Month: January 2018

Lightning Talk

• Usability Fails
• Etching
• Diverse Events
• Kids Space – fairly unstructured and self organising
• Opening up LandSat imagery – NBAR-T available on NCI
• Project Nacho – HTML -> VPN/RDP gateway . Apache Guacomle
• Vocaloids
• Blockchain
• Using j2 to create C++ code
• Memory model code update
• CLIs are user interface too
• Complicated git things
• Mollygive -matching donations
• Abusing Docker

Closing

• LCA 2019 will be in Christchurch, New Zealand – http://lca2019.linux.org.au
• 700 Attendees at 2018
• 400 talk and 36 Miniconf submissions

 

 

QUIC: Replacing TCP for the Web Jana Iyengar

• History
  • Protocol for http transport
  • Deployed Inside Google 2014 and Chrome / mobile apps
  • Improved performance: Youtube rebuffers 15-18% , Google search latency 3.6 – 8 %
  • 35% of Google’s egree traffic (7% of Internet)
  • Working group started in 2016 to standardized QUIC
  • Turned off at the start of 2016 due to security problem
  • Doubled in Sept 2016 due turned on for the youtube app
• Technology
  • Previously – ip _> TCP -> TLS -> HTTP/2
  • QUIC -> udp -> QUIC -> http over QUIC
  • Includes crypto and tcp handshake
  • congestion control
  • loss recovery
  • TLS 1.3 has some of the same features that QUIC pioneered, being updated to take account
• HTTP/1
  • 1 trip for TCP
  • 2 trips for TLS
  • Single connection – Head Of Line blocking
  • Multiple TCP connections workaround.
• HTTP/2
  • Streams within a single transport connection
  • Packet loss will stall the TCP layer
  • Unresolved problems
    • Connection setup latency
    • Middlebox interference with TCP – makes it hard to change TCP
    • Head of line blocking within TCP
• QUIC
  • Connection setup
    • 0 round trips, handshake packet followed directly by data packet
    • 1 round-trips if crypto keys are not new
    • 2 round trips if QUIC version needs renegotiation
  • Streams
    • http/2 streams are sent as quic streams
• Aspirations of protocol
  • Deployable and evolveable
  • Low latency connection establishment
  • Stream multiplexing
  • Better loss recovery and flexible congestion control
    • richer signalling (unique packet number)
    • better RTT estimates
  • Resilience to NAT-rebinding ( UDP Nat-mapping changes often, maybe every few seconds)
• UDP is not a transport, you put something in top of UDP to build a transport
• Why not a new protocol instead of UDP? Almost impossible to get a new protocol in middle boxes around the Internet.
• Metrics
  • Search Latency (see paper for other metrics)
  • Enter search term > entire page is loaded
  • Mean: desktop improve 8% , mobile 3.6 %
  • Low latency: Desktop 1% , Mobile none
  • Highest Latency 90-99% of users: Desktop & mobile 15-16%
  • Video similar
  • Big gain is from 0 RTT handshake
• QUIC – Search Latency Improvements by Country
  • South Korea – 38ms RTT – 1% improvement
  • USA – 50ms – 2 – 3.5 %
  • India – 188ms – 5 – 13%
• Middlebox ossification
  • Vendor ossified first byte of QUIC packet – flags byte
  • since it seemed to be the same on all QUIC packets
  • broke QUIC deployment when a flag was fixed
  • Encryption is the only way to protect against network ossification
  • “Greasing” by randomly changing options is also an option.
• Other Protocols over QUIC?
  • Concentrating on http/2
  • Looking at Web RPC

Remote Work: My first decade working from the far end of the earth John Dalton

• “Remote work has given me a fulfilling technical career while still being able to raise my family in Tasmania”
• First son both in 2015, wanted to start in Tasmania with family to raise them, rather than moving to a tech hub.
• 2017 working with High Performance Computing at University Tasmania
• If everything is going to be outsourced, I want to be the one they outsourced to.
• Wanted to do big web stuff, nobody in Tasmania doing that.
• Was a user at LibraryThing
  • They were searching for Sysadmin/DBA in Portland, Maine
  • Knew he could do the job even though was on other side of the world
  • Negotiated into it over a couple of months
  • Knew could do the work, but not sure how the position would work out

