Results of the Ubuntu Desktop Applications Survey

I had the distinct honor to deliver the closing keynote of the UbuCon Europe conference in Paris a few weeks ago.  First off -- what a beautiful conference and venue!  Kudos to the organizers who really put together a truly remarkable event.  And many thanks to the gentleman (Elias?) who brought me a bottle of his family's favorite champagne, as a gift on Day 2 :-)  I should give more talks in France!

In my keynote, I presented the results of the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Default Desktops Applications Survey, which was discussed at length on HackerNews, Reddit, and Slashdot.  With the help of the Ubuntu Desktop team (led by Will Cooke), we processed over 15,000 survey responses and in this presentation, I discussed some of the insights of the data.

The team is now hard at work evaluating many of the suggested applications, for those of you that aren't into the all-Emacs spin of Ubuntu ;-)

Moreover, we're also investigating a potential approach to make the Ubuntu Desktop experience perhaps a bit like those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books we loved when we were kids, where users have the opportunity to select each of their prefer applications (or stick with the distro default) for a handful of categories, during installation.

Marius Quabeck recorded the session and published the audio and video of the presentation here on YouTube:

You can download the slides here, or peruse them below:

Let's talk about the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Roadmap! from Dustin Kirkland

Cheers,
Dustin

Bare Metal Kubernetes: More Containers, Less Overhead

Earlier this month, I spoke at ContainerDays, part of the excellent DevOpsDays series of conferences -- this one in lovely Portland, Oregon.

I gave a live demo of Kubernetes running directly on bare metal.  I was running it on an 11-node Ubuntu Orange Box -- but I used the exact same tools Canonical's world class consulting team uses to deploy Kubernetes onto racks of physical machines.

You see, the ability to run Kubernetes on bare metal, behind your firewall is essential to the yin-yang duality of Cloud Native computing.  Sometimes, what you need is actually a Native Cloud.

Deploying Kubernetes into virtual machines in the cloud is rather easy, straightforward, with dozens of tools now that can handle that.

But there's only one tool today, that can deploy the exact same Kubernetes to AWS, Azure, GCE, as well as VMware, OpenStack, and bare metal machines.  That tools is conjure-up, which acts as a command line front end to several essential Ubuntu tools: MAAS, LXD, and Juju.

I don't know if the presentation was recorded, but I'm happy to share with you my slides for download, and embedded here below.  There are a few screenshots within that help convey the demo.

Bare Metal Kubernetes - More Containers, Less Overhead from Dustin Kirkland

Cheers,
Dustin

My Meetup Slides: Deploy and Manage Kubernetes Clusters on Ubuntu in the Oracle Cloud

Thank you to Oracle Cloud for inviting me to speak at this month's CloudAustin Meetup hosted by Rackspace.

I very much enjoyed deploying Canonical Kubernetes on Ubuntu in the Oracle Cloud, and then exploring Kubernetes a bit, how it works, the architecture, and a simple workload within.  I'm happy to share my slides below, and you can download a PDF here:

Canonical Kubernetes on the Oracle Cloud (1) from Dustin Kirkland

If you're interested in learning more, check out:

• The upstream documentation for installing Kubernetes on Ubuntu:
• https://kubernetes.io/docs/getting-started-guides/ubuntu/
• You can also get $300 free credit on Oracle Cloud
• https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/tryit
• Also, you can watch our Kubernetes webinar series:
• https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/06/02/kubernetes-webinar-series/

It was a great audience, with plenty of good questions, pizza, and networking!

I'm pleased to share my slide deck here.

Cheers,
Dustin

The Questions that You're Afraid to Ask about Containers

Yesterday, I delivered a talk to a lively audience at ContainerWorld in Santa Clara, California.

If I measured "the most interesting slides" by counting "the number of people who took a picture of the slide", then by far "the most interesting slides" are slides 8-11, which pose an answer the question:

"Should I run my PaaS on top of my IaaS, or my IaaS on top of my PaaS"?

In the Ubuntu world, that answer is super easy -- however you like!  At Canonical, we're happy to support:

1. Kubernetes running on top of Ubuntu OpenStack
2. OpenStack running on top of Canonical Kubernetes
3. Kubernetes running along side OpenStack

In all cases, the underlying substrate is perfectly consistent:

• you've got 1 to N physical or virtual machines
• which are dynamically provisioned by MAAS or your cloud provider
• running stable, minimal, secure Ubuntu server image
• carved up into fast, efficient, independently addressable LXD machine containers

With that as your base, we'll easily to conjure-up a Kubernetes, an OpenStack, or both.  And once you have a Kubernetes or OpenStack, we'll gladly conjure-up one inside the other.

As always, I'm happy to share my slides with you here.  You're welcome to download the PDF, or flip through the embedded slides below.

