CIQ’s Brown Bag Webinar Series

So one of the things I've actually been seeing and I had a friend of mine's son ask me I want to learn something new and I'm trying to get into it. What should I do started talking about Rocky obviously go learn Rocky Linux and he started asking about Kubernetes. Well I want to build a Kubernetes cluster. How do I get started? So one of the things that I remember probably the last two or three years especially pre pandemic uh everybody was building out uh Linux clusters on Raspberry Pi deploying Kubernetes clusters. It was a really cheap, easy way to go play. But now that it's really hard to find a Raspberry Pi, especially if you're looking for an 8 gig model, I've seen people paying 750, 800 bucks for one, which is I mean, you go buy a laptop and do the same thing.

Yeah. But for people who have one, that seems to be the problem. They have one. And what I've been running across lately is people building out something like this. So, you actually take one of those 8 gig pies and attach an SSD and you can actually install VMware ESXi on this thing. now. So you can run a full-blown ESXi cluster and install Rocky Linux on it and actually have multi-nodes. So you have an entire multi-node Kubernetes cluster on a Raspberry Pi, which is is something that I've started obviously building out. That's why it looks like this today. Uh I've started down that road to go play with it and see if I can get it to work.

And it's been really interesting to try to get that type of thing running. Obviously, it's never going to be a great performer. It's not really what it's intended for, but it's a great place to learn. And one of the other questions that I've been getting is, okay, well, I've got VMware installed on it. I've got some Rocky boxes. Now what? So, one of the things I've also started noticing and looking around for is there's obviously there's a bunch of Ansible playbooks out there to go do this for a simple Rocky cluster. I mean, it's not like it's that hard. Uh, playing with those and getting them up and running.

I've seen some different blogs out there that are talking about get a a Kubernetes cluster up and running in five minutes. I mean, is what have you seen people doing or what have you done yourself? Yeah. Um, I've actually been looking into it as well as far as, uh, my son has been showing an interest. Um, as well as learning, you know, some Linux and obviously with me working with Rocky Linux, he's heard a lot about it. Um, and, uh, even my brother-in-law has been wanting to pick up Linux. So, um, I'm running into the same issue as you as many are, not finding too many Raspberry Pies um, out there.

But that was the idea was we were going to I I talked to my brother-in-law. I said, "Hey, what do you think about this project? We'll do it with our our kids." He has a son as well, same age, and uh they're really getting into technology. And so I said, "How what do you think of this idea that we get some pies and we'll start learning building some clusters and obviously we're going to pick Rocky Linux to run on it." So, um I've been doing my research and not not been su successful in getting some pies yet. Um so that's about as far as I've gotten right now.

Um but I have seen um uh some blog posts out there on how to use Anible on how to uh just run a a simple playbook. You know, somebody's already done the work on how to uh put Kubernetes onto a cluster of Rocky servers. Um, so it's just basically doing a little bit of Google searching and uh you could easily um get a playbook, run it and put it on on Rocky um that way. But yeah, so it's I would love to get my hands on some more Rocky Pies. Um and that's definitely I see a lot of people I see uh if you go on YouTube, there's a lot of YouTubers doing the same thing, right?

Building clusters for learning. Uh, and um, you know, maybe they're not exactly using Rocky, but Rocky would work just as well as the the operating system. Yeah, I it it's been easier. Most people have a three laying around somewhere, if not several of them, because they were significantly cheaper. And that's what I started off doing, but like I said, I was interested in doing something else. And now that 64-bit is available or it's been available for Rocky on the Pi, I've just been really interested in playing with that. Yeah. Robert, have you been playing yet? Yeah, I mean obviously we you know our fuzzball stack uses a little bit of rock little bit of Kubernetes and a lot of bit of Rocky, right?

So um you know Michael has done many deployments uh of our own Kubernetes stack that we containerized and uh have a systematic way to deploy that as well. So, um, yeah. I mean, I wouldn't say I was on Raspberry Pi. I I tend to be as a an old uh hardware person. I tend to have like 15, uh, old laptops lying around the house that I string up, but uh, so mine looks a little bit not as pretty as yours, probably. Let's just put it that way. Damn, it's got backup battery built in. Nothing wrong with that either. It's awesome. So, I know I know earlier and Michael you and I were talking about you've had some people call in and ask questions kind of about installing Kubernetes.