Challenges

• Discipline
  • Feels he is not organised. Doesn’t keep planner uptodate or todo lists etc
  • “You can spend a lot of time reading about time management without actually doing it”
  • Do you need to have the minimum level
• Isolation
  • Lives 20 minutes out of Hobart
  • In semi-rural area for days at a time, doesn’t leave house all week except to ferry kids on weekends.
  • “Never considered myself an extrovert, but I do enjoy talking to people at least weekly”
  • Need to work to hook in with Hobart tech community, Goes to meetups. Plays D&D with friends.
  • Considering going to coworking space. sometimes goes to Cafes etc
• Setting Boundries
  • Hard to Leave work.
  • Have a dedicated work space.
• Internet Access
  • Prioritise Coverage over cost these days for mobile.
  • Sometimes fixed provider go down, need to have a backup
• Communication
  • Less random communicated with other employees
  • Cannot assume any particular knowledge when talking with other people
  • Aware of particular cultural differences
  • Multiple chance of a miscommunication

Opportunities

• Access to companies and jobs and technologies that could get locally
• Access to people with a wider range of experiences and backgrounds

Finding remote work

• Talk your way into it
• Networking
• Job Bof
• stackoverflow.com/jobs can filter
• weworkremotely.com

Making it work

• Be Visable
• Go home at the end of the day
• Remember real people are at the end of the email

 

Self-Documenting Coders: Writing Workshop for Devs Heidi Waterhouse

History of Technical documentation

• Linear Writing
  • On Paper, usually books
  • Emphasis on understanding and doing
• Task-based writing
  • Early 90s
  • DITA
  • Concept, Procedure, Reference
• Object-orientated writing
  • High art for of tech writers
  • Content as code
  • Only works when compiled
  • Favoured by tech writers, translated. Up to $2000 per seat
• Guerilla Writing
  • Stack Overflow
  • Wikis
  • YouTube
  • frustrated non-writers trying to help peers
• Search-first writing
  • Every page is page one
  • Search-index driven

Writing Words

• 5 W’s of journalism.
• Documentation needs to be tested
• Audiences
  • eg Users, future-self, Sysadmins, experts, End users, installers
• Writing Basics
  • Sentences short
  • Graphics for concepts
  • Avoid screencaps (too easily outdated)
  • User style guides and linters
  • Accessibility is a real thing
• Words with pictures
  • Never include settings only in an image ( “set your screen to look like this” is bad)
  • Use images for concepts not instructions
• Not all your users are readers
  • Can’t see well
  • Can’t parse easily
  • Some have terrible equipment
  • Some of the “some people” is us
  • Accessibility is not a checklist, although that helps, it is us
• Using templates to write
  • Organising your thoughts and avoid forgetting parts
  • Add a standard look at low mental cost
• Search-first writing – page one
  • If you didn’t answer the question or point to the answer you failed
  • answer “How do I?”
• Indexing and search
  • All the words present are indexed
  • No false pointers
  • Use words people use and search for, Don’t use just your internal names for things
• Semantic tagging and reuse
  • Semantic text splits form and content
  • Semantic tagging allows reuse
  • Reuse saves duplication
  • Reuse requires compiling
• Sorting topics into buckets
  • Even with search you need some organisation
  • Group items by how they get used not by how they get prammed
  • Grouping similar items allows serendipity
• Links, menus and flow
  • give people a next step
  • Provide related info on same page
  • show location
  • offer a chance to see the document structure

Distributing Words

• Static Sites
• Hosted Sites
• Baked into the product
  • Only available to customers
  • only updates with the product
  • Hard to encourage average user to input
• Knowledge based / CMS
  • Useful to community that known what it wants
  • Prone to aging and rot
  • Sometimes diverges from published docs or company message
• Professional Writing Tools
  • Shiny and powerful
  • Learning Cliff
  • IDE
  • Super features
  • Not going to happen again
• Paper-ish things
  • Essential for some topics
  • Reassuring to many people
  • touch is a sense we can bond with
  • Need to understand if people using docs will be online or offline when they want them.
• Using templates to publish
  • Unified look and feel
  • Consistency and not missing things
  • Built-in checklist

