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• Sigstore's differences from PGP, including transparency logs and centralization |
• Signing and verifying digital content with Sigstore |
• Software supply chain security and the role of signing commits |
• Sigstore and its adoption in signing release artifacts and container images |
• Use cases for Cosign in signing container images and verifying their provenance |
• Distrosless base image suite and its properties, including reproducibility and transparency |
• Chainguard company and its About page with Easter eggs and interactive elements |
• The hosts discuss Dan Lorenc's uncut hair as a result of the pandemic |
• Discussion of Easter eggs in software, including one hidden face on the Chainguard website |
• The importance and growing recognition of software supply chain security |
• The impact of the SolarWinds attack on the industry and government regulations |
• Dan Lorenc's experience at KubeCon and Supply Chain Security Con |
• Chainguard's goals and plans for future development, including continued focus on Sigstore adoption |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So I've attended the last KubeCon virtually - this was KubeCon EU - and I got the impression that the biggest trend then was eBPF. Everybody was talking about it, and some were calling it "the JavaScript for the kernel", "Kernel 2.0", all sorts of references. How do you think about eBPF, Liz? |
**Liz Rice:** So I've also heard that idea of it being -- it's expressed as eBPF is to the kernel what JavaScript is to an HTML page, in that it makes it programmable. Kind of interesting analogy, but it kind of makes my brain hurt, so I find it easy to just think about the kernel. |
So what eBPF allows us to do is to run custom programs that we load into the kernel and we associate them with events. And because there are so many different types of events that we can attach our programs to, and because they're in the kernel, there's only one kernel per host, so these programs have access to pretty ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[04:15\] That was exactly my impression as well. I really like this idea where we have all those containers running on this host, and then you have many hosts... But still, when it comes to the hosts, why is this particular set of containers struggling? What is going on there? Networking is such a bi... |
**Liz Rice:** \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes... So I think eBPF is making things a little bit more visible, a little bit more understandable, and that helps. |
**Liz Rice:** And we can skip past those IP tables by just -- |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes... |
**Liz Rice:** ...we'll just ignore that. We'll just use eBPF instead, and that does lead to some genuinely measurable performance improvements, which is really nice. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So when it comes to the end users, what is the eBPF helping them with? Understanding things, networking? Is there something more to it? I mean, that's at the surface. If we peel back the first layer, what do we have underneath? |
**Liz Rice:** So I think one thing to be clear about is that although a lot of us as engineers are getting very excited about eBPF programs, and I love to talk about "Hey, let's write an eBPF program", in reality, most people are not going to need to write eBPF programs themselves, much like most of us aren't involved ... |
There's a history of observability in particular using eBPF. Brendan Gregg has been doing amazing work for several years with all these different command line tools you can use to measure, get metrics on pretty much everything that's happening across your system. But until recently, that's all been very command-line dr... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So I know that one tool that you're very familiar with is Cilium and I'm wondering where does Cilium and eBPF meet, because end users - I think they would know more about Cilium features and what that helps them do, see and understand, and less about eBPF specifically, the technology that Cilium... |
**Liz Rice:** Yeah, so Cilium has always made use of eBPF. It was originally created as a networking project that uses eBPF to create that network plumbing between different end points in your system. And I think probably a lot of users just know it as a Kubernetes CNI. But it's actually a lot more than that. It's also... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[07:58\] So does Cilium -- I know that it exposes all these metrics and all this visibility into what is happening under the hood, especially from a networking perspective and from a communication perspective... But Cilium - what are the components in the Cilium product, or project? ...I'm not sure h... |
**Liz Rice:** Yeah, so when you run Cilium, you install a Cilium agent on every node, and if all you want is networking capabilities, then that gets you going. You probably want to start being able to see those network flows, and to do that, you'd install a component called Hubble, which collects this network informati... |
So if you look at Hubble flows, you can see traffic flowing between different Kubernetes pods. And then there's also a Hubble UI which pulls that flow of information, brings it into a much more sort of human-readable form... For example, showing you a service map, and showing you how traffic is flowing between these di... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** What about when it comes to alerting, monitoring, that side of things? ...when there is a problem, you being informed that "Hey, there's a problem." Is there such a component, or would you integrate Cilium with something else for that capability? What does that story look like? |
