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

Multi-Factor Authentication in the Cloud

Here are the slides, as promised, from my Multi-Factor Authentication in the Cloud talk at yesterday's Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit.  I really enjoyed this talk, and the excellent questions from the audience!


:-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

Data Security and Key Management in the Cloud

Key management in cloud computing presents a brand new, unique, and distinct set of challenges which are in many cases disparate from the traditional set of key management problems system administrators have been dealing with for decades in physical data centers.  In fact, this very topic, in conjunction with data security and privacy, is the subject of two presentations I’m giving in the next 30 days at:

• Texas Linux Fest -- San Antonio, TX -- August 4, 2012
• Linux Foundation’s CloudOpen -- San Diego, CA -- Wednesday August 29, 2012

How are you managing your most sensitive information stored in the Cloud? Are you encrypting that data? Where are you storing your cryptographic keys and certificates? And who has access to them? If you have a stake in your organization's security, these questions may be keeping you up at night.

Cloud storage and Big Data present significant opportunities for enterprises, but those opportunities bring several huge challenges. In this session, we’ll explore:

• What's not secure, not acceptable, not working --- but totally pervasive!
• Where encryption makes the most sense around Cloud and Big Data applications
• Key sprawl in the cloud
• The strengths and weaknesses of various key management options
• Easing the pain - Recent innovations for managing keys and company secrets
• Real-world use cases – from web servers to encrypted file systems to big data to SSH to SSL

I hope you’ll join me for one or both of these talks!

:-Dustin