[Container world 2017] The Questions You're Afraid to Ask about Containers from Dustin Kirkland

Cheers,
Dustin

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Security: A Comprehensive Overview

From Linux kernel livepatches to encryption to ASLR to compiler optimizations and configuration hardening, we strive to ensure that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is the most secure Linux distribution out of the box.

These slides try to briefly explain:

• what we do to secure Ubuntu
• how the underlying technology works
• when the features took effect in Ubuntu

I hope you find this slide deck informative and useful!  The information herein is largely collected from the Ubuntu Security Features wiki page, where you can always find up to date information.

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Security Features from Dustin Kirkland

Cheers,
Dustin

OpenZFS Developer Summit Keynote: Everything Old is New Again...But Better!

On Monday this week, I was afforded the distinct privilege to deliver the opening keynote at the OpenZFS Developer Summit in San Francisco.  It was a beautiful little event, with a full day of informative presentations and lots of networking during lunch and breaks.

Below, you can view my slides, download the PDF, or watch the talk (starts at 31:10) and demo in its entirety.

Hopefully you'll enjoy the demo -- especially the most interesting raw tracing system new in the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Linux 4.4 kernel, something called The Berkeley Packet Filter, or "BPF" for short.  I used a series of open source utilities from Brendan Gregg (from Netflix), called iovisor/bcc.  Quoting the README.md on Github:

BCC is a toolkit for creating efficient kernel tracing and manipulation programs, and includes several useful tools and examples. It makes use of extended BPF (Berkeley Packet Filters), formally known as eBPF, a new feature that was first added to Linux 3.15. Much of what BCC uses requires Linux 4.1 and above.

I'll follow up this post with another one, formally introducing BPF and how to install and use bcc in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, if anyone is interested...

Open ZFS Keynote (public) from Dustin Kirkland

:-Dustin

Container Camp London: Streamlining HPC Workloads with Containers

A couple of weeks ago, I delivered a talk at the Container Camp UK 2016.  It was an brilliant event, on a beautiful stage at Picturehouse Central in Picadilly Circus in London.

You're welcome to view the slides or download them as a PDF, or watch my talk below.

And for the techies who want to skip the slide fluff and get their hands dirty, setup your OpenStack and LXD and start streamlining your HPC workloads using this guide.

Streamlining HPC Workloads with Containers from Dustin Kirkland

Enjoy,
:-Dustin

Using Containers to Create the World's Fastest OpenStack

Below you can find the audio/video recording of my OpenStack Austin presentation, where I demonstrated Ubuntu OpenStack Mitaka, running on top of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, entirely within LXD machine containers.  You can also download the PDF of the slides here.  And there are a number of other excellent talks here!


Cheers, Dustin

Container World 2016: Application and Machine Containers (slides)

I had the opportunity to speak at Container World 2016 in Santa Clara yesterday.  Thanks in part to the Netflix guys who preceded me, the room was absolutely packed!

You can download a PDF of my slides here, or flip through them embedded below.

I'd really encourage you to try the demo instructions of LXD toward the end!


:-Dustin

adapt install [anything]

As always, I enjoyed speaking at the SCALE14x event, especially at the new location in Pasadena, California!

What if you could adapt a package from a newer version of Ubuntu, onto your stable LTS desktop/server?

Or, as a developer, what if you could provide your latest releases to your users running an older LTS version of Ubuntu?

Introducing adapt!

adapt is a lot like apt...  It’s a simple command that installs packages.

But it “adapts” a requested version to run on your current system.

It's a simple command that installs any package from any release of Ubuntu into any version of Ubuntu.

How does adapt work?

Simple… Containers!

More specifically, LXD system containers.

Why containers?

Containers can run anywhere, physical, virtual, desktops, servers, and any CPU architecture.

And containers are light and fast!  Zero latency and no virtualization overhead.

Most importantly, system containers are perfect copies of the released distribution, the operating system itself.

And all of that continuous integration testing we do perform on every single Ubuntu release?

We leverage that!
You can download a PDF of the slides for my talk here, or flip through them here:



I hope you enjoy some of the magic that LXD is making possible ;-)

Cheers!
Dustin

SXSW 2015 Slides and Audio from Fingerprints are Usernames, Not Passwords

This morning, I led a "core conversation" session in the Security and Privacy track at SXSW Interactive festival.  With 60 seats in the room, it was standing room only, and unfortunately, some people were turned away from the session due to a lack of space.  Amazingly, that was a packed house at 9:30am on a Sunday morning, merely stumbling distance from the late night party that is 6th Street in Austin, Texas!

I'm pleased to share with you both the slides, as well as a rudimentary audio recording from the mic on my laptop.  The format of a "core conversation" at SXSW is not your typical conference lecture.  Rather, it's an interactive, dynamic, social exchange of ideas and thoughts.  I hope you enjoy!

Slides:


Audio:


Have a great South-by!
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