Collaborating on Words

• One weird trick, write it up as your best guess and let them correct it
• Have a hack day
  • Ste a goal of things to delete
  • Set a goal of things to fix
  • Keep track of debt you can’t handle today
  • team-building doesn’t have to be about activities

Deleting Words

• What needs to go
  • Old stuff that is wrong and terrible
  • Wrong stuff that hides right stuff
• What to delete
  • Anything wrong
  • Anything dangerious
  • Anything used of updated in year
• How
  • Delete temporarily (put aside for a while)
  • Based on analytics
  • Ruthlessly
  • Delete or update

Documentation Must be

• True
• Timely
• Testable
• Tuned

Documentation Components

• Who is reading and why
  • Assuming no one likes reading docs
  • What is driving them to be here
• Pre Requisites
  • What does a user need to succeed
  • Can I change the product to reduce documentation
  • Is there any hazard in this process
• How do I do this task
  • Steps
  • Results
  • Next steps
• Test – How do I know that it worked
  • If you can’t test i, it is not a procedure
  • What will the system do, how does the state change
• Reference
  • What other stuff that affects this
  • What are the optionsal settings
  • What are the related things
• Code and code samples
  • Best: code you can modify and run in the docs
  • 2nd Best: Code you can copy easily
  • Worst: retyping code
• Option
  • Why did we build it this way
  • What else might you want to know
  • Have other people done this
  • Lifecycle

Documentation Types

• Instructions
• Ideas (arch, problem space,discarded options, process)
• Action required (release notes, updates, deprecation)
• Historical (roads maps, projects plans, retrospective documents)
• Invisible docs (user experience, microinteractions, error messages)
  • Error messages – Unique ID, what caused, What mitigation, optional: Link to report

 

Keynote: Containers aka crazy user space fun

• Work at Microsoft on Open Source and containers, specifically on kubernetes
• Containers vs Zones vs Jails vs VMs
• Containers are not a first class concept in the kernel.
  • Namespaces
  • Cgroups
  • AppArmour in LSM (prevent mounting, writing to /proc etc) (or SELinux)
  • Seccomp (syscall filters, which allowed or denied) – Prevent 150 other syscalls which are uncommon or dangerous.
    • Got list from testing all of dockerhub
    • eg CLONE, UNSHARE
    • NoNewPrivs (exposed as “AllowPrivilegeEsculation” in K8s)
    • rkt and systemd-nspawn don’t 100% follow
• Intel Clear containers are really VMs

History of Containers

• OpenVZ – released 2005
• Linux-Vserver (2008)
• LXC ( 2008)
• Docker ( 2013)
  • Initially used LXC as a backend
  • Switched to libcontainer in v0.7
• lmctfy (2013)
  • By Google
• rkt (2014)
• runc (2015)
  • Part of Open container Initiative
• Container runtimes are like the new Javascript frameworks

Are Containers Secure

• Yes
• and I can prove it
• VMs / Zones and Jails are like all the Lego pieces are already glued togeather
• Containers you have the parts seperate
  • You can turn on and off certain namespaces
  • You can share namespaces between containers
  • Every container in k8s shares PID and NET namespaces
  • Docker has sane defaults
  • You can sandbox apps every further though
• https://contained.af/
  • No one has managed to break out of the container
  • Has a very strict seccomp profile applied
  • You’d be better off attacking the app, but you are still running a containers default seccomp filters

Containerizing the Desktop

• Switched to runc from docker (had to convert stuff)
• rootless containers
• Runc hook “netns” to do networking
• Sandboxed desktop apps, running in containers
• Switch from Debian to CoreOS Container Linux as base OS
  • Verify the integrity of the OS
  • Just had to add graphics drivers
  • Based on gentoo, emerge all the way down

What if we applied the the same defaults to programming languages?