How does CIQ feel about it? I mean, there's a lot of options when you go to install Kubernetes. Let's be honest, there's a lot of different things you need to think about from a CIQ perspective. What are we working on for that? Uh, yep. So we get a lot of questions you know okay they know that Kubernetes will run on Rocky but they want to know what's the best practice you know do we have any suggestions do we have any thing that we would guide them uh in regards to installing uh Kubernetes on Rocky um so we've been actually I've been trying to work on a document in that regards because there's different ways to install Kubernetes for all those that that are familiar with Kubernetes there's different paths that you can go on installing and setting it up.

So, um uh basically just going through the documentation from Kubernetes um and digesting and just breaking down what would be the best path using Rocky as an operating system. So, I have a document and um I should have probably shared this before so it was all queued up uh so I apologize. Um, it's all good. So, when you were looking at this though, Michael, you were looking this at from a perspective of if I wanted to run this in production. I mean, stuff we were talking about earlier is obviously kind of a hobbyist playing with it, trying to learn running it on the Pi or doing it at home.

Those installs are you're going to go get something from Anible. It's probably going to be pretty vanilla and not necessarily something you would just want to run and stick in production. But you're looking at this from really from an operational standpoint of if I go this route, these are the types of decisions that I need to make and kind of where we stand from a CI perspective on what that would look like. Exactly. Thank you for clarifying that. Yeah, absolutely. Mo most people are starting out, they're just going to go grab the quick starts or um you know use rancher or some way to get Kubernetes up and running quick just to to play around with to learn.

This is more from that that perspective. Okay, this is going to go in production. Uh, what is the best way to set this up on my production server? Um, and so that's what this document that I'm just doing a quick screen share of here. Uh, kind of just, you know, I say right there in the introduction, there's different ways to set up and run Kubernetes. There's different choices. And so that that's the purpose of this document that I've been working on is trying to go through put down what are the the the base requirements and then what are the the things that a system admin or a person who's going to deploy this needs to think about in deploying Kubernetes on their Rocky system.

Um so it's still a work in progress. Um but I've actually been using this uh for some support cases. uh use this document to go through set up an environment in order to help tackle some support tickets that have come in our way. So, um I just need to polish it up. I'm not going to show you the whole document because I think I showed you earlier uh down below. It's a little messy. It's just a bunch of notes uh from me, you know, putting my thoughts together. Um, but we just wanted to share with those watching that uh we're working on uh stuff like that here at CIQ that we get we feel these questions and we say, "Oh, you know what?

Let's see if there's a better way to do this or what is the best way to do this?" And we'll start digging into it and try to figure that out to help everyone else out. Oh, that's great. And I know it's something that's very important to us is to be able to have a nice streamlined answer for this is the way that we believe you should be doing it. I know Robert, you're an advocate of of helping people and making sure people are successful. I feel like this is something that as we go through being able to produce something like this and share with the community is is pretty important and can add value back to the community.

Yeah. And you know, thanks to folks like Michael for doing all this research over time, but we're going to have multiple different uh and uh information like this that we're going to be putting out from our support team and our our lead engineers like Michael. So, um, over time, we're getting asked these questions and we're going to just have accessible information, um, whether it's in our our learning portals, in our, uh, in our support portals or, you know, generally available across the internet, in blogs, on our website, etc. Um, I think, you know, one as important as this in particular, we'll definitely do a video and show people step-by-step guides on how to do it.

Um and again thanks to uh you know the our our support team that's really putting a lot of effort into pre-thinking and pre-an analyzing how to do these things effectively for our customers. Yeah, I can I can also imagine that once these documents get created, there will probably be followed by if not the community, one of us that will put together anal playbooks or puppet manifests to go do this kind of stuff that not only do you have the document that you can view and follow if you want to, but also be able to do this very quickly. Uh, and and from something that is a known good.

So, it's exciting. One of the other things that gets brought up, and I know this is something that Robert, you've talked about quite a bit, is that universal base image. when we're talking about containers, we're talking about Kubernetes, I think it's something that is important to for people to understand what are we talking about when we say UBI or or universal based image, what is it and then why is it important? Yeah. And you I'll let Michael get into the weeds for you, but at the end of the day um we want a freely available way for everybody to build their containers um at scale um in the ways that's going to suit their applications that they need to run.

