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Now, while release engineering for an open source product may not seem as important at first, because it's free, so why care, actually the opposite is true. The developers care a lot about these things. And once you have a certain number of users, which RabbitMQ has, these things become important... Because bugs can af... |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Yeah, you will probably try to find alternatives to that project. This one was free -- free, I mean it didn't cost you any money, so you do not lose anything by switching. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[08:13\] Again, I view RabbitMQ as core infrastructure, but what does core infrastructure mean to you? |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** I think I have the same definition as you. A core infrastructure is a component you rely on to provide your service, for instance, if you're a company... Or even as someone at home, I rely on some core infrastructure just to run my own computers, even if it's not for work. |
For instance, as a company, in the context of RabbitMQ for instance, I expect that it's crystal clear what I get from RabbitMQ, so that I'm confident when I want to deploy it, upgrade it, so that I can build my own business on top of that component, and this won't fall apart because of that core component, core infrast... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. So I know that you have experience with RabbitMQ, but I don't know as much about your experience with FreeBSD, because you're not just a RabbitMQ contributor, but also a FreeBSD contributor. |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Yes. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So you have seen both sides of a messaging system such as RabbitMQ and an operating system such as FreeBSD. So how do the two compare? |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** An operating system is a very generic tool. You don't expect it to be the best in a specific area, but you expect it to behave well, and be at least good in all areas. RabbitMQ is a bit different in that \[unintelligible 00:10:08.03\] because we want to provide a very specific service in Rabb... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So can you give me an example from your experience of release engineering gone wrong in both projects, if there is such a thing? I'm sure there is. |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Starting with RabbitMQ, I remember one release -- I don't remember the version number, but at the same time we released a new version of RabbitMQ with both a security bug fix and a breaking change. That was perfect, I'm sure, for admins who wanted to deploy that security bug fix as soon as po... |
In FreeBSD I remember the FreeBSD 5.0 release cycle, because between FreeBSD 4 and 5, one of the big changes was to replace global lock used all over the place in the kernel by fine-grained lockings. And this went pretty bad because it took years to stabilize that work. |
\[12:09\] In parallel to that, new versions of FreeBSD 4 were cut and published, but it was really difficult for the project to ship something at that time, because the cut base was very unstable, and nobody knew when we could cut even beta, let alone the final version. Yeah, it was a big problem because of that. It pu... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think you touched up on something really interesting, which is the longer you wait to ship something, the worse the release gets, or the more problematic the release can become. |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I don't know whether it becomes is a definite but the longer you wait, the higher the chances the release will not be as good. |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Yeah. And I think that the most important part is that people are losing confidence, both developers working on that, and users expecting the release. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, I think we keep forgetting, at the end of the day it is people like you and me that are responsible for some pretty important systems that they have to, first of all, consume these updates somehow, understand what changes they are rolling out, and when something goes wrong - well, guess what? Th... |
So the harder it is for these developers to roll out these changes or to start using maybe new features, whatever it may be, the less likely they are to consume future changes. So it's almost like they enter a vicious cycle, but it's a negative one in that if it doesn't work as smooth and as consistent and as pain-free... |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** No. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** No. If things would change in unexpected ways, would you do it? No. If you had to wait a really long time for an update, like let's say two years, and then you applied it and everything broke, would you do it again? No. So there is a very strong relationship between the happiness of end users and the ... |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Yeah, I agree. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So if you had to pick one - I know it's an unfair comparison, but let's just go with it for the fun of it - what would you say is a more core infrastructure, RabbitMQ or FreeBSD? |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** It's a tough one... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** You can answer it any way you want, by the way... It's meant to be fun, it's not meant to be tough. \[laughter\] |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** I think it depends on... If we stay in the company we're not end users and not people at home I mean, it depends on what kind of service you provide on top of that. For instance, if we are taking a company using RabbitMQ for cars, like you mentioned earlier, in that case RabbitMQ would be the... |