• Generate seccomp filters at build-time
  • Previously tried at run time, doesn’t work that well, something always missed
  • At build time we can ensure all code is included in the filter
  • The go compiler writes the assembly for all the syscalls, you can hijack and grab the list of these, create a seccomp filter
  • No quite that simply
    • plugins
    • exec external stuff
    • can directly exec a syscall in go code, the name passed in via arguments at runtime
• metaparticle.io
  • Library for cloud-native applications

Linux Containers in secure enclaves (SCONE)

• Currently Slow
• Lots of tradeoffs or what executes where (trusted area or untrsuted area)

Soft multi-tenancy

• Reduced threat model, users not actively malicious
• Hard Multi-tenancy would have potentially malicious containers running next to others
• Host OS – eg CoreOs
• Container Runtime – Look at glasshouse VMs
• Network – Lots to do, default deny in k8s is a good start
• DNS – Needs to be namespaced properly or turned off. option: kube-dns as a sidecar
• Authentication and Authorisation – rbac
• Isolation of master and System nodes from nodes running containers
• Restricting access to host resources (k8s hostpath for volumes, pod security policy)
• making sure everything else is “very dumb” to it’s surroundings

 

Insights – solving every problem for good Paul Wayper

Sysadmins

• Too much to check, too little time
• What does this message mean again
• Too reactive

How Sysadmins fix problems

• Read text files and command output
• Look at them for information
• Check this information against the knowlede
• Decide on appobiate solution

Insites

• Reads test files and outputs
• Process them into information
• Use information in rules
• Rules provide information about Solution

Examples

• Simple rule – check “localhost” is in /etc/hosts
• Rule 2 – chronyd refuses to fix server’s time since is out by more than 1000s
  • Checks /var/log/message for error message from chrony
• Insites rolls up all the checks against messages, so only down once
• Rule 3 – rsyslog dropping messages

Website

http://red.ht/demo_rules

 

Personalisation at Scale: A “Cookie Cutter” Approach Jim O’Halloran

• Impact on site performance on conversion is huge
• Magento
  • LAMP stack + Redis or memcached
  • Generally App is CPI bound
  • Routing / Rendering still time consuming
• Varnish full page caching (FPC)
• But what about personalised content?
• Edge Side Includes (ESIs)
  • But ESIs run in series, is slllow when you have many
  • Content is nont cacheable, expensive to calculate, significant render time
  • ESI therefore undermines much advantage of FPC
• Ajax
  • Make ajax request and fetch personalised content
  • Still load on backend
  • ESI limitations plus added network latency
• Cookie Cutter
  • When an event occurs that modifies personalisation state, send a cookies containing the required data with the response.
  • In the browser, use the content of that cookie to update the page

Example

• Goto www.example.com
  • Probably cached in varnish
  • I don’t have a cookie
  • If I login, uncachable request, I am changing login state
  • Response includes Set-Cookie header creating a personalised cookie
• Advantages
  • No backend requests
  • Page data served is cached always
• How big can cookies be?
  • RFC 6265 has limits but in reality
  • Actual limit ~4096 bytes per cookie
  • Some older browsers also limit to ~4096 bytes total per domain

Potential issues

• Request Size
  • Keep cookies small
    • Store small values only, No pre-rendered markup, No larger data structures
  • Serve static assets via CDN
  • Lot of stuff in cart can get huge
• Information leakage
  • Final URLs leaked to unlogged in users
• Large Scale changes
  • Page needs to look completely different to different users
  • Vary headers might be an option
• Formkeys
  • XSRF protection workarounds
• What about cache misses
  • Megento assembles all it’s pages from a series of blocks
  • Most parts of page are relatively static (block cache)
  • Aligent_CacheObserver – Megento extension that adds cache tags to blocks that should be cached but were not picked up as cachable by default
  • Aoe_TemplateHints – Visibility into Block cache
  • Cacheing != Performance Optimisation – Aoe_Profiler

Availability

• Plugin availbale for Megento 1
  • Varnish CookieCutter
• For Magento 2 has native varnish
  • But has limitations
  • Maybe some off CookieCutter stuff could improve

Future

• localStorage instead of cookies

 

Panel: Meltdown, Spectre, and the free-software community Jonathan Corbet, Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang, Benno Rice, Jess Frazelle, Katie McLaughlin, Kees Cook