Whether it's a Kubernetes environment, whether it's, you know, for science and on the fuzzball platform, either way, we want people to have a universal way to make it easy, effective, um, and they're up and running in an extreme way. Um, and Mike, I'm more than happy to let you kind of dig in deeper on, you know, what that looks like in practice, but we're getting asked for this a lot. Um it's something that uh we're putting a lot of effort in from the team and uh you know it it's something that we're going to see down the road with a lot of uh the major distributions of of Kubernetes.

Yeah, a lot of people like the the U you know UBI because you know when they think of enterprise Linux operating system they think of stability um you know security. it's been proven and so a lot of people want to start off, you know, using that as their base for whatever the application is that they're going to be providing or distributing. Um, but you also want a a base that is not too big in size being distributed around. So, uh, with the UBI, that's the nice thing is that basically it's condensed down. It's a small image, just what's needed, but then it's also an image that can be run anywhere.

It it hopefully you're running it on Rocky, but you don't necessarily have to run it on Rocky, but you know that the libraries and everything that's in that base um image is coming from a source that everyone trusts and and relies on for stability. Um so, uh and you know, you can run different platforms. I think we've talked about um VMware has their platform uh what is it um Tanzoo Tanzoo yeah sorry thank you all right sorry VMware so uh Tanzoo uh you know so they will they support running UBIS on their platform so that would be someone that wants to use Rocky as their base uh image for distributing their app that's that's one of the benefits so that's being worked on actively uh as well as to have that available.

Um in fact, I believe we did some testing of a of one recently. Uh Neil, who was who uh works on um with us as well as in RSF, he was putting together an image and we were doing some testing with that. Very nice. One of the other things, Robert, I know that we talk about Alchemist quite often. Is is that run safe and alchemist? Is that something that can also be put into that universal base image that can make that even more secure? Yeah. And it's actually an extension beyond just, you know, having it into the build process of of Rocky. It's having it in uh a container, having it in uh a provisioning solution, having it in fuzzball itself.

Um originally they designed it to protect applications, right? So um that is a natural fit for uh what we're talking about and it's definitely something that we're we're going to have available for customers. And just going back, I mean I know I think it was Neil or maybe it was Forest on one of our previous webcast actually showed going through the process of using repo as a service and enabling Alchemist and it was very simple and very straightforward to do. I was I was shocked. It was cool. Uh, usually when you go through something like that, it seems like it's a whole rebuild and the new install of of the operating system and then it works.

But this is truly just run a command and it's there and it's working. So, it's exciting that that's going to be available also in in something like a container as well. So, I I want to open this up and I want to let people ask questions if there are any out there. It doesn't just have to be on what we talked about today. I know there are a lot of different things that that are going on in the community. I know there's a lot of different questions that I get quite often. We were just trying to have a topic today to kind of spark some interest.

So, if you guys have questions, please feel free to to jump in and start start asking those. If not, I'm going to make Michael start telling stories. Oh, no. Or Robert, any good stories lately, Robert, while we wait for a question? Uh, so I mean there's always good stories, right? But uh you know while we got Michael on it might actually be beneficial to uh um you know talk through uh some of the support uh initiatives that were bringing further down the road. Um having uh uh a way to understand the different packages that different applications need or want. Um helping customers potentially with moving from CentOS 7 and preparing to see what they need to go to Rocky 8.

um and you know potentially nine coming soon too. Um but there's a there's a lot of value from a support team perspective that our our leads like Michael want to bring to our customers. Um and you know Michael feel free to maybe express some of your thoughts on that and uh um tell us where where you thinking of taking some of that. Yeah sure. So, um, we get a lot of questions that I'm on CentOS 7, we're looking to move to Rocky 8. Um, does this application run on Rocky? So, they're not looking at doing like an in place migrate. They're just wanting to know, hey, can I install the same application over here on Rocky uh, and just expect it to work?

that way I can port over my my application and I know it's going to going to work over there. So, uh we get we get a lot of questions. Here's my app. Here's the version. Does it run on Rocky? Um so one of the things that we've been discussing internally is we would like to have a way we're we're you know we're still in the brainstorming processes here but um talking about is there a way where we could go basically like run an assessment tool in a sense pull out your packages and figure out you know through the tool okay is this package put aside the the version for now does this package is it available able at least by that name in their in their repository uh for Rocky.

