reflected on "10 Amazing Years of Ubuntu and Canonical".  Indeed, it has been one hell of a ride, and that post is merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg...

The people I've met, the things I've learned, the places I've been, the users I've helped, the partners I've enabled, the customers I've served -- these are undoubtedly the most amazing and cherished experiences of my professional career to date.

And for the first time in my life, I can fully and completely grok the Ubuntu philosophy:
I am who I am, because of who we all are
With all my heart, I love what we've created in Ubuntu, I love the products that we've built at Canonical, I love each and every person involved.

So, it is with mixed emotion that the Canonical chapter of my life comes to a close and a new one begins...

Next week, I have the honor and privilege to join the Google Cloud product management team, and work beside so, so, so, so many people who continue to inspire me.

Words fail to express how excited I am about this opportunity!  In this new role, I will be working closely with Aparna Sinha, Michael Rubin, and Tim Hockin, and I hope to see many of you at KubeCon Europe in Copenhagen later this month.

My friends and family will be happy to know that we're staying here in Austin, and I'll be working from the Google Austin office with my new team, largely based in Sunnyvale, California.

The Ubuntu community can expect to see me remaining active in the Ubuntu developer community as a Core Dev and a MOTU, and I will continue to maintain many of the dozens of open source projects and packages that so many of you have come to rely upon.  Perhaps I'll even become more active upstream in Debian, if the Debian community will have me there too :-)

Finally, an enormous THANK YOU to everyone who has made this journey through Ubuntu and Canonical such a warm, rewarding, emotional, exceptional experience!

Cheers,
@DustinKirkland

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

RFC: The New Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Server Installer

One of the many excellent suggestions from last year's HackerNews thread, Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?, was to refresh the Ubuntu server's command line installer:


We're pleased to introduce this new installer, which will be the default Server installer for 18.04 LTS, and solicit your feedback.

Follow the instructions below, to download the current daily image, and install it into a KVM.  Alternatively, you could write it to a flash drive and install a physical machine, or try it in your virtual machine of your choice (VMware, VirtualBox, etc.).

$ wget http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-server/daily-live/current/bionic-live-server-amd64.iso
$ qemu-img create -f raw target.img 10G
$ kvm -m 1024 -boot d -cdrom bionic-live-server-amd64.iso -hda target.img
...
$ kvm -m 1024 target.img

For those too busy to try it themselves at the moment, I've taken a series of screenshots below, for your review.














Finally, you can provide feedback, bugs, patches, and feature requests against the Subiquity project in Launchpad:



Cheers,
Dustin

Friday, February 16, 2018

10 Amazing Years of Ubuntu and Canonical

February 2008, Canonical's office in Lexington, MA
10 years ago today, I joined Canonical, on the very earliest version of the Ubuntu Server Team!

And in the decade since, I've had the tremendous privilege to work with so many amazing people, and the opportunity to contribute so much open source software to the Ubuntu ecosystem.

Marking the occasion, I've reflected about much of my work over that time period and thought I'd put down in writing a few of the things I'm most proud of (in chronological order)...  Maybe one day, my daughters will read this and think their daddy was a real geek :-)

1. update-motd / motd.ubuntu.com (September 2008)

Throughout the history of UNIX, the "message of the day" was always manually edited and updated by the local system administrator.  Until Ubuntu's message-of-the-day.  In fact, I received an email from Dennis Ritchie and Jon "maddog" Hall, confirming this, in April 2010.  This started as a feature request for the Landscape team, but has turned out to be tremendously useful and informative to all Ubuntu users.  Just last year, we launched motd.ubuntu.com, which provides even more dynamic information about important security vulnerabilities and general news from the Ubuntu ecosystem.  Mathias Gug help me with the design and publication.

2. manpages.ubuntu.com (September 2008)

This was the first public open source project I worked on, in my spare time at Canonical.  I had a local copy of the Ubuntu archive and I was thinking about what sorts of automated jobs I could run on it.  So I wrote some scripts that extracted the manpages out of each one, formatted them as HTML, and published into a structured set of web directories.  10 years later, it's still up and running, serving thousands of hits per day.  In fact, this was one of the ways we were able to shrink the Ubuntu minimal image, but removing the manpages, since they're readable online.  Colin Watson and Kees Cook helped me with the initial implementation, and Matthew Nuzum helped with the CSS and Ubuntu theme in the HTML.

