Ubuntu and LXD at ContainerCon 2015

Canonical is delighted to sponsor ContainerCon 2015, a Linux Foundation event in Seattle next week, August 17-19, 2015. It's quite exciting to see the A-list of sponsors, many of them newcomers to this particular technology, teaming with energy around containers. 

From chroots to BSD Jails and Solaris Zones, the concepts behind containers were established decades ago, and in fact traverse the spectrum of server operating systems. At Canonical, we've been working on containers in Ubuntu for more than half a decade, providing a home and resources for stewardship and maintenance of the upstream Linux Containers (LXC) project since 2010.

Last year, we publicly shared our designs for LXD -- a new stratum on top of LXC that endows the advantages of a traditional hypervisor into the faster, more efficient world of containers.

Those designs are now reality, with the open source Golang code readily available on Github, and Ubuntu packages available in a PPA for all supported releases of Ubuntu, and already in the Ubuntu 15.10 beta development tree. With ease, you can launch your first LXD containers in seconds, following this simple guide.

LXD is a persistent daemon that provides a clean RESTful interface to manage (start, stop, clone, migrate, etc.) any of the containers on a given host.

Hosts running LXD are handily federated into clusters of container hypervisors, and can work as Nova Compute nodes in OpenStack, for example, delivering Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud technology at lower costs and greater speeds.

Here, LXD and Docker are quite complementary technologies. LXD furnishes a dynamic platform for "system containers" -- containers that behave like physical or virtual machines, supplying all of the functionality of a full operating system (minus the kernel, which is shared with the host). Such "machine containers" are the core of IaaS clouds, where users focus on instances with compute, storage, and networking that behave like traditional datacenter hardware.

LXD runs perfectly well along with Docker, which supplies a framework for "application containers" -- containers that enclose individual processes that often relate to one another as pools of micro services and deliver complex web applications.

Moreover, the Zen of LXD is the fact that the underlying container implementation is actually decoupled from the RESTful API that drives LXD functionality. We are most excited to discuss next week at ContainerCon our work with Microsoft around the LXD RESTful API, as a cross-platform container management layer.

Ben Armstrong, a Principal Program Manager Lead at Microsoft on the core virtualization and container technologies, has this to say:

“As Microsoft is working to bring Windows Server Containers to the world – we are excited to see all the innovation happening across the industry, and have been collaborating with many projects to encourage and foster this environment. Canonical’s LXD project is providing a new way for people to look at and interact with container technologies. Utilizing ‘system containers’ to bring the advantages of container technology to the core of your cloud infrastructure is a great concept. We are looking forward to seeing the results of our engagement with Canonical in this space.”

Finally, if you're in Seattle next week, we hope you'll join us for the technical sessions we're leading at ContainerCon 2015, including: "Putting the D in LXD: Migration of Linux Containers", "Container Security - Past, Present, and Future", and "Large Scale Container Management with LXD and OpenStack". Details are below.

Date: Monday, August 17 • 2:20pm - 3:10pm
Title: Large Scale Container Management with LXD and OpenStack
Speaker: Stéphane Graber
Abstract: http://sched.co/3YK6
Location: Grand Ballroom B
Schedule: http://sched.co/3YK6 

Date: Wednesday, August 19 10:25am-11:15am
Title: Putting the D in LXD: Migration of Linux Containers
Speaker: Tycho Andersen
Abstract: http://sched.co/3YTz
Location: Willow A
Schedule: http://sched.co/3YTz

Date: Wednesday, August 19 • 3:00pm - 3:50pm
Title: Container Security - Past, Present and Future
Speaker: Serge Hallyn
Abstract: http://sched.co/3YTl
Location: Ravenna
Schedule: http://sched.co/3YTl

Cheers,
Dustin

The Linux Foundation's Cloud Open: Security and Privacy in the Cloud

Howdy all!

I just delivered my presentation at the Linux Foundation's CloudOpen 2012 event, and I'm happy to share my slides below.  You can also download the PDF.


I must say that this conference is simply one of the absolute best conferences around.  This year co-located several events, including LinuxCon, Linux Plumbers, as well as the new CloudOpen conference.  I've spoken at each of these in the past, and always found the quality of the presentations, evening events, and hallway conversations as the absolute best in the industry.

:-Dustin

PowerNap Your Data Center! (LinuxCon 2011 Vancouver)

I was honored to speak at LinuxCon North America in beautiful Vancouver yesterday, about one of my favorite topics -- energy efficiency opportunities using Ubuntu Servers in the data center (something I've blogged before).

I'm pleased to share those slides with you today!  The talk is entitled PowerNap Your Data Center, and focused on Ubuntu's innovative PowerNap suite, from the system administrator's or data center manager's perspective.

We discussed the original, Cloud motivations for PowerNap, its evolution from the basic process monitoring and suspend/hibernate methods of PowerNap1, to our complete rewrite of PowerNap2 (thanks, Andres!) which added nearly a dozen monitors and the ubiquitously useful PowerSave mode.  PowerNap is now more useful and configurable than ever!

Flip through the presentation below, or download the PDF here.





Stay tuned for another PowerNap presentation I'm giving at Linux Plumbers next month in California.  That one should be a bit deeper dive into the technical implementation, and hopefully generate some plumbing layer discussion and improvement suggestions.

:-Dustin