• FreeBSD only heard 11 days beforehand. Would have liked more notice
• Got people involved from the Kernel Summit in Oct
• Hosting company only heard once it went official, been busy patching since
• Likely to be class-action lawsuit for $billions. That might make chip makers more paranoid about documentation and disclosure.
• Thoughts in embargo
  • People noticed strange patches going in beforehand.
  • Only broke 6 days early, had been going for 6 months
  • “Linus is happy with this, something is terribly wrong”
  • Sad that the 2nd-tier cloud providers didn’t know. Exclusive club and lines as to who got informed were not clear
  • Projects that don’t have explicit relationship with Intel didn’t get informed
• Thoughts on other vendors
  • This class of bugs could affect anybody, open hardware would probably not fix
  • More open hardware could enable people to review the processors and find these from the design rather than poking around
  • Hard to guarantee the shipped hardware matches the design
  • Software people can build everything at home and check. FABs don’t work at home.
• Speculative execution warned about years ago. Danger ignored. How to make sure the next one isn’t ignored?
  • We always have to do some risky stuff
  • The research on this built up slowly over the years
  • Even if you have only found impractical attacks against something doesn’t mean the practical one doesn’t exist.
• What criteria do we use to decide who is in?
  • Mechanisms do exist, they were mainly not used. Perhaps because they were for software vulnerabilities
• Did people move providers?
  • No but Containers made things easier to reboot stuff and shuffle
• Are there similar vulnerabilities ( similar or general hardware ) coming along?
  • The Kernel page-table patches were fairly general, should cover many similar ones
  • All these performance optimising bit of your CPU are now attack surfaces
  • What are people going to do if this slows down hardware too much?
• How do we explain problems like these to politicians etc
  • Legos
  • We still have kernel devs getting their laptops
• Can be use CPUs that don’t have speculative execution?
  • Not really. Back to 486s
• Who are we protesting against with the embargo?
  • Everybody
  • The longer period let better fixes get in
  • The meltdown fix could be done in semi-public so had better quality

What is the most common street name in Australia? Rachel Bunder

• Why?
  • Saw a map with most common name by US street
• Just looking at name, not end bit “park” , “road”
• Data
  • PSMA Geocoded national address file – Great but came out after project
  • Use Open Street Maps
• Started with Common Name in Sydney
  • Used Metro Extracts – site closing down soon
  • Format is geojson
  • Road files separately provided
• Procedure
  • Used python, R also has good features and libaraies
  • geopandas
  • Had some paths with no names
  • What is a road? – “Something with a name I can drive a car on”
• Sydney
  • Full street name
    • Victoria Road
    • Pacific Highway
    • oops like like names are being counted twice
  • Tried merging them together
  • Roads don’t 100% match ends. Added function to fuzzy merge the roads that are 100m apart
  • Still some weird ones but probably won’t affect top
  • Second attempt
    • Short st, George st, William st, John st, Church st
• Now with just the “name bit”
  • Tried taking out just the last name. ended up with “the” as most common.
  • Started with “The” = whole name
  • Single word = whole name
  • name – descriptor – suffex
  • lots of weird names
  • name list – Park, Victoria, Railway, William, Short
• Wouldn’t work in many other counties
• Now for all over Australia
  • overpass data
  • Downloaded in 50kmx50x squares
• Lessons
  • Start small
  • Choose something familiar
  • Check you bias (different naming conventions)
  • Constance vigerlence
  • Know your problem
• Common plant names
  • Wattle – 15th – 385
• Other name
  • “The Esplanade” more common than “The Avenue”
• Top names
  • 5th – Victoria
  • 4th – Church – 497
  • 3rd – George –  551
  • 2nd – Railway
  • 1st – Park – 693
• By State
  • WA – Forest
  • SA – Railway
  • Vic – Park
  • Tas – Esplanade
  • NT – Smith/Stuart
  • NSW – Park

 

Wandering through the Commons

Reflections on Free and Open Source Software/Hardware in Australia, New Zealand and beyond

• Past Linux.conf.au’s reviewed
• FOSS in Aus and NZ
  • Above per capita
• List of Aus / NZ people and their contributions
  • John Lions , Lions book on Unix
  • Pia Andrews/Waugh/Smith – Open Government, GovHack, Linux Australia, Open Data
  • Vik Oliver – 3D Printing
  • Clare Cuuran – Open Government in NZ
  • plus a bunch of others