3. Byobu (December 2008)

If you know me at all, you know my passion for the command line UI/UX that is "Byobu".  Byobu was born as the "screen-profiles" project, over lunch at Google in Mountain View, in December of 2008, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit.  Around the lunch table, several of us (including Nick Barcet, Dave Walker, Michael Halcrow, and others), shared our tips and tricks from our own ~/.screenrc configuration files.  In Cape Town, February 2010, at the suggestion of Gustavo Niemeyer, I ported Byobu from Screen to Tmux.  Since Ubuntu Servers don't generally have GUIs, Byobu is designed to be a really nice interface to the Ubuntu command line environment.

4. eCryptfs / Ubuntu Encrypted Home Directories (October 2009)

I was familiar with eCryptfs from its inception in 2005, in the IBM Linux Technology Center's Security Team, sitting next to Michael Halcrow who was the original author.  When I moved to Canonical, I helped Michael maintain the userspace portion of eCryptfs (ecryptfs-utils) and I shepherded into Ubuntu.  eCryptfs was super powerful, with hundreds of options and supported configurations, but all of that proved far to difficult for users at large.  So I set out to simplify it drastically, with an opinionated set of basic defaults.  I started with a simple command to mount a "Private" directory inside of your home directory, where you could stash your secrets.  A few months later, on a long flight to Paris, I managed to hack a new PAM module, pam_ecryptfs.c, that actually encrypted your entire home directory!  This was pretty revolutionary at the time -- predating Apple's FileVault or Microsoft's Bitlocker, even.  Today, tens of millions of Ubuntu users have used eCryptfs to secure their personal data.  I worked closely with Tyler Hicks, Kees Cook, Jamie Strandboge, Michael Halcrow, Colin Watson, and Martin Pitt on this project over the years.

5. ssh-import-id (March 2010)

With the explosion of virtual machines and cloud instances in 2009 / 2010, I found myself constantly copying public SSH keys around.  Moreover, given Canonical's globally distributed nature, I also regularly found myself asking someone for their public SSH keys, so that I could give them access to an instance, perhaps for some pair programming or assistance debugging.  As it turns out, everyone I worked with, had a Launchpad.net account, and had their public SSH keys available there.  So I created (at first) a simple shell script to securely fetch and install those keys.  Scott Moser helped clean up that earliest implementation.  Eventually, I met Casey Marshall, who helped rewrite it entirely in Python.  Moreover, we contacted the maintainers of Github, and asked them to expose user public SSH keys by the API -- which they did!  Now, ssh-import-id is integrated directly into Ubuntu's new subiquity installer and used by many other tools, such as cloud-init and MAAS.

6. Orchestra / MAAS (August 2011)

In 2009, Canonical purchased 5 Dell laptops, which was the Ubuntu Server team's first "cloud".  These laptops were our very first lab for deploying and testing Eucalyptus clouds.  I was responsible for those machines at my house for a while, and I automated their installation with PXE, TFTP, DHCP, DNS, and a ton of nasty debian-installer preseed data.  That said -- it worked!  As it turned out, Scott Moser and Mathias Gug had both created similar setups at their houses for the same reason.  I was mentoring a new hire at Canonical, named Andres Rodriquez at the time, and he took over our part-time hacks and we worked together to create the Orchestra project.  Orchestra, itself was short lived.  It was severely limited by Cobbler as a foundation technology.  So the Orchestra project was killed by Canonical.  But, six months later, a new project was created, based on the same general concept -- physical machine provisioning at scale -- with an entire squad of engineers led by...Andres Rodriguez :-)  MAAS today is easily one of the most important projects the Ubuntu ecosystem and one of the most successful products in Canonical's portfolio.

