How SUSE Is Bringing Open Source Projects and Communities Together

How SUSE Is Bringing Open Source Projects and Communities Together - Printable Version

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How SUSE Is Bringing Open Source Projects and Communities Together - xSicKxBot - 06-18-2018

How SUSE Is Bringing Open Source Projects and Communities Together

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The modern IT infrastructure is diverse by design. People are mixing different open source components that are coming from not only different vendors, but also from different ecosystems. In this article, we talk with Thomas Di Giacomo, CTO of SUSE, about the need for better collaboration between open source projects that are being used across industries as we are move toward a cloud native world.
Linux.com: Does the mix of different open source components create a challenge in terms of a seamless experience for customers? How can these projects work more closely with each other?
Thomas Di Giacomo: Totally, more and more, and it’s unlikely to slow down. It can be because of past investments and decisions, with existing pieces of IT and new ones needed to be added to the mix. Or, it might be because of different teams or different parts of an organization working on their own projects with different timelines etc. Or, again, because companies work with partners coming with their own stacks. But maybe even more importantly, it is also because no single one project can be the only answer on its own to what needs to be done.
An OS needs additional modules and applications on top of it to address use cases. To address use cases, IaaS needs to handle specific networking and storage components that are provided by relevant projects. Infrastructure on its own is pretty useless if it’s not paired with application delivery elements, not only to manage the compute part but to tie in software development and application lifecycle.
Linux.com: Can you point out some industry wide efforts in that direction?
Thomas Di Giacomo: There’s a lot of more or less structured initiatives and approaches to that. On one hand, open source is de facto facilitating cross-project work, not only because the code is visible but with a focus on (open) APIs for instance, but it is also indirectly making it sometimes challenging as more and more open source projects are being started. That’s definitely a great thing for innovation, for people to contribute their ideas, for new ideas to grow, etc., but it requires specific attention and focus on helping users with putting together cross-project solutions they need for achieving their plans. Making sure cross-project solutions are easy to install and maintain, for example, and can co-exist with what’s already there.
What starts to happen is cross-project development, integration, and testing with, for instance, shared CI/CD flows and tools between different project. A good example is what OPNFV has initiated a while ago now, with cross CI/CD between OPNFV, OpenStack, OpenDaylight, and others.
Linux.com: At the same time, certain technologies like Kubernetes cut through many different landscapes — whether it be cloud, IoT, Paas, IaaS, containers, etc. That also means the expectations from traditional OS change. Can you talk about how SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) is evolving to handle containerized workloads and transactions/atomic updates?
Thomas Di Giacomo: Yes, indeed. Cutting through many different landscapes is also something Linux did (and still does) — from different CPU architectures, form factors, physical and virtualized, on-prem and public clouds, embedded to mainframes, etc.
But you’re right, although the abstractions are improving — getting to higher levels and better at making the underlying layers become less visible (that’s the whole point of abstracting) — the infrastructure components and even the OS, are still there and foundational for the abstracted layers to work. Hence, they have to evolve to meet today’s needs for portability, agility, stability.
We’ve constantly worked on evolving Linux in the past 26 years now, including some specific directions and optimizations to make SUSE Linux both a great container host OS or container base OS, so that container based technologies and use cases would run as smoothly, securely and infrastructure agnostically as possible. Technically, the snapshotting and transactional upgrade/rollback capabilities coming from btrfs as a filesystem, as well as having different possible container engines, keeping the certification, stability and maintainability of an enterprise-grade OS really makes it uniquely appropriate for running container clusters.
Linux.com: While we are talking about OSes, SUSE has both platforms — traditional SLE and atomic/transactional Kubic/SUSE CaaSP. How do these two projects work together, while making life easier for customers?
Thomas Di Giacomo: There are two angles of “together” here. The first one is our usual community/upstream first philosophy, where Kubic/openSUSE Tumbleweed are the core upstream projects for SUSE CaaS Platform and SUSE Linux Enterprise.
The other “together” is about bringing traditional and container-optimized OS closer together. FIrst, the operating system is required to be super modular, where not just a particular functionality is a module but where everything is a module. Second, the OS needs to be multi-modal. By that we mean it should be designed to take care of requirements for both traditional infrastructure and software-defined/cloud-native container-based infrastructure. This is what the community is putting together with Leap15, and what we’re doing for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 coming out very soon.
Linux.com: SUSE is known for working with partners, instead of building its own stack. How do you cross-pollinate ideas, talent, and technologies as you (SUSE) work across platforms and projects like SLE, Kubic, Cloud Foundry, and Kubernetes?
Thomas Di Giacomo: We work upstream in the respective open source projects as much as we can. Sometimes some open source components are in different projects or outside upstream, and here again we try to bring them back as much as possible. Let me give just a couple of examples to illustrate that.
We’ve been initiating and contributing to a project called openATTIC, aiming at providing a management tool for storage, software-defined storage solutions, and especially for Ceph. openATTIC is obviously open source like everything we do, but it was sitting outside of Ceph. Working with the Ceph community, we’ve started contributing openATTIC code and features to the upstream ceph dashboard/ceph manager, speeding it up with fueling more existing capabilities rather than re-developing the whole from scratch. And then together with the Ceph partners/community and with other Ceph components, we’re facilitating cross-projects by somehow merging them.
Another example is a SUSE project called Stratos. It is a UI for Cloud Foundry distributions (any one of them, upstream and vendors), which we contributed to Cloud Foundry upstream. 
Linux.com: Thanks to Cloud Foundry Container Runtime (CFCR), Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes are working closely, can you tell us about the work SUSE is doing with these two communities?
Thomas Di Giacomo: There are lots of container-related initiatives within the Cloud Foundry Foundation, for instance. Some of them we’re leading, some of them we are involved with, and in any case working together with the community and partner companies on those topics. We, for instance, focus on the containerization of Cloud Foundry itself, so that it is lightweight, portable, easily deployable, upgradable on any type of Kubernetes infrastructure (via Helm), so that containers and services are available to both Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry applications on there, and that actually simply containerized applications and Cloud Foundry developed ones co-exist easily. 
So today such a containerized Cloud Foundry is available on top of AKS or EKS, on top of SUSE CaaS Platform obviously as well, as possibly any Kubernetes. This was started a while ago and now part of Cloud Foundry upstream, used by our solutions obviously but also by others to provide the CF developer experience on Kubernetes in the most straightforward and native way as possible. There are other activities focused on providing a pluggable container scheduler for CFCR, as well as improving the cross-interoperable service capabilities.
Now this is currently mostly happening in the CF upstream and CF community, and we’re also working to start a workgroup within CNCF on the same topic (especially the containerization of Cloud Foundry), to bring the projects and their communities closer together.
This article was sponsored by SUSE and written by The Linux Foundation.
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