text stringlengths 0 2.68k |
|---|
**Dave Pacheco:** Yeah, so Hubris is a sort of... It's an operating system. We use it in a couple of different components in the service processor and the root of trust, on all of these systems: on the sleds, the switches, and the PowerShell controllers. So it's one of the things that we update. It is also true that in... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[36:12\] Is this a novel problem that you all invented, given your architecture? |
**Dave Pacheco:** That's a good question. Yeah, a lot of the details are specific to our architecture and pretty novel. It's the sort of thing that I expect cloud providers today have their own bespoke software for. And in fact, large deployments of on-prem stuff will have their own bespoke software to do a lot of this... |
I remember back at one of my past jobs, we did have to go update the BIOS on 64 systems, or something like that. And you've been in the BIOS thing, right? You're clicking through the thing, and like how do you do that on 64 systems? |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh yeah, \[unintelligible 00:36:59.09\] |
**Dave Pacheco:** And at the time -- |
**Jerod Santo:** One at a time? |
**Dave Pacheco:** This wasn't a productionized thing, but at the time I didn't know that iTerm or whatever has this mode which is like "Send all my keystrokes to all the other panes." |
**Jerod Santo:** You just taught me that, right now. \[laughs\] |
**Dave Pacheco:** Someone just opened up 64 panes, and was just like "Enter, Enter, Tab..." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, my gosh. I would be that person. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's a 64X developer right there. |
**Dave Pacheco:** It's a real problem, right? ...when you have this software at such a low layer; it's not really designed to be interacted with by automation. Everyone that's had to do this has had to come up with their own way to do it, basically. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Well, one reason why you don't update your BIOS very often is because you've got to reboot your machine. And I know that ultimately, your guys' goal is like "No, reboot update", right? |
**Dave Pacheco:** That's right. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's not what you're working on now, though. |
**Dave Pacheco:** That's going to be the next phase, and it's going to be a much smaller part of the problem for us. At least we expect. |
**Jerod Santo:** It's going to be easier... |
**Dave Pacheco:** You never know until you're done, but... |
**Jerod Santo:** It's not going to take you two years... |
**Dave Pacheco:** Right. So we've done a lot of the pieces involved in that. All the stuff we've been doing so far is like the orchestration... It's foundational stuff. So our system is based on what's called the plan-execute pattern, which means that before taking any action, the system generates a new intended state ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Dave Pacheco:** And then we can go test all the execution stuff given whatever plan we want, without having to have gotten a system into exactly that state. And it also lets you do all kinds of things, like ask the system "What are you going to do next?" before it does it. And "Why are you doing that thing?" You know... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Dave Pacheco:** So these are really important operational things that we just need to have. That's the kind of stuff that's taken the first two years. |
**Jerod Santo:** So you laid a lot of groundwork. |
**Dave Pacheco:** That's right. And so now we're talking doing what we're calling non-disruptive updates. So this is doing updates without rebooting the customer VMs. We're still rebooting the sleds. |
**Jerod Santo:** So do you move the VMs? |
**Dave Pacheco:** Exactly. We're going to live-migrate the VMs. And now, I don't mean to oversimplify it, but that should be just a question of policy, which is like we're flipping a bit in that blueprint that says "This sled needs to be evacuated \[unintelligible 00:39:03.08\] |
**Jerod Santo:** So let's say you have an Oxide rack, 16 sleds... Is that typical? |
**Dave Pacheco:** Yeah, \[unintelligible 00:39:08.07\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Alright. So we've got 16 sleds, and we need to run an update. This is in the new world, when this exists. And each sled has, I don't know, 30 VMs on it. Now we're doing math in our head... "Uh-oh, he's going to do a math problem." No, I'm not going to. And a couple of times run update. So I go put it o... |
**Dave Pacheco:** Something like that. Yeah, that's where actually -- |
**Jerod Santo:** Distribute that load evenly across the other ones, in the meantime... |
**Dave Pacheco:** That's where a lot of the complexity does come in with the non-disruptive update, is first of all, how do you mechanically move these things around? It's like a bin packing problem. But then there's also how do we make sure that we have the capacity to do that? If we're going to start doing -- if you'... |
**Jerod Santo:** If you're running your thing at max... |
**Dave Pacheco:** Right, there's no place to put it. |
**Jerod Santo:** ...there's nowhere to move them. |
**Dave Pacheco:** Right. |
**Jerod Santo:** Buy another rack. |
**Dave Pacheco:** \[40:11\] Right. \[laughter\] Well, that's the thing. At scale, people actually don't care about this problem. Because keeping a couple of sleds capacity free when you've got 100 racks is like a very small fraction of your cost. And it actually makes sense for a lot of reasons. It also allows you to s... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. That reminds me, or that makes me think of failed updates in the self-service world, when this version's out; not the... What do you call it? Undisrupted? |
**Dave Pacheco:** Non-disrupted. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, non-disrupted. With the current iteration you're working on now, can you guarantee that an update will finish? |
**Dave Pacheco:** That's not what I thought you were going to say. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Dave Pacheco:** Finish? No, because there's things outside of our control. For example, one of the biggest challenges in self-service update - because the control plane is running, we have these intermediate states I mentioned, where you've got new version of software talking to old version of software. And how do yo... |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Dave Pacheco:** Because the reverse never happens right now. And so that's fine. But that means that if you're doing an update and one of the sleds is like out to lunch and we can't talk to it, we don't know if we've been able to update it, we can't actually keep going and update the rest of the control plane. |
**Jerod Santo:** You've gotta wait for that sled. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.