7. pollinate / pollen / entropy.ubuntu.com (February 2014)

In 2013, I set out to secure Ubuntu at large from a set of attacks ranging from insufficient entropy at first boot.  This was especially problematic in virtual machine instances, in public clouds, where every instance is, by design, exactly identical to many others.  Moreover, the first thing that instance does, is usually ... generate SSH keys.  This isn't hypothetical -- it's quite real.  Raspberry Pi's running Debian were deemed susceptible to this exact problem in November 2015.  So designed and implemented a client (shell script that runs at boot, and fetches some entropy from one to many sources), as well as a high-performance server (golang).  The client is the 'pollinate' script, which runs on the first boot of every Ubuntu server, and the server is the cluster of physical machines processing hundreds of requests per minute at entropy.ubuntu.com.  Many people helped review the design and implementation, including Kees Cook, Jamie Strandboge, Seth Arnold, Tyler Hicks, James Troup, Scott Moser, Steve Langasek, Gustavo Niemeyer, and others.

8. The Orange Box (May 2014)

In December of 2011, in my regular 1:1 with my manager, Mark Shuttleworth, I told him about these new "Intel NUCs", which I had bought and placed them around my house.  I had 3, each of which was running Ubuntu, and attached to a TV around the house, as a media player (music, videos, pictures, etc).  In their spare time, though, they were OpenStack Nova nodes, capable of running a couple of virtual machines.  Mark immediately asked, "How many of those could you fit into a suitcase?"  Within 24 hours, Mark had reached out to the good folks at TranquilPC and introduced me to my new mission -- designing the Orange Box.  I worked with the Tranquil folks through Christmas, and we took our first delivery of 5 of these boxes in January of 2014.  Each chassis held 10 little Intel NUC servers, and a switch, as well as a few peripherals.  Effectively, it's a small data center that travels.  We spend the next 4 months working on the hardware under wraps and then unveiled them at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta in May 2014.  We've gone through a couple of iterations on the hardware and software over the last 4 years, and these machines continue to deliver tremendous value, from live demos on the booth, to customer workshops on premises, or simply accelerating our own developer productivity by "shipping them a lab in a suitcase".  I worked extensively with Dan Poler on this project, over the course of a couple of years.

9. Hollywood (December 2014)

Perhaps the highlight of my professional career came in October of 2016.  Watching Saturday Night Live with my wife Kim, we were laughing at a skit that poked fun at another of my favorite shows, Mr. Robot.  On the computer screen behind the main character, I clearly spotted Hollywood!  Hollywood is just a silly, fun little project I created on a plane one day, mostly to amuse Kim.  But now, it's been used in Saturday Night LiveNBC Dateline News, and an Experian TV commercials!  Even Jess Frazelle created a Docker container

10. petname / golang-petname / python-petname (January 2015)

From "warty warthog" to "bionic beaver", we've always had a focus on fun, and user experience here in Ubuntu.  How hard is it to talk to your colleague about your Amazon EC2 instance, "i-83ab39f93e"?  Or your container "adfxkenw"?  We set out to make something a little more user-friendly with our "petnames".  Petnames are randomly generated "adjective-animal" names, which are easy to pronounce, spell, and remember.  I curated and created libraries that are easily usable in Shell, Golang, and Python.  With the help of colleagues like Stephane Graber and Andres Rodriguez, we now use these in many places in the Ubuntu ecosystem, such as LXD and MAAS.

If you've read this post, thank you for indulging me in a nostalgic little trip down memory lane!  I've had an amazing time designing, implementing, creating, and innovating with some of the most amazing people in the entire technology industry.  And here's to a productive, fun future!

Cheers,
:-Dustin

Friday, February 2, 2018

RFC: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Minimal Images

  • To date, we've shaved the Bionic (18.04 LTS) minimal images down by over 53%, since Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and trimmed nearly 100 packages and thousands of files.
  • Feedback welcome here: https://ubu.one/imgSurvey
In last year's AskHN HackerNews post, "Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?", and the subsequent treatment of the data, we noticed a recurring request for "lighter, smaller, more minimal" Ubuntu images.

This is particularly useful for container images (Docker, LXD, Kubernetes, etc.), embedded device environments, and anywhere a developer wants to bootstrap an Ubuntu system from the smallest possible starting point.  Smaller images generally:
  • are subject to fewer security vulnerabilities and subsequent updates
  • reduce overall network bandwidth consumption
  • and require less on disk storage
First, a definition...
"The Ubuntu Minimal Image is the smallest base upon which a user can apt install any package in the Ubuntu archive."
By design, Ubuntu Minimal Images specifically lack the creature comforts, user interfaces and user design experience that have come to define the Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Cloud images.

