Standards and the Next Generation of Cloud

(or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Software Standards)

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craig mcluckie (@cmcluck)

product guy at Google

Sarah Novotny (@sarahnovotny)

community wonk at Google

A thought: Andy Grove and disruption

• “Only the paranoid survive”
• a book about understanding disruption
• 4 current disruptive forces
• containers
• cloud
• IoT
• XaaS

one way to think the evolution of cloud

• mode 1: ‘commodity cloud’
• useful abstractions on commodity infrastructure
• mode 2: ‘traditional enterprise’ cloud.
• mode 2.1 -- ‘departmental apps’.
• mode 2.2 -- ‘integrated applications’.
• outsource infrastructure operations
• mode 3: the ‘hyperscale cloud’.
• patterns architected for internet scale infrastructure

why enterprise cares about mode 3

• starting point: every business needs to reimagine itself as a software company
• … okay, so become a software company?
• next: open source is eating the software world
• … okay, so become an open source software company?
• next: scale is exploding
• … okay, so become an ‘internet scale’ open source software company?

… so you probably care about mode 3

• only one practical way to achieve internet scale computing: ‘cloud native’
• co-evolved in many places: Google, Facebook, Twitter, ...
• So #GIFEE (or #FIFEE, #TIFEE, …) helps

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• container packaged
• predictable deployment; efficient resource isolation
• dynamically scheduled
• radically higher QoS and efficiency; radically lower ops cost
• micro-services oriented
• radically higher reuse; easier to extend

in getting to 2 billion containers a week...

Google had to build a few things

• Linux containers support: cgroups
• support efficient resource isolation for process groups
• contributed to Linux by Google (2006)
• schedulers: Borg and it’s successor Omega
• micro-services naming/discovery
• efficient RPC framework
• build and CI/CD systems
• developer tooling and debugging
• etc, etc, etc

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which make us an internet company

the community could go 2 ways to deliver those things

‘vertical integration’

… or ... ‘decoupled stacks’

A thought: Andy Grove and specialization

“I tend to believe Mark Twain hit it on the head when he said, “Put all of your eggs in one basket and WATCH THAT BASKET.”

― Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive

back to Andy Grove

Reproduced from ‘Only the Paranoid Survive’

IBM

DEC Sperry Wang Univac

Sale and distribution

Application Software

Operating System

Computer

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Chips

verticalization will fail:

standardization of interfaces is crucial

• an ecosystem needs specialization
• more options are better than fewer
• a vendor shouldn’t have to implement a whole stack

solution

compute node OS

container runtime

infrastructure provisioning

agent

…. N

distributed systems services

resource scheduling

application definition and orchestration

software defined network

software defined storage

container image repository

container image registry

so we need a foundation to deliver whole stack(s)

solution

compute node OS

container runtime

agent

…. N

resource scheduling

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distributed systems services

application definition and orchestration

software defined network software defined storage infrastructure provisioning

container image repository

container image registry

so we need a foundation to deliver whole stack(s)

a foundation makes sense

• assemble harmonized sets of technologies
• qualify reference architectures for interoperability
• identify and fill gaps
• create a safe place for the industry to engage and contribute

but we want it to be a great foundation

• address some potential shortcomings
• be coherent -- hold technical opinion
• be accountable -- give end users ‘teeth’
• be consistent -- avoid semantic drift

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• address through governance structure
• balanced authority -- ‘separation of church and state’

how to achieve coherency: technical leadership

• technical oversight committee
• independent, elected group
• modeled on the supreme court
• chosen for lifetime contributions
• representation from end-user committee
• hold technical opinion, decide what is ‘cloud native’

how to achieve accountability: end user committee

• independent of vendors
• representative of users
• technical committee is accountable to end user committee

how to achieve consistency: code driven standards

• avoid the tyranny of academic standards: lead with code
• establish semantic standard through reference implementation
• promote API standard over time once you know what works
• demonstrate semantic consistency through conformance testing
• good: API conformance
• better: behavioral conformance
• best: common code

a call to action

CNCF is a different sort of foundation…

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• broad vendor support: BC (business committee)
• strong sense of technical identity: TOC (technical oversight committee)
• strong commitment to end user: EUC (end user committee)

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we are actively recruiting end users for the foundation please visit http://cncf.io for details