My name is Alex and I am excited to be a part of the Continuous Delivery Foundation community. I believe that the work we do here will help the world deliver faster through interoperability of technology and foundational component governance.
I am an open source contributor to many projects and also advocate for the work of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. I hold it a great privilege to help give a platform for those without a voice and act as a force multiplier to create opportunities for others.
I have worked for the past thirteen years at Microsoft, BSkyB, Blinkbox, Beamery and more. Working as both an individual contributor and engineering leader.
Now I am an engineering director at American Express. I work on large scale serverless runtime observability, proliferating DevOps practices and hybrid-cloud cluster development on hyper-converged infrastructure.
It is my hope that I can bring real end-user community desires and feedback to the governance body of the CDF to help us understand and shape the activities that we invest time in. Equally I am looking forward to working as an ambassador to help the community gain tangible benefits of a collaborative vendor-neutral continuous delivery ecosystem.
I am Hector Calderon, an engineer, architect, or insert open source loving nerd adjective here. I have worked with companies of all sizes from small to enterprise. With a vendor/cloud agnostic mentality, I have had the chance to work with many open source projects, including all of the graduate CDF projects. When I am not trying to automate myself out of a position I am out exploring the world with my dog, Piper.
My delivery journey started a few years ago when I was assigned to optimize RPM libraries for modernizing mainframes.. Yes, MAINFRAMES. It’s actually a lot cooler than it sounds and I had the opportunity to work with some of the best engineers I know to this day.
Over the years and various companies, I noticed the most important requirement for delivering success is largely based upon the mentality of the team and company (below is a meme we put on the back of our CI team shirts). Note, huge fan of Napoleon Hill’s QQMA formula – quality, quantity, and mental attitude.
At the end of the day everybody wants a high-quality product at a fast speed with least amount of overhead.
I have not been much of a contributor in the past, but now I am looking to give back to the community that has taught me so much. My objective as Ambassador is to make delivery easier for everyone. Feel free to reach out.
Find out why 2020 is the year of Spinnaker at https://Spinnaker.Live on June 18th at 9:00am PDT. Learn how enterprises accelerate with open source Spinnaker at this Linux Foundation virtual conference co-hosted by the CD Foundation and Armory.
“The CD Foundation seeks to improve the world’s capacity to deliver software with security and speed,” said Rosalind Benoit, Director of Community at Armory, and Chair of the CD Foundation Outreach Committee. “Spinnaker.Live speaks to everyone invested in software delivery collaboration and automation. Open source is powered by connections, and this event is to meet, connect, and hear great stories. Please bring your energy and ideas to this incredible global community!”
Spinnaker is a free and open source continuous delivery software platform developed by Netflix and Google to create tailor-made, collaborative continuous delivery pipelines. With unique multi-cloud building blocks, it integrates all the tools, approvals, and infrastructure needed to automate an enterprise software delivery lifecycle.
Spinnaker is housed under the CD Foundation umbrella at the Linux Foundation. It is a Founding Project of the CD Foundation.
Continued Growth in 2020
Spinnaker is continuing to grow in 2020, boasting more contributors and more Pull Requests than ever before.
Key statistics for 2020
Q1 2020 was the first quarter since Spinnaker was open sourced that the project had at least 2 new contributors each week
Of the 1,183 contributors to Spinnaker in the last year, 464, or 40%, contributed in Q1 2020
Merged Pull Requests have skyrocketed in 2020. These are the code and documentation contributions that the project accepts and incorporates.
Average since open sourced: 399/month
Average in the last 12 months: 605/month
Previous high was 656 (March 2019, 1.6x the average since being open sourced)
February 674 (1.7x avg)
March 891 (2.2x avg)
April 962 (2.5x avg)
May 755 (1.9x avg)
Notable Amazon Support
Spinnaker has been implemented widely with well known companies like Adobe, AirBnb, Autodesk, Comcast, Salesforce, SAP, and many more using Spinnaker to handle the software delivery life cycle. Of note, Amazon Web Service (AWS) has dramatically increased contributions to Spinnaker in 2020.