To date, we've shaved the Bionic (18.04 LTS) minimal images down by over 53%, since Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and trimmed nearly 100 packages and thousands of files.

-->
ReleaseBytes (compressed)Bytes (uncompressed)FilesDirectoriesLinksPackages
ls -alFdu -sb .find . -type f | wc -lfind . -type d | wc -lfind . -type l | wc -lsudo chroot . dpkg -l | grep -c ^i
14.04 LTS base65,828,262188,406,5089,9531,3061,496189
16.04 LTS base48,296,930120,370,1435,6557511,531103
18.04 LTS base31,089,25981,270,0202,58959619095



As of today, the Bionic (18.04 LTS) minimal image weighs in at 30MB (compressed), and 81MB (uncompressed on disk), and is comprised of 100 Debian packages.

We've removed things like locales and languages, which are easy to add back, but are less necessary in scale-out, container working environments.  We've also removed other human-focused resources, like documentation, manpages, and changelogs, which are more easily read online (and also easy to re-enable).  This base filesystem tarball also lacks a kernel and an init system, as it's intended to be used inside of a chroot or application container.  Note that Canonical's Ubuntu Kernel team has also made tremendous strides tuning and minimizing Linux into various optimized kernel flavors.

We've just released Bionic's Alpha 2, in our development cycle toward an April 26, 2018 release date of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS -- our 7th Ubuntu LTS.

At this point, we're soliciting your feedback in this public "RFC" on our progress toward the smallest Ubuntu base image ever!

Here are a few resources:
I can still see another 1.2MB of savings to harvest in /usr/share/doc, /usr/share/info, and /usr/share/man, and the Foundations team is already looking into filtering out that documentation, too.

Do you see any other opportunities for savings?  Can you help us crop the Bionic (18.04 LTS) images any further?  Is there something that we've culled, that you see as problematic?  We're interested in your feedback at the form here:
Cheers,
Dustin

Friday, January 5, 2018

Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu -- The Ultimate Developer Laptop of 2018!


I'm the proud owner of a new Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition (9360) laptop, pre-loaded from the Dell factory with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop.

Kudos to the Dell and the Canonical teams that have engineered a truly remarkable developer desktop experience.  You should also check out the post from Dell's senior architect behind the XPS 13, Barton George.

As it happens, I'm also the proud owner of a long loved, heavily used, 1st Generation Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop :-)  See this post from May 7, 2012.  You'll be happy to know that machine is still going strong.  It's now my wife's daily driver.  And I use it almost every day, for any and all hacking that I do from the couch, after hours, after I leave the office ;-)

Now, this latest XPS edition is a real dream of a machine!

From a hardware perspective, this newer XPS 13 sports an Intel i7-7660U 2.5GHz processor and 16GB of memory.  While that's mildly exciting to me (as I've long used i7's and 16GB), here's what I am excited about...

The 500GB NVME storage and a whopping 1239 MB/sec I/O throughput!

kirkland@xps13:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/nvme0n1
/dev/nvme0n1:
 Timing cached reads:   25230 MB in  2.00 seconds = 12627.16 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 3718 MB in  3.00 seconds = 1239.08 MB/sec

And on top of that, this is my first QHD+ touch screen laptop display, sporting a magnificent 3200x1800 resolution.  The graphics are nothing short of spectacular.  Here's nearly 4K of Hollywood hard "at work" :-)


The keyboard is super comfortable.  I like it a bit better than the 1st generation.  Unlike your Apple friends, we still have our F-keys, which is important to me as a Byobu user :-)  The placement of the PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End keys (as Fn + Up/Down/Left/Right) takes a while to get used to.


The speakers are decent for a laptop, and the microphone is excellent.  The webcam is placed in an odd location (lower left of the screen), but it has quite nice resolution and focus quality.


