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**Liz Rice:** Yeah, it was. Last year. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, that was-- I really loved that one too, because it really broke down what a container is. There's a lot of confusion a lot of times when people get into containers and they try to compare it more to a lightweight virtual machine rather than a highly configured process. And I think implementin... |
**Liz Rice:** Right. It's the... I don't know if there is a better way of really seeing what's going on than to see the code... For people who understand code it's the clearest way. I always find it much easier to see code than to try and understand what people mean when they draw boxes. Show me the code! |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, boxes only get you so far. That I think is enough to hook you, like 'Oh, this could be interesting. How might I use this?' But when it comes down to truly understanding and implementing something, seeing the code is where it's at. |
**Liz Rice:** Yeah, I think so. I'm exaggerating about the boxes; some boxes are really good. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Who was it? Was it Bob Martin who made that comment about "Architecture is just about drawing boxes with arrows going in one direction", something like that? \[laughing\] So, for anybody who might not be familiar with you and your work, do you want to give a brief background? |
**Liz Rice:** Sure, okay. So, I am I suppose an engineer by trade, I spend a lot of my career working on protocols, and I started off writing in C for a very long time. And I had a few years where I stopped writing code and I went and did product management for a few companies. Some of them you might have heard of, lik... |
\[04:05\] And now I am... Well, a technology evangelist is my job title for a company called Aqua Security, and we help enterprises with securing their containerized deployments. But I basically have a really fun job of demonstrating things and trying to explain what is going on in various basic technology, hopefully w... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think understanding things at a more in-depth level helps with security though too, so I'd argue that it's beneficial from a security standpoint. |
**Liz Rice:** I definitely think it is, and particularly with the world of containers where, if people are thinking about them as if they were virtual machines, well, they are not really thinking about them the right way. And there are so many different kind of insecurities. Fundamentally, if you want the security of a... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** But talk to us more about that. Because when I think about it, I think that at an individual level the security issues would be much easier to grasp and comprehend for a micro-service, for a single micro-service. But when you have so many, it sounds that would be more difficult. So how does the c... |
**Liz Rice:** Yeah, I think it's really about decomposing the problem the same way that the microservices, from a software architecture point of view, can decompose the problem. And the fact that you've now got these more isolated— well, we'll say containers, you've got a different problem in that you need to keep trac... |
A really good example is if you've got a micro-service that is supposed to—maybe it's product search, that is supposed to look up products from a product database, so it only ever reads from the database. And so, if you were to catch that microservice trying to write something to a database, you'd know that it was some... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, and I'm thinking... So, is there a container-level security gateway, I would say? |
**Liz Rice:** \[08:01\] Yeah, so at Aqua we have a product that covers the whole life cycle of containers, really. So we do the image scanning and looking for vulnerabilities... And in some ways, that's more complex for containers, just because you've got more instances of different pieces of code. I guess there's a fe... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, that is exactly what I was thinking about, and I think you touched on that. With so many microservices and so many images and maybe even so many containers, you would need something like what your company does, that would help manage the security for all of the basic group. |
**Liz Rice:** Right, yeah. And it's wonderful; see I've been with Aqua for, I guess, coming up six months now. And it's one of the things that really excited me about joining them, was I can really see how this product is needed. And I haven't come from a security background, I'd come from a development background and ... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, absolutely. And that is done in Go as well. |
**Liz Rice:** Yeah. So some of it is Go, some of it there is some C code as well, because we're doing some pretty low-level things to monitor what's going on inside the containers. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So it seems you actually really enjoy educating people on low-level things, like container implementations and the [syscall talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01w7viEZzXQ&t=35s) that you recently gave. What motivates you there? Is this people asking you questions and you try to produce content t... |
**Liz Rice:** Yeah, so it started with the container talk. I saw an early version of that by Julian Friedman from IBM quite early on, when I was first dealing with containers. And it just clarified everything for me, and I thought "I want to replicate this." I had to go away and did it myself at home, and then I though... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** So, is there a trick to taking something that's as complex as say syscalls or networking, and presenting it in a way that makes people understand it? It still feels like magic, but they appreciate the presentation afterwards? Because I think that's the feeling that everybody takes away from your pre... |
**Liz Rice:** \[12:02\] Yeah, I think... My process is to try building things; I like to think 'What happens if I try and build this thing, or if I try to reproduce what's going on?' Or 'If I try using something, what will happen?' So, it's experimentation. And I'll try lots of things, and some things do always leap ou... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah. The first time I ever used `strace` or `ltrace` and got to see all the syscalls and library calls that were being made by processes, you're like 'I have super powers!' |
**Liz Rice:** Yeah! And then looking at what's inside the `/proc` directory as well, it's a gold mine of crazy interesting things that the kernel is doing, and... Yeah, I think there's all sorts of fun things in there. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I love the `/proc` directory and digging through. I hate that it's not very well documented, and even looking through the Linux source code to figure out... Like, how does this counter get incremented, what does that really mean? And it's often complex. |
**Liz Rice:** Yeah. Did you see, [Jess Frazelle](https://twitter.com/jessfraz) was just on Twitter today asking people about their opinions on "If `/proc` had a better API, what would it look like?" Or what would people like to see from a better API to `/proc`? |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, and it's actually really amazing how many of the tools that people use every day, like `top` and `htop` and others that really are just interfaces over the top of that `/proc` directory. |
**Liz Rice:** Right. |
**Erik St. Martin:** But yeah, I think there needs to be better documentation on some of that stuff for sure. There's actually a really cool GitHub repo — I am trying to remember this off the top of my head; I think it's [github.com/0xAX/linux-insides](https://github.com/0xAX/linux-insides), and it walks through a lot ... |
**Liz Rice:** That does look amazing. |
**Erik St. Martin:** But I don't think they have anything on the `/proc` directory, which would be awesome. |
**Liz Rice:** I'm just looking at it now. Yeah, they call some things like _Cgroups_, which probably goes into... Probably it has to look at `/proc`. But yeah, it looks amazing. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Interrupts and interrupt handlers and all kinds of really deep-level kernel stuff. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** And how you approach looking at these things that are lower-level and we don't get to look at on a daily basis unless we make an effort and have the curiosity to do so — so, the way you approach looking at these things I think makes a big difference. |
\[12:51\] For example, looking at this talk about the syscalls, there was a moment when you outputted some stack to the screen, to the terminal, and I was looking at that and was like 'Okay, that's what the output is.' And you were looking at that and thinking 'No, those are duplicates.' I would've been thinking it 'We... |
**Liz Rice:** Yeah, I think I might have had a certain amount of... I don't know, I'm gonna say storytelling license there, because I had actually seen the bit in the man page that says "You've got these two different stop states, and you can't tell the difference who's the tracer", but it just makes more sense as a st... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, but I think it highlights something important, which is sometimes when we are looking at something that's completely new, we can just take for granted that that's how it's supposed to work, but we should always have a... Take a second look, and question and inquire and go deeper. I thought ... |
**Liz Rice:** Yeah. You know who I think is amazing at this? It's [Julia Evans](https://twitter.com/b0rk), if you've seen her at work... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Oh, yeah. |
**Liz Rice:** Because she is so good at having that kind of curiosity about how does a thing work? Amazing. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah. |
**Erik St. Martin:** And the thing that I love about that approach, with those quick graphics and things like that that she creates, is it gives you this really abstract understanding of it, but it gives you enough hooks where if you wanted to dig a little deeper on one section, you could. And that usually tends to be ... |
**Liz Rice:** And I think she takes the fear out of it somehow. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah. I absolutely love her work, and if you are not following her on Twitter, you definitely should. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yes, absolutely. I agree with that too. |
**Liz Rice:** Definitely. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So what's next on the list? Do you have any ideas for what your next talk or blog post or something will be about? |
**Liz Rice:** Yes. So, I have a couple of ideas for things and I was raising the question on Twitter just the other day, because I really love to hear from other people their ideas of things that they think 'Yeah, that area over there - I really don't know how it works.' So, if you're listening and there's something yo... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Being you have a networking background, what about something networking related? I think there's a lot of stuff going on in the cloud networking space now; you know, [CNI](https://github.com/containernetworking/cni), and you've got things like [Flannel](https://github.com/coreos/flannel) and [Calic... |
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