Up-to-date statistics are available on Devstats. They show a strong spike coming into 2020 in AWS contributions, with pull requests in recent months more than tripling 2019’s monthly highs. Amazon has stated publicly that they are backing Spinnaker due to strong enterprise customer demand.
AWS will be prominently represented at Spinnaker.Live with a keynote, breakout session, panel, and use case talks from AWS experts and companies who deploy software to AWS. Don’t miss it!
We held the first CI/CD Meetup in China on February 29th. There were more than 5000 attendees who joined us together. It is time to do more CI/CD, so we will hold the second CI/CD Meetup in China on June 19th.
There will be four topics focused on: Pipeline, CI, SCM, and Automation Testing.
1. Build a dedicated pipeline engine: Jenkins shared library in-depth design and practice
Combining actual business, design patterns, and Jenkins features step by step, tells how to support large-scale, complex pipelined practice based on Jenkins SharedLibrary expansion library: from how native solutions solve actual business needs to structured design to solve atoms. The minimum unit) abstraction and basic capabilities are enhanced, and then to dynamic refactoring to build a pipeline execution engine.
Gu Zheng
JD Software Architect
2. Construction of engineering efficiency data in Continuous Integration
Engineering performance data is an important tool for improving R&D efficiency. Through years of tool construction, Didi has already possessed a relatively complete R&D tool chain, and the improvement of engineering efficiency has shifted from the original single-point capability optimization to the optimization of the entire process. As the most important continuous integration and continuous release process in the entire R&D process, how to perceive and improve it through data driving will be the key to continuously improve the engineering efficiency.
Zhou Fan
Didi Chuxing, Development Tool Team Leader
Personal profile: Graduated from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in communications engineering. After graduation, he joined Google directly. He has worked in the Beijing office and the US headquarters for more than 10 years. Gained experience in development, testing and operation and maintenance. In 2018, he joined Didi Chuxing as the head of the R&D tool team, leading the team to improve the company’s R&D tools and engineering efficiency.
3. Ways to improve software quality: code review
Code review is a common topic, so why exactly do code review, how to do it, how to improve efficiency, those that can be manual, those that can be automated, what detailed considerations, let industry veterans take you around.
Li Peng
Senior experts in SCM and DevOps
Personal profile
With more than 20 years of experience in the software industry, he has comprehensive experience in development, operation, maintenance and management. He has worked in many companies such as Xin’an Century, Motorola, Ericsson, Alpha Motors, Horizon Robotics and so on. Familiar with the industry’s CMMI, TL9000, ISO9001: 2000 standards, proficient in various development methodologies; proficient in software quality management, configuration management, CICD, automated testing and other key aspects of DevOps.
4. Test environment, practice and implementation of full-stack DevOps platform
Introduce the development and testing side of Minsheng Bank, the DevOps platform architecture, core capabilities, and implementation. There are currently more than 4,000 active users on the DevOps platform; more than 240 supported projects; full-stack support for back-end, front-end and client.
Hu Wenan
Minsheng Bank, DevOps architect
Personal profile:
Hu Wenan, DevOps Architect of Minsheng Bank, is responsible for organization-level R&D specifications and process formulation, as well as the planning and construction of the PaaS platform and DevOps platform.
Screwdriver is a scalable CI/CD solution which uses Kubernetes to manage user builds. Screwdriver build workers interfaces with Kubernetes using either “executor-k8s” or “executor-k8s-vm” depending on required build isolation.
executor-k8s runs builds directly as Kubernetes pods while executor-k8s-vm uses HyperContainers along with Kubernetes for stricter build isolation with containerized Virtual Machines (VMs). This setup was ideal for running builds in an isolated, ephemeral, and lightweight environment. However, hyperd is now deprecated, has no support, is based on an older Docker runtime and it also required non-native Kubernetes setup for build execution. Therefore, it was time to find a new solution.
Why Kata Containers ?