And Bluetooth and WiFi, well, they "just work".  I got 98.2 Mbits/sec of throughput over WiFi.

kirkland@xps:~$ iperf -c 10.0.0.45
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 10.0.0.45, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 10.0.0.149 port 40568 connected with 10.0.0.45 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.1 sec   118 MBytes  98.2 Mbits/sec

There's no external display port, so you'll need something like this USB-C-to-HDMI adapter to project to a TV or monitor.


There's 1x USB-C port, 2x USB-3 ports, and an SD-Card reader.


One of the USB-3 ports can be used to charge your phone or other devices, even while your laptop is suspended.  I use this all the time, to keep my phone topped up while I'm aboard planes, trains, and cars.  To do so, you'll need to enable "USB PowerShare" in the BIOS.  Here's an article from Dell's KnowledgeBase explaining how.


Honestly, I have only one complaint...  And that's that there is no Trackstick mouse (which is available on some Dell models).  I'm not a huge fan of the Touchpad.  It's too sensitive, and my palms are always touching it inadvertently.  So I need to use an external mouse to be effective.  I'll continue to provide this feedback to the Dell team, in the hopes that one day I'll have my perfect developer laptop!  Otherwise, this machine is a beauty.  I'm sure you'll love it too.

Cheers,
Dustin

Thursday, January 4, 2018

Ubuntu Updates for the Meltdown / Spectre Vulnerabilities


For up-to-date patch, package, and USN links, please refer to: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/KnowledgeBase/SpectreAndMeltdown

This is cross-posted on Canonical's official Ubuntu Insights blog:
https://insights.ubuntu.com/2018/01/04/ubuntu-updates-for-the-meltdown-spectre-vulnerabilities/


Unfortunately, you’ve probably already read about one of the most widespread security issues in modern computing history -- colloquially known as “Meltdown” (CVE-2017-5754) and “Spectre” (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715) -- affecting practically every computer built in the last 10 years, running any operating system. That includes Ubuntu.

I say “unfortunately”, in part because there was a coordinated release date of January 9, 2018, agreed upon by essentially every operating system, hardware, and cloud vendor in the world. By design, operating system updates would be available at the same time as the public disclosure of the security vulnerability. While it happens rarely, this an industry standard best practice, which has broken down in this case.

At its heart, this vulnerability is a CPU hardware architecture design issue. But there are billions of affected hardware devices, and replacing CPUs is simply unreasonable. As a result, operating system kernels -- Windows, MacOS, Linux, and many others -- are being patched to mitigate the critical security vulnerability.

Canonical engineers have been working on this since we were made aware under the embargoed disclosure (November 2017) and have worked through the Christmas and New Years holidays, testing and integrating an incredibly complex patch set into a broad set of Ubuntu kernels and CPU architectures.

Ubuntu users of the 64-bit x86 architecture (aka, amd64) can expect updated kernels by the original January 9, 2018 coordinated release date, and sooner if possible. Updates will be available for:

  • Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful) -- Linux 4.13 HWE
  • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial) -- Linux 4.4 (and 4.4 HWE)
  • Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty) -- Linux 3.13
  • Ubuntu 12.04 ESM** (Precise) -- Linux 3.2
    • Note that an Ubuntu Advantage license is required for the 12.04 ESM kernel update, as Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is past its end-of-life
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic) will release in April of 2018, and will ship a 4.15 kernel, which includes the KPTI patchset as integrated upstream.

Ubuntu optimized kernels for the Amazon, Google, and Microsoft public clouds are also covered by these updates, as well as the rest of Canonical's Certified Public Clouds including Oracle, OVH, Rackspace, IBM Cloud, Joyent, and Dimension Data.

These kernel fixes will not be Livepatch-able. The source code changes required to address this problem is comprised of hundreds of independent patches, touching hundreds of files and thousands of lines of code. The sheer complexity of this patchset is not compatible with the Linux kernel Livepatch mechanism. An update and a reboot will be required to active this update.

Furthermore, you can expect Ubuntu security updates for a number of other related packages, including CPU microcode, GCC and QEMU in the coming days.

We don't have a performance analysis to share at this time, but please do stay tuned here as we'll followup with that as soon as possible.

Thanks,
@DustinKirkland
VP of Product
Canonical / Ubuntu

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