**Liz Rice:** Yeah, you'd integrate that with something else. I think a lot of people will push the flow data into some kind of sim for example. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** But I'm thinking about, for example, packet loss. There's a lot of congestion, or lots of retries, whatever the case may be. Is there a way to monitor or to consume the Cilium metrics, I'm assuming, and then have alerts? |
**Liz Rice:** So you can absolutely get the metrics into Prometheus, or showing Grafana... There's some beautiful screenshots in the -- I can't quite remember where I saw them recently, but just this whole series of amazing Grafana graphs that you can use to diagnose your network. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. I'm not sure whether you can tell by now that I'm really interested in trying Cilium out for real, in a production environment. I really am. And I'm trying to figure out what the components are. |
So my next question would be "Where would you recommend that I start? Do I take the Helm chart, is there an operator? What does the Getting Started look like? |
**Liz Rice:** So there's a few different options... There is a Helm chart, there's a command-line tool, the Cilium CLI, which makes it as simple as installing the CLI, and then "cilium install", and "cilium hubble install" if you'd like to add that... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I like that Getting Started. Oh, yes. |
**Liz Rice:** It does really make that Getting Started experience nice. Also, if you want a helping hand, we're just about to start a series of weekly install fests. So the idea is to have a session with someone who's experienced in Cilium, they're kind of guiding you through the process, and it'll be interactive, so t... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I love the sound of that. I wasn't expecting for that answer, but that's amazing. That's exactly what I'm looking for, so thank you, Liz, for thinking ahead of time... |
**Liz Rice:** \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** This is perfect. Okay, I really love where this is going. So I'm thinking of watching you code live, which is at the top of my list for this KubeCon. It's one of the must-do for me at this KubeCon, to watch you code live. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Where the idea came from, how do y... |
**Liz Rice:** Yeah, so I've done a few talks about eBPF programming... There's lots of different frameworks and libraries that you can use, and you can write your user space code in different languages, like Python, and Go, and Rust now as well. My Rust isn't quite up to doing live-coding in that myself, but... \[laugh... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[12:10\] What do you use for live-coding? |
**Liz Rice:** I typically use either -- Go is kind of my go-to language, but for ease of demonstrating a lot of eBPF capabilities, I'll quite often use the BCC framework, which supports Python. That's also very easy to read in a live coding environment. And occasionally, I've done some that you see. Because the kernel ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. And what would you like to cover in those sessions? Which is your step number one, step number two? What do you tend to cover in those? I haven't watched one, but again, top of my list, as I mentioned. |
**Liz Rice:** Yeah, so the kind of step one is usually Hello World. I think that's step one in any programming scenario. And running a little program in the kernel that will just trace out Hello World in response to perhaps a system call, or perhaps a network event. And that's very easy to set up. |
Then maybe we go down the direction of "How do we get information in and out of the kernel? So there's a concept in eBPF called maps, where there are shared data structures, so that we can parse information between eBPF programs, or into user space, between kernel and user space. Or maybe we go in a networking directio... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think that's the best way to approach it, if you think about it, because live coding is about going through it and explaining to users "This is what this does." It's less about typing. I think that's the least interesting part. And it's how we think about things, and how we start structuring things.... |
**Liz Rice:** Yeah, I've got one 6:30 UK time today, and another one tomorrow that I think is a little bit earlier, but I've gotta check my calendar... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay, okay. Great. Thank you for that. Okay. So I know that this KubeCon - one of the things that you do is you have a talk, cloud-native super-powers with eBPF. I know that it's really late for you - 12:30 you said? I was looking... So I intend to joining and keep you awake. |
**Liz Rice:** Oh, thank you... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** How are you heckling? Do you like heckling? |
**Liz Rice:** I love heckling. I love questions. \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay, great. So that's what I intend to do. That sounds good. |
**Liz Rice:** Fantastic. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I know that Duffie Cooley recently joined you... What's it being like working with him? And by the way, hi, Duffie, if you're listening. |
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