Kata Containers is an open source project and community that builds a standard implementation of lightweight virtual machines (VMs) that perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs. It combines the benefits of using a hypervisor, such as enhanced security, along with container orchestration capabilities provided by Kubernetes. It is the same team behind HyperD where they successfully merged the best parts of Intel Clear Containers with Hyper.sh RunV. As a Kubernetes runtime, Kata enables us to deprecate executor-k8s-vm and use executor-k8s exclusively for all Kubernetes based builds.
Screwdriver Journey to Kata
As we faced a growing number of instabilities with the current HyperD – like network and devicemapper issues and IP cleanup workarounds, we started our initial evaluation of Kata in early 2019 (https://github.com/screwdriver-cd/screwdriver/issues/818#issuecomment-482239236) and identified two major blockers to move ahead with Kata:
1. Security concern for privileged mode (required to run docker daemon in kata)
2. Disk performance.
We recently started reevaluating Kata in early 2020 based on a fix to “add flag to overload default privileged host device behaviour” provided by Containerd/cri (https://github.com/containerd/cri/pull/1225), but still we faced issues with disk performance and switched from overlayfs to devicemapper, which yielded significant improvement. With our two major blockers resolved and initial tests with Kata looking promising, we moved ahead with Kata.
Screwdriver Build Architecture
Replacing Hyper with Kata led to a simpler build architecture. We were able to remove the custom build setup scripts to launch Hyper VM and rely on native Kubernetes setup.
Setup
To use Kata containers for running user builds in a Screwdriver Kubernetes build cluster, a cluster admin needs to configure Kubernetes to use Containerd container runtime with Cri-plugin.
Components
Screwdriver build Kubernetes cluster (minimum version: 1.14+) nodes must have the following components set up for using Kata containers for user builds.
Containerd:
Containerd is a container runtime that helps with management of the complete lifecycle of the container.
Cri-Containerd is a containerd plugin which implements Kubernetes container runtime interface. CRI plugin interacts with containerd to manage the containers.
Routing builds to Kata nodes in Screwdriver build cluster
Screwdriver uses Runtime Class to route builds to Kata nodes in Screwdriver build clusters. The Screwdriver plugin executor-k8s config handles this based on:
Based on the limitation “Kata default guest kernel does not support IA32 bit binaries”, maintain a list of containers to exclude; only route builds to nodes with Kata when the container is not in the list
Performance
The below tables compare build setup and overall execution time for Kata and Hyper when the image is pre-cached or not cached.
Image: node12with Image cached in node
Kata (with 1 min wait in build)
Hyper (with 1 min wait in build)
Setup time
28 secs
50 secs
Overall execution time
1 min 32 secs
1 min 56 secs
Image: node12without Image cached in node
Kata (with 1 min wait in build)
HyperD (with 1 min wait in build)
Setup time
51 secs
1 min 32 secs
Overall time
1 min 55 secs
2 min 40 secs
Known problems
While the new Kata implementation offers a lot of advantages, there are some known problems we are aware of with fixes or workarounds:
Run images based on Rhel6 containers don’t start and immediately exit
To workaround/mitigate we maintain a container exclusion list and route to current hyperd setup and we have plans to eol these containers by Q4 of this year.
Containerd IO snapshotter – Overlayfs vs devicemapper for storage driver
My name is Oscar Medina, and I am thrilled to be part of this fantastic community. I have spent over 22 years in the technology industry, and have seen things come and go.
One thing that excites me these days (aside from the plethora of outdoor activities), is the paradigm shift I’ve seen throughout my career when it comes to systems architecture.
Microservices and container orchestration is not going away as other things have. This is why I am committed to spreading the word and helping educate folks on what the Continuous Delivery Foundation is all about.
Over the past 4.5 years or so, I have spent a lot of time in the open-source world. I am currently a Developer Advocate for the Jenkins X project, which is also now under the CD Foundation umbrella along with other projects such as Spinnaker, Jenkins, Tekton, and Jenkins X, of course.
I look forward to meeting you at different organized events, virtual or hopefully in person in the future.
I am BMK Lakshminarayanan from New Zealand. I am excited to join on the other great ambassadors’ line-up with Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) as a newly appointed CDF Ambassador.