Um if it is there then then we got to look at okay is it different versions we we might need to flag that as something to look at. Um but the idea being that any packages we don't find here, we would like to start noting that here at our support department so that when we get future questions about that um same package, we've already done the research uh for our customers. So from a support perspective, we want to make it easier to fill those questions um in order to be able to give a a good response. Yes, this will work, but you need to look out for this, look out for that.

Um, that way it helps with migration plans because there's a lot of lot of people out there, they're planning on upgrading to Rocky Linux, uh, or changing from Sentos 7 over to Rocky 8. Um, but there's always that unknown. Will it work? So we're trying to come up with uh ways from a support perspective to help ease that nervousness to ease the the planning when it comes to the migration if that was the direction you were you were thinking of Robert. Yeah, definitely. And then you know a similar mechanism, a similar tool um also helps with triage, also helps with uh understanding uh validations on different hardware, different capabilities.

Um the support team's looking at multiple different ways to do testing uh and validation on those hardwares as well. Um, so over time we're going to have uh a database full um if you will of a lot of that information. So it helps people make decisions. Um we're also going to develop a lot of performance tuning capabilities. Um we are a uh we're born out of an HPC uh company. Um you know we're growing beyond that obviously into full-on enterprise and hypers scale as well. But but at the end of the day, at the core of some of our key folks is performance. And so we're going to have a lot of uh capabilities around uh how to tune Rocky, how to get the most out of Rocky andor, you know, variations of Rocky that that come to market.

So outside of just customers asking for this, do we have vendors that are coming and asking for this preemptively? So their customers and maybe asking them to support Rocky. Is that something that we're seeing as well? Yeah. And you know, uh I mean we did have a a a pretty nice partnership announcement, you know, a couple weeks back now with our friends at uh Google Cloud. Um clearly uh they're getting asked, but I can tell you that every single cloud partner uh that we're working with um is seeing a very similar uptake. um we're talking to multiple different uh large organizations uh whether they're government or commercial um are saying the same thing.

So uh yeah I mean the the same conversation is being happening over and over and you know we're preparing uh solutions to uh enable customers faster and faster. That's great. So Michael I think you kind of hit on something that that seems to come up quite often. It is that migration from CentOS 7 and I know there are a lot of different ways to go about it but are you seeing a specific trend? Are there people that are doing more they're trying to go from CentOS 7 to 8 and then Rocky or is it truly wild west? Everybody's doing it different and whatever makes sense for them.

I think um I think a good maybe a good majority have already done the transition from CentOS 8 up to Rocky 8. M you know there's a migration script which has been put to its test. It's working very well for many people. Um but I think the questions we've been fielding lately have been from CentOS7 straight to Rocky. Um I don't recall anyone discussing going to eight first CentOS 8 first then to Rocky. The the discussion seem to be more around I'm on Sentos 7. We know we have a couple more years of support left. So we're we're starting to think now about transitioning over uh to Rocky 8.

That's so the the SOS tool gets used quite often to see what's on those machines and kind of how does that process work? So they run or execute the SOS report. They give it to us and then what happens? Yeah. So, there's this really neat tool called SOS report and it basically gives us gives someone a good snapshot of everything that's on on their hardware uh I mean on their system hardware software the RPM packages that are installed um you know storage anything that you would need to try to figure out uh are there any gotchas so um that's one thing excuse me that we've

been in you know when we are engaged engaged to help with migration, we ask to run that tool first because with that we're able to get a good idea of what we're working with, what's on the system, what do we need to look out for. Um, so that that's that's an excellent tool to start with gathering data and figuring out what is needed to be considered in a migration plan. And I'm assuming that's also going to feed back into kind of what Robert's talking about of that central point of here are the gotchas that we've run across before. So as it comes in, you run the report and immediately we know that this is going to potentially cause a problem or we know this is going to work.

