Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Meet the Bitnami Team: JuanJo Ciarlante

The Bitnami team is a diverse group of talented people distributed all over the world. Get to know them better through this series of blog posts

JuanJo is a Senior Site Reliability Engineer on the SRE team, which is part of the Kubernetes Squad, and works remotely from Argentina.

A brief bio

¿ Cómo funciona (How does it work) ?

I’ve been passionate about «how things work» since I was a child. I still recall how anxious I was when waiting for my father to bring home the latest issue of «Cómo funciona» magazine. Not surprisingly, many years later FOSS became the major driver in my career.

That token[ring card] that changed my life.

My 1st taste of Internet came thru a Metro-Area-Network at the govt department I was working at, c.a. 1995, in Mendoza/Argentina, where we got a “lease” for one of those shiny public IP addresses. Alas, it was linked via a single token-ring NIC installed in our Slackware Linux gateway box (an old IBM PS/2 we had recycled for that purpose). With no budget for a second TR NIC, several hundred dollars at that time and baby Linux 1.2 only supporting a single address per interface, it quickly became unsustainable to switch between our formal govt’s private address and the precious public one.

Hm … what about that ~2MB linux-1.3.xx.tar.gz source that’s written in that C language I had been tinkering with? After some weeks, many tries+rebuilds+crashes along the way, I had hacked up something beyond WFM, post-able to the linux-kernel mailing list -- with the help and feedback mainly from Alan Cox¹, we got ip_aliasing finally merged in linux-1.3.47 \o/
Since then I contributed to many other FOSS projects: Linux IP masquerading improvements, user/kernel space OpenSWAN crypto algo modularization, IPv6 transport support for OpenVPN, among other sparse bits.
Cloud-y times ahead.

In 2007 I joined Google at their Switzerland HQ as an SRE. By 2012 I had to return to my home country (was techlead of the GMail/Abuse-backends SRE team by that time) ... those times you’d want fork() to be a real-world thing.


Alas, an opportunity to work from home for Canonical had opened, which I was lucky enough to grab: joined as Webops/SRE, later CRE (Cloud-RE) to wheel OpenStack-s for fun and profit.

Being back home also allowed me to resume my courses at the Universidad de Mendoza - re-joining that synergy that comes from teaching↔learning.

During my career I had been so lucky to have great challenges, learn so much from my awesome colleagues, work+contribute to FOSS projects, what else could I ask for? →

Why you joined Bitnami and what excites you about working here?

→ Kubernetes 

I’d been missing a rock-solid cloud orchestration platform (yeah, every Xoogler misses Google’s Borg I guess), but then Kubernetes came to life! Then Bitnami -- with its focus on the application orchestration realm together with its strong involvement in k8s projects in like kubeless, helm and ksonnet/kubecfg -- made a perfect fit for me :))

I also love the company-wide team culture, how horizontally you can approach managers and founders, it’s a great place to work !

What are you working on?

As member of the SRE team, we are involved in a pretty diverse set of devops tasks and projects, while also actively contributing to our Kubernetes efforts - for example, I recently added integration tests to kubeless, which ended being quite a trip (riding Travis to spawn a kubernetes cluster for your tests to land-on is an interesting challenge).

What do you like to do for fun?

Hmm guess that bash 1-liners don’t count here, so let’s try something else :#)

I love cooking (yeah you may say that’s meal-Engineering, but I’d like to convince myself that’s not only that ;). I also enjoy travelling to learn from other people’s culture, art and nature.

I’ve recently joined a local runners’ group, which gives another way to enjoy the beautiful hills surrounding Mendoza.

¹FWIW Interesting thoughts and discussion with Alan Cox: he pushing me to come up with something that would not require extra tools than ifconfig, then telling me why my original choice of ‘/’ as a shell-friendly aliased interface separator (i.e. no ‘|’, ‘$’, etc) was actually a bad idea - hmm not many choices left:
@ ←nah, so email-ish
% ←ditto (uucp routing, anyone?)
. ←meh looks like a file extension
: ←yeah, available! - plus there’s no such thing as drive-names on *nix OSes, after all ;)

Interested in working with Bitnami and JuanJo? Apply for one of our open positions!