Working in Free Software and Open Hardware

• The basics
  • Be visable in projects of relevance
    • You will be typed into Google, looked at in GitHub
  • Be yourself
    • But be business Friendly
  • Linkedin is a thing, really
  • Need a accurate basic presence
• Finding a new job
  • Networks
  • Local user groups
  • Conferences
  • The projects you work on
• Application and negotiation
  • Be professional, courteous
  • Do homework about company and culture
  • Talk to people that work there
  • Spend time on interview prep
    • Know your stuff, if you don’t know, say so
  • Think about Salary expectations and stick to them
    • Val Aurora’s page on this is excellent
  • Ask to keep copyright on your code
    • Should be a no-brainer for a FOSS.OH company
• In the Job
  • Takes time to get into groove, don’t sweat it
  • Get out every now and then, particularly if working from home
  • Work/life balance
  • Know when to jump
    • Poisonous workplaces
  • An aside to People’s managers
    • Bring your best or don’t be a people manager
    • Take your reports welfare seriously

Looking after You

• Ours is in the main a sedentary and solitary pursuit
  • exercise
• Sitting and standing in front of a desk all day is bad
  • takes breaks
• Depression is a real thing
• Eat more vegetables
• Find friends/colleagues to exercise with

Working if FOSS / OH – Staying Current

• Look over a colleagues shoulder
• Do something that is not part of your regular job
  • low level programming
  • Karger systems, Openstack
• Stay uptodate with Security Blogs and the like
  • Many of the attack vectors have generic relevance
• Take the lid off, tinker with hardware
  • Lots of videos online to help or just watch

Make Hay while the Sun Shines

• Save some money for rainy day
• Keep networks Open
• Even when you have a job

You’re fired … Now What? – In a moment

• Don’t panic
  • Going out in a twitter storm won’t help anyone
• It’s not personal
  • It is the position that is no longer needed, not you
• If you think it an unfair dismissal, seek legal advice before signing anything
• It is normal to feel rubbish
• Beware of imposter syndrome
• Try to keep 2-3 opportunities in the pipeline
• Don’t assume people will remember you
  • It’s not personal, everyone gets busy
  • It’s okay to (politely naturally) follow up periodically
• Keep search a little narrow for the first week or two
  • The expand widely
• Balance take “something/everything” as better than waiting for your dream job

Dream Job

• Power 9 CPU
  • 14nm process
  • 4GHz, 24 cores
  • 25km of wires
  • 8 billion transisters
  • 3900 official chips pins
  • ~19,000 connections from die to the pin

Conclusions

• Part of a vibrant FOSS/OH community both hear and abroad
• We have accomplished much
• The most exciting (in both senses) things lie before us
• We need all of you to be part at every level of the stack
• Look forward to working with you…

Securing the Linux boot process Matthew Garrett

• Without boot security there is no other security
• MBR Attacks – previously common, still work sometimes
• Bootloader attacks – Seen in the wild
• Malicious initrd attacks
  • RAM disk, does stuff like decrypt hard drive
  • Attack captures disk pass-shrase when typed in
• How do we fix these?
  • UEFI Secure boot
  • Microsoft required in machines shipped after mid-2012
  • sign objects, firmware trusts some certs, boots things correctly signed
  • Problem solved! Nope
  • initrds are not signed
• initrds
  • contain local changes
  • do a lot of security stuff
• TPMs
  • devices on system motherboards
  • slow but inexpensive
  • Not under control of the CPU
  • Set of registers “platform configuration registers”, list of hashes of objects booted in boot process. Measurements
  • PCR can enforce things, stop boots if stuff doesn’t match
  • But stuff changes all the time, eg update firmware . Can brick machine
• Microsoft to the resuce
  • Tie Secure boot into measured boot
  • Measure signing keys rather than the actual files themselves
  • But initrds are not signed
• Systemd to the resuce
  • systemd boot stub (not the systemd boot loader)
  • Embed initrd and the kernel into a single image with a single signature
  • But initrds contain local information
  • End users should not be signing stuff
• Kernel can be handed multiple initranfs images (via cpio)
  • each unpacked in turn
  • Each will over-write the previous one
  • configuration can over-written but the signed image, perhaps safely so that if config is changed, stuff fails
  • unpack config first, code second
• Kernel command line is also security sensative
  • eg turn off iommu and dump RAM to extract keys
  • Have a secure command line turning on all security features, append on the what user sends
• Proof of device state
  • Can show you are number after boot based on TPM. Can compare to 2FA device to make sure it is securely booted. Safe to type in passwords
• Secure Provision of secrets
  • Know a remote machine is booted safely and not been subverted before sending it secret stuff.