Definitely. I was looking at it just uh yesterday there was a discussion uh around having tools to to help us with with assessing systems. Um when someone says I have a problem, we usually say okay give us that report just so that we can kind of have a good feel without having access directly to their system. That gives us a good um way to to understand what what is there, what is present. Um but definitely so when I was looking at the SOS report tool, I was looking at the code a little bit. Um it I haven't dug into it enough, but um it looks like it's pretty it's made to be extensible.

There's ways to do plugins. So that's an area that would be good to explore. See what we can leverage uh in this regard, you know, as far as helping with migration. Maybe there's there's something we could add to it that would definitely um uh give us the ability to direct someone that wants to migrate uh in a better way. Then right now it's a lot of manual work, but maybe we could leverage that tool to help us since we're going to have information about their system. We can immediately, you know, through some scripting pick up on, hey, we see this here. we got to take care of this uh before they can migrate.

Very interesting. Thank you. That's fantastic. I don't know, Robert, if you have anything you want to add to that. That that seems like a great thing or a great opportunity to go start adding functionality and kind of helping solve that problem. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, just uh keep in the back of your mind are our our support team is made up of folks like Michael, right? So, we're not just going to say we only support the OS. we only support, you know, an issue or a ticket. Um, it is, we're also here for advice and architecture and, uh, helping people be successful.

At the end of the day, our goal is to help all of the folks that are using Rocky be successful. We're trying to do that in the community, like you heard, Michael's in the community helping there, just like tons of volunteers. um as well as our customers individually. Uh we are here to help you be successful whether uh whether it's about a migration conversation or an architectural conversation that's coming up. So know that that's that's what our team is trying to do. That's great. Thanks, Robert. So I think we are actually almost out of time and I'm trying to see if we have any questions that have come in.

It doesn't look like we have yet. So, if you guys have questions, please shoot them our way real quick before we end this for the week. If not, we'll be back next week. Hopefully, we'll have something else that you can find. Oh, there we go. So, uh, does the migration tool work for going from CentOS 7 to Rocky 8 or or do you advise I go to CentOS8 first? And that that was kind of what I was asking. I've seen that there is a tool, Michael, that will take you from CentOS 7 to CentOS 8, and I can't remember the name of it. Uh, and then you could run the Rocky script, but involved in that, I think there's at least two reboots from 7 to 8 and then from CentOS to Rocky.

So I don't know if that's something that would make people nervous or not but how yeah there there are some tools we we are recommending as well as even the community the Rocky community uh the consensus seems to be the preference if it's possible is to basically just start from scratch uh as far as your upgrade um not try to jump major versions from synthos Even going from CentOS 7 to CentOS 8, there could be a lot of gotchas there. So that's the recommendation is not even to go from a major version like CentOS 7 straight to Centas 8 and then go oh now I'm going to migrate to Rocky.

Um so not necessarily going to recommend that. There is a tool out there that some have had very good success on. Um there is an open- source tool called Elevate that some have used. I think that's what you're thinking. That's the one I was. Yes. Elevate. Yeah. Yep. So that is there. That is an option. Um but we are still recommending uh to avoid any potential gotchas. uh you know just if you're on CentOS 7 it's better just to go straight to um you know do a fresh install of Rocky 8 and then you know migrate your your apps over um you know so have a good backup and then you know migrate over.

So that's still sort of our recommended path um uh as far as that goes. Uh, I don't see a need to first go to CentOS 8 and then do the migrate to Rocky. If you're going to go through all that trouble of jumping from CentOS 7 to CentOS 8, you might as well just go straight to Rocky. Yeah. One of the issues I've had in previous life of moving major version to major version is you don't notice whenever you first finish it seems like everything was fine. You go through that first patching cycle and things start to explode and you don't know why. and you have to go back and start digging apart what went wrong where and it's usually stuff that got left over or stuff that didn't get brought over as a part of that migration.

So I I have always tried to just install new just to save myself some pain later, but again we've had some customers go through this and do just fine. So whatever your risk tolerance is. Yep. Thank you for the question, Sean. Appreciate it. Anyone else? If not, we will see you again next week. Michael, thank you very much for all that you do and for your time today. Robert, as always, good to see you. Thank you. Thanks, guys. Great.