About me:
I am a passionate Solutions Architect over 20 years of ICT experience working with Bank of New Zealand. I am a hands-on engineer, architect and worked on various challenging assignments ranging from desktop applications to distributed systems.
I am #DevOps #ContinuousDelivery advocate and evangelist for modern engineering & developer practices including helping developer productive, effective and efficient at the same time simple methods, approaches to software architecture.
I am passionate about sharing and learning with the community. Outside of my work, I run community groups and host CNCF New Zealand #meetup for Cloud-Native enthusiasts and The Future ICT to help students, people returning to work or looking for career opportunities in ICT.
I am also CNCF & DevOps Institue ambassador with a commitment to connecting the Humans of DevOps and Modern IT to advance the Skills, Knowledge, Ideas & Learning (SKIL). I am a frequent speaker at local meetups and international in-person & virtual conferences and also the Core organiser of DevOpsDays New Zealand and co-chair Cloud-Native Summit Wellington conferences. I am passionate about engaging, connecting & learning with various community members & leaders.
I am excited to associate with CDF as an Ambassador in promoting core values of CDF, open-source and vendor-neutral CI/CD tools. I am enthusiastic about the opportunity of contributing to and supporting the global community of CD Foundation & growing continuous delivery ecosystem.
Let us learn, share, care and grow together.
Please feel free to reach me out on LinkedIn or Twitter: @LBMKRISHNA
Eduardo is a performance engineer at Red Hat, working on the OpenShift performance & latency sensitive applications (PSAP) . Eduardo is also a Computer Science PhD student at Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia, working on containerized distributed systems for research computing, with high focus on automated workflows and GitOps.
His research interests include High Performance Computing, Distributed systems, Dependency management, Linux containers and most recently, Container orchestration.
Over the past 5 years Eduardo has focused on enabling researchers to build and deploy performance sensitive applications with containers on distributed environments, by creating tutorials, talks and meetups around how to bridge Research computing and Cloud Native ecosystems.
Hello there! I’m Helen Beal, a new CD Foundation Ambassador from Chichester in the UK. I’m also Chief Ambassador at DevOps Institute so you can tell I’m a huge fan of the power of community. I’m also a DevOps coach, writer and speaker and strategic advisor. Books and words are a huge part of my life – I read constantly and have also written several novels with more in the pipeline. I also love playing Scrabble and Bananagrams.
I’m really excited to have this opportunity to work closely with the Continuous Delivery community as it’s such an integral part of what we do in DevOps and I’ve been working with the software development lifecycle for my whole career, starting with Lotus Notes (remember that?!) in 1995! I write and speak about many different aspects of DevOps – recently I’ve been really focused on neuroscience in the workplace and value stream management. I also just did my first talk on the relationship between community and capitalism for TechStrongCon. Here’s a beautiful visual rendition of a recent talk by the wonderful MindsEyeCCF.
When I’m not DevOpsing, I tend to be out enjoying the beautiful British countryside. I’m a volunteer warden at a local nature reserve, Kingley Vale, where I pick up litter, ask people to put their dogs on leads and monitor species like the Chalk Hill Blue butterfly and one of our two UK snake species, the (lightly venomous) adder. Here’s me with a baby tawny owl.
I’m excited to be contributing to this community and meeting new people and learning new things. You can follow me on InfoQ here and Medium here. Find me on LinkedIn here and Twitter here.
My name is Alexander Raul – and I am extremely happy to join the Continuous Delivery Foundation as a Community Ambassador!
I am the CEO of Rackner, which is a cloud native consultancy focused on Kubernetes and Open Source – so my day to day is really driven by projects in the ecosystem. Continuous Delivery is a piece which doesn’t get as much credit as it deserves and where there’s still plenty of work to be done.
I am looking forward to introducing projects like Spinnaker and Tekton to developers all over the globe – and let’s be clear, Continuous Delivery should make the developer’s job easier while improving operational capability. If it only does one of the two, there’s probably a better solution.
