Interested in development of Platform-as-a-Service product?

[Oliver Schad]

Hi everybody,

we're happily using LXC/LXD together with our Kubernetes integration,
LXE.

https://github.com/automaticserver/lxe

Based on that we have developed a foundation for PaaS. What does that
mean?

You can specify a provision, a description of a cluster, that provides
a service - i.e. a PostgreSQL-Cluster with 1 master and 2 slaves or a
more complex thing like a Kubernetes Cluster with 3 etcd servers, 2
API-Servers and n Minion and several communication endpoints.

To provision something like that is a really complex thing, especially
because it's stateful: you have to provision step by step in a reliable
way. If you would have race conditions, something would sometimes fail.

On top you need a operational automation: failover, backup/restore,
upgrading, data center migration and so on. So it's not done with a
successful ping. Really NOT!

It is an approach to provide something like Google Cloud or Amazon
Cloud on any infrastructure.

We're working on that since 2017 so we have a really good
understanding, what is needed and how to build it. So it is really not
2 shell scripts with a few lines. ;-)

However, we see that this project is so big (i.e. working on a customer
web portal like Google Cloud Console), that it makes sense to share
efforts over several companies. 1) to have more hands, 2) to have more
brains, 3) to get more complete requirements, 4) finally to create a
critical mass world-wide.

So if you work in a company, who is looking for something like a PaaS
product and you want to get part of our platform development, please
feel free to contact me off-list. Yes, in an ideal world we would just
make it open source, but sadly we have to pay our staff somehow and
today I couldn't make it without - but it's not a final decision. I
hope, that we can someday offer the common used enterprise/community
package, where we sell additional add-ons and services on top of a
community edition, which is open-source. Cross your fingers.

But: we hope, that LXE is something, which makes you at least a bit
happier TODAY! We've got never real feedback here for our Kubernetes
integration LXE: does it makes sense for you?

However, thanks to all of the LXC developers, especially Stephane.
You're providing the only container runtime, we're happy with. Why? It's
stateful! It's reliable! It won't stop, until you want to stop it.

It gives us a reliability as we would spawn services plain directly on
a machine. No service interruption because of the container approach
itself.

Great Work!

Just a small hint to the community: because we want the best
reliability, we can get, we DONT use systemd.

We remove this unreliable and overcomplex service manager from Ubuntu on
our own (yes, also on Ubuntu Jammy) and use the small and reliable init
suite from the master of the init systems, Laurent Bercot, who invented
s6 and helped us to integrate s6 with Ubuntu.

https://skarnet.org/software/s6/

Yes, this peace of software is beautiful - really. If you like elegant
designed software, you will like s6. It gives you process supervision
with a really small memory and CPU footprint. To make the dimension
clear: a supervisor of s6 has 35K binary size. Systemd binary is 1.8M
(both on Ubuntu Jammy)

So if someone is interested to integrate our work into the OFFICIAL
Ubuntu Distro, feel free to contact us.

======== snip ==============

# apt-cache show init
Package: init
Priority: important
Section: metapackages
Installed-Size: 8
Maintainer: Automatic Server AG <in...@automatic-server.com>
Architecture: amd64
Version: 1:0.1.1aos1~22.04.1
Depends: init-system-helpers (>= 1.25)
Pre-Depends: s6-policy-exclusive
[...]

~# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
Release: 22.04
Codename: jammy


======= snap =============

Best Regards
Oli

--
Automatic-Server AG •••••
Oliver Schad
Geschäftsführer
Hardstr. 46
9434 Au | Schweiz

www.automatic-server.com | oliver...@automatic-server.com
Tel: +41 71 511 31 11 | Mobile: +41 76 330 03 47