text stringlengths 0 2.29k |
|---|
**Andrew Rynhard:** Yeah. Well, I guess the question is "Where do I start?" Where we're at today has really been the vision for me personally, where I wanted Kubernetes to be. It was a lot of fun learning Kubernetes using kubeadm, doing Kubernetes the hard way; it was fun. But that fun very quickly dies, and never retu... |
\[13:57\] We started off with kubeadm, but kubeadm just fundamentally wasn't designed with the idea of a Linux distribution that is purely API and configuration-driven. So there was some weirdness in trying to shoehorn that into our paradigm. |
So then we decided to go down to a project called \[unintelligible 00:14:13.13\], which was formerly a CoreOS project. It was self-hosted Kubernetes. So it would spin up a temporary control plane using static pods, and then using that temporary control plane you'd actually apply your control plane, which would be backe... |
We just really embraced the fact that Talos - yes, it is a Linux distribution, but really, at its core, it is a Kubernetes bootstrapping or whatever kubeadm and bootkube qualify themselves as. That's what we are. And so we just said, "Okay, we tried to be good citizens within the open source world, but the paradigm shi... |
So it's been a long road to kind of get to where we're at today. Like you said, there's a lot going on under the hood to make it that simple. In fact, in our demos that we do for potential customers, we have to feel bad about how good and fast the demos go, because it's like - yeah, you've got a Kubernetes cluster on b... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Where's the rest? \[laughter\] |
**Steve Francis:** Yeah, exactly. Unless they know how Kubernetes works and how complicated that is to achieve, if they're new to Kubernetes, they're like "Alright, well, this looks pretty simple..." |
**Andrew Rynhard:** Yeah, exactly. They don't really know what they're looking at. So we're kind of -- yeah, it just puts us in a weird place. My demos are literally like "I know that's short, but that's the magic of it." |
**Gerhard Lazu:** You've made it too good, Andrew. That's the problem. You've made it too good. Steve comes along, "What the hell? This is just too simple." \[laughter\] No, no, seriously, seriously... I mean, that is exactly where you need to start, because there's so much more that needs to lay on top of it. And you ... |
I mean, being able to talk to your operating system through CLI only... Okay, it has an API - sure, you can talk to an API. But the CLI is there to talk to that API... That's it. I think that's what everyone -- like, why package managers? Seriously. |
**Andrew Rynhard:** Exactly. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I mean, that's what we used to do 20-30 years ago; surely we have moved on since then, right? \[laughs\] |
**Steve Francis:** We don't... We just want to build out VMs for everything. \[laughter\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Exactly, yeah. And you just throw away so much complexity; even when it comes to networking, there's so much stuff happening just in that stack, never mind everything else - storage, securing whatever boots... It's just like, it's never-ending. And good luck configuring all of that. It doesn't matter ... |
**Andrew Rynhard:** \[17:52\] Yeah. It's ten different files, and depending on which distro, it's network manager, or it's just good old \[unintelligible 00:17:59.20\] files... To your point, I think at that layer of operating -- like, the operating system layer, like you said, this is a 20, 30-year old way of managing... |
But when you allow a human to get onto a machine, we have a tendency to love everything that we can interact with. We want to make these servers special, and name them after Lord of the Rings characters... But by just simply getting humans off of the box, we've already kind of cut that emotional tie, and it allows us t... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** What is your perspective, Steve? ...because you've seen data centers from every which angle. How does this fit in that world? |
**Steve Francis:** Oh, this is the way it should be. I mean, I started with configuration management tools way back in the day of CFEngine, when it was a small open source project, and I've been through all the Chef and Puppet and everything. One of our large enterprise customers who has many fleets of servers - I'm al... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. And at least you should have a trail, like "Why did we do this change?" Can we track it via version control in a way that everyone sees, everyone understands? Can we maybe add some pictures to the thing? That's like the human side of things, rather than an admin changing something somewhere, not... |
**Andrew Rynhard:** \[laughs\] Yeah. Right. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay... So what is part of the operating system? Because the operating system is really, really small. |
**Steve Francis:** Well, our operating system is really, really small. Talos Linux is. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Talos is really small, yes. |
**Steve Francis:** A generic Linux... Systemd is basically an operating system. \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Oh, my goodness me. Oh, that was like one of the things. I think it's the second thing. The first thing was SSH. Not having SSH is such a good thing. You don't even have to worry about securing something that doesn't exist. Like, that's just the best. Okay. |
**Andrew Rynhard:** But yeah, the operating system really is just the PID 1, and a Linux kernel. There's some magic you've got to do with the initial init that the kernel loads, and then you switch route after setting up base pseudo file systems like dev, and proc, and whatnot. But to your point earlier about networkin... |
\[22:18\] It's funny, because a big reason why Talos Linux exists today is because I was learning Linux from a project called Linux From Scratch. Basically, it's exactly what it sounds like - you build a Linux distribution from scratch. And in that process, I learned that Linux is actually very, very simple, at the end... |
So that is Talos Linux, that is our operating system, is just putting some structure in front of Linux with an API, and a more complex networking stack, that's interpreted, or at least directed by the configuration file. And that's the bulk of Talos. And of course, there's some operational knowledge too baked within Ta... |
**Steve Francis:** Yeah, very minimal. One thing I like to throw out there is Talos Linux I think on it has something like 32 binaries installed on the whole operating system, most of them to deal with file management, loading file systems... |
**Andrew Rynhard:** A lot of them hard links, too. |
**Steve Francis:** That's true. So they're duplicates. A typical Ubuntu install has like over 3,500 binaries, executables installed. So that's a lot more things that can attack, and be misconfigured, and need to be secured. Just things to go wrong. The less code there is, the less to go wrong. |
**Break:** \[24:39\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** We talked about simplicity, we talked about networking, and this surprised me in the best possible way... Not initially. Initially it was like a WTF moment for me... But I was thinking "How the hell do I cluster these things?" And, okay, Omni has something to do with it, and we will leave this for sli... |
So when you first mentioned it to me, Andrew - this was, again, October 2021. You only had just released it; it was like a new thing. |
**Andrew Rynhard:** Yeah, that was really new. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. And I was like "Wow, this is amazing." And now, having it experienced via Omni, that felt like magic. It just didn't feel real. So do you want to tell us a little bit about KubeSpan now? Can you expand on what you told us in October? Because I'm sure you remember what you told us a year ago... \... |
**Andrew Rynhard:** I'm sure, I'm absolutely certain that I don't. But let's see if I do. Let's see if I can be accurate. So yeah, KubeSpan, as you've already said, is really built on top of WireGuard. But the harder part of WireGuard is just doing like key distribution, and making other nodes aware of other nodes, and... |
So KubeSpan just really is orchestration for how do nodes discover other nodes, and how do we automatically configure WireGuard, and how do we do key exchanges? And so there's this lightweight discovery service that we run, where Talos will actually encrypt a blob of data, which ultimately just teaches other machines a... |
**Steve Francis:** Works across networks, behind firewalls... It's pretty slick. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's in itself a piece of magic. WireGuard in itself is not as complicated as OpenVPN or IPsec to configure, but it still has its complexity. But KubeSpan - I mean, as Andrew says it, it's just a boolean. I mean, I was thinking "Surely, there must be more to this." There wasn't. I was like "Where's ... |
**Steve Francis:** Were you running in multiple locations that you needed KubeSpan? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. So this is it. So I told you before we started recording that we have four guests here... This is the moment. |
**Andrew Rynhard:** Alright. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Alright, everybody... |
**Andrew Rynhard:** Wow. Wow, that looks like some hardware right there... What is that? I mean, it's a computer, I think... \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It is. Okay... So one of my Christmas presents - or shall I say two of my Christmas presents - were an open bench table... |
**Andrew Rynhard:** To yourself, right? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** To myself, of course... No. My wife got it for me. She knew exactly the color to get. Black. \[laughter\] Okay, so open bench table, fanless Sea Sonic PSU. Is that the right way up? It is. |
**Andrew Rynhard:** It is. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Fanless so... A very old EVO 870... No, this way. SSD. That's for storage. There's an SD card... And this motherboard - it's one of my first supermicros. I'll have it forever. It's an X9SCA-F. It's 11 years old. Well, it will be 12 years old by the time this episode comes out. It was also a Christmas ... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.