Dealing with Contributor Overload Holden Karau

• Developer Advocate at Google
• Apache Spark, Contributor to BEAM

Some people from big projects, some from projects hoping to get big

• Remember it’s okay to not fix it all
• The fun of a small project
  • Simple communication
  • Aligned incentives
  • Easy to tell who knows what
  • Tight community
• The fun of a parge project
  • More people to do the work
  • More impact and people thanking you
  • Lots of ideas and experiences
  • If $s then fun conferences
  • Get paid to work on it.
• Is my project on Fire? or just lots of people on it.
  • Measurable
    • User questions spike
    • issue spike
  • Lesss measurable
    • Non-explicit stuff not being passed on
• Classic Pipeline
  • Users -> contributors -> committers _> PMC
  • Each stage takes times
  • Very leaky pipeline, perhaps it leaks too much
• With hyper-growth project can quickly go south
  • Committer:user ration can’t get too far out.
• Even without hyper-growth: sadness
  • Same thing happens, but slower
• Overload – Mitigation
  • You don’t have to answer everyone, this can be hard
  • Stackoverflow
  • Are your answers easily searchable
  • Knowledge base – “do you mean”
  • Take time and look for patterns in questions
  • Find people who like writing and get to to write a book
    • Don’t to for core committers, they will have no time for anything else
• Issue overload
  • Try and get rid of duplicate tickets
  • Autoclose tickets – mixed results
• How to deal with a spike
  • Raise the bar
  • Make it easier
  • Get Perl to solve the problem
• Raising the bar
  • Reject trivial changes – reduces the onramp
  • Add weird system – more posts on how to contribute
• What can Perl solve
  • Style guide
  • bot bot bots
  • make it faster to merge
  • Improve PR + reviewer notice
  • Can increase productivity
• Add more committers
  • Takes time and effort
  • People can be shy
  • Make a guide for new folks to follow
  • Have a safe space for people to ask questions
• Reduce overhead for contributing well
  • Have doc on how to contribute next to the code, not elsewhere that people have to search for.

The Open Sourcing of Infrastructure Elizabeth K. Joseph

The recent history of infrastructure

• 1998
  • To make a server use Solaris or NT. But off a shelf
  • Linux seen as Cheap Unix
  • Lots of FUD

Got a Junior Sysadmin Job

• 2004
  • Had to tell people the basics “What is free software?”  , “Using Open Source Web Applications to Produce Business Results”
  • Turning point LAMP stack
  • Flood of changes on how customers interacted with software over last
    • Reluctance to be locked-in by a vendor
    • Concerns of security
    • Ability to fix bugs ourselves
    • Innovation stifled when software developed in isloation

Last 10 years

• Changes in how peopel interacted with software
  • Downtime un-acceptable
  • Reliance of scaling and automation
  • Servers as Pets -> cattle
  • Large focus on data

Open Source is now Ubiquitous

• Even Microsoft is using it a lot and interacting with the community

Operations tools were not as Open Sourced

• Configuration Management
  • puppet modules, chef playbooks
• Open application definitions – juhu charms, DC?OS Universe Catalog
• Full disk images
  • Dockerhub

The Cloud

• Cloud is the new propriatory
• EC2-only infrastructure
• Questions you should ask beforehand
  • Is your service adhering to open standards or am I locked in?
  • Recourse if the company goes out of business
  • Does vendor have a history of communicating about downtime and security problems?
  • Does vendor responds to bugs and feature requests?
  • Will the vendor use data in a way I’m not comfortable with?
  • Initial costs may be low, but do you have a plan to handle long term, growing costs
• Alternatives
  • Openstack, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, DC/OS with Apache Mesos

Hybrid Cloud

• Tooling can be platform agnostic
• Hard but can be done