\[16:16\] So I think that's the most important component. For a company like Sony, for instance, who is using FreeBSD in their Playstation products, if the devices they ship to gamers crash all the time because their operating system is unstable, it will be a very sad story for everyone. So in that kind of context I th... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I know that Netflix are other big users of FreeBSD. Imagine if you can't stream your Netflix because there was a bug in FreeBSD, probably shipped worldwide, across all their \[unintelligible 00:16:54.02\] |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** WhatsApp is also using FreeBSD, but they're also exchanging messages... So in that company if they were to use RabbitMQ - yeah, it would be more difficult to define which component is the most important. I would say RabbitMQ. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think they would get the best and worst of both components, so it depends on a combination of that how well that would work out... But I see what you mean. And for the listeners, this actually happened; both myself and JSP were in Paris - JSP is from Paris, France... JSP - that's how I refer to Jean... |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Yes. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** But GSP is actually Georges St-Pierre, and he's an MMA fighter. |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I used to do his workouts many years before I even met you. So whenever I say JSP, I'm thinking "Ah, Georges St-Pierre", and like "I should go for a workout." So that's something which happens -- I know you never knew that, but anyways, that was a tangent. So coming back... We were Paris, and we had t... |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Yeah. Especially that RabbitMQ is often used to also mitigate problems on both the application emitting the message and the application consuming it. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's right. |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** So if you have a problem in the middle... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, I'm pretty sure that today, for example, you have used a system that behind the scenes uses RabbitMQ. And that's why we think of it as core infrastructure, because we know that it's everywhere. And it works well in most cases, but as it happens, we get to find out about all the cases when it doe... |
**Break**: \[19:27\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So we've been talking generally about the RabbitMQ release engineering, the FreeBSD one, how do they compare as projects, the whole core infrastructure notion... What I'm wondering now is how does the FreeBSD release engineering process look like? |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** So after that FreeBSD 5.0 disaster the release engineering team started to work on something so that FreeBSD never faces that situation again... And that process evolved a couple times since. Today, the FreeBSD release engineering is based on a fixed interval between major releases and also m... |
When we want to start to prepare the next release, we have release engineers or someone who is hired by the FreeBSD Foundation and is paid for that; he will take care of announcing to the FreeBSD contributors - not only the contributors, but the entire community. He will publish a calendar where he will state that the ... |
So that calendar is very flexible, but it's quite useful, because it tells to the FreeBSD contributors when to expect things, and it's very easy for contributors to organize and prioritize their tasks. For instance, if someone is working on new features, then he knows that he has to finish by these dates, or it will be... |
\[23:52\] So that calendar tool is really useful, because it allows everyone in the community and the developers to communicate and understand what's going on. As I said, for users who will use that new version of FreeBSD, they can plan for testing, for instance. You mentioned Netflix - they'd appreciate that, because ... |
So the fact that we use a detailed calendar - yeah, it really helps the communication and it makes the whole process more reliable and the outcome more reliable as well. I think that's the main part which was introduced following FreeBSD 5. And we have some evolutions from time, but they are mostly around adjusting the... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. This is something -- first of all, this sounds really interesting, and what I'm wondering is could I see this calendar somewhere? Can I see how this process works? Is it publicly available? |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Yeah, that calendar is published on the FreeBSD.org website, announced on the mailing lists... That's the main communication channels. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** And where does the FreeBSD development happen? I know that the RabbitMQ one happens on GitHub, but where does the FreeBSD one happen? |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Initially in CVS. I don't remember the years exactly, but at some point we switched to Subversion, and both servers were hosted internally in the FreeBSD infrastructure, and in the Yahoo cluster in Sunnyvale. In the past year we switched to Git, but we are still hosting that internally, and t... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So I know that you can obviously communicate everything via the website. I don't know whether you have any commenting enabled; most websites don't. It tends to be a one-way channel... But how does the community talk to the developers? Is there a mailing list? How does that work? |
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