Security Issue: RubyGems

Ruby project has published a security advisory due to multiple moderate-severity vulnerabilities in RubyGems bundled by Ruby. The reported issues are:
  • A DNS request hijacking vulnerability
  • An ANSI escape sequence vulnerability
  • A DoS vulnerability in the query command
  • A vulnerability in the gem installer that allowed a malicious gem to overwrite arbitrary files

The following versions are affected:
  • Ruby 2.2.7 and earlier
  • Ruby 2.3.4 and earlier
  • Ruby 2.4.1 and earlier

At this time, there are no Ruby releases with the fix for RubyGems. It is strongly recommended to apply one of the following workarounds:
  • Upgrade RubyGems to the latest version (2.6.13) by executing:
     $ gem update --system 
  • Apply the patch for your version:

You can find more info about this issue in the links below:

RubyGems project
Hacker News

If you have further questions about Ruby or this security issue, please post to our community forums and we will be happy to help you.

Monday, August 21, 2017

Container Trends – Bitnami User Survey 2017 (Part 2)

Survey Says: Kubernetes

Name the top 5 container orchestration solutions.

Top answer on the board: Kubernetes


The rise of Kubernetes as the leading container orchestration tool should come as no surprise. It’s the topic of the day with Amazon and Microsoft recently joining the CNCF. In a few short years, we’ve seen hundreds of companies join the ecosystem building or modifying solutions to support kubernetes (check out the recently updated CNCF Landscape) and we’ve even seen the early days of acquisitions beginning to happen. With all that is being said and written, it’s still good to back up a trend with some good old-fashioned data.

As promised (see Container Trend Part 1), in our second post covering our recent user survey we’re taking a look at container orchestration trends. In our last blog post, we showed the increase in interest, highlighting a more than 2x increase in production container usage from 2016 to 2017. As that increase in container usage was happening, what impact did that have on how containers were being managed? Of course, we’d expect some increase in usage of container orchestration to match that growth.

We asked our users “What Container Orchestration System(s) does your company use?” and the results were surprising in a few ways. First and foremost was the enormous growth of Kubernetes. And while Mesos usage doubled, it still pales in comparison to new entrant offerings like AWS Elastic Container Service and Azure Container Service. Docker Swarm showed significant growth over that period as well, perhaps due to Swarm being included in the Docker 1.12 release. The least surprising bit of data was the sharp decline in users with no container orchestration, which is supportive of the shift from dev/test to production.

Figure 1. Container Orchestration Adoption - 2016 vs 2017


Key Stats:
  • 115% growth in businesses using Kubernetes
  • 100% growth in Mesos
  • AWS Container Service overtaking Docker Swarm in less than 1 year
Digging deeper into container orchestration, we wanted to understand the scenarios in which the various platforms are being used. Knowing there was such a huge shift to production environments in the past year and seeing the impact that had on orchestration adoption above, we wanted to understand if there was preference for one platform over another as users make that move. For the most part, platform selection for dev/test is aligned with production. Focusing specifically on 2017 in this data set, we can see that Kubernetes, AWS and Azure usage all increased a few percentage points over their general adoption numbers when users were focused on production usage, with the largest number of users selecting Kubernetes.

Figure 2 – Container Orchestration Adoption 2017 – Dev/Test vs. Production



Key stats:
  • Kubernetes is platform choice for over 50% of existing production container deployments
If you are making a decision on where to invest as you build out a container strategy or you’re looking for tools that can help you manage your Kubernetes environment, you’ve come to the right place. Bitnami can get you started on your journey with pre-packaged container images from our vast catalog of ready-to-run applications and we’re actively developing a contributing to a number of leading edge kubernetes projects.

Stay tuned for more from our 2017 Bitnami user survey. Next time we’ll break down container orchestration a little further and look at mixed usage …we’re just getting started.