Introducing Mountain!

Join us live for an exciting announcement from CIQ!

Webinar Synopsis:

• Introducing Mountain

• Michael Ford's Experience at CIQ

• Justin Burdine's Linux Background

• The History of Mountain at CIQ

• What Have Customers Said About Mountain?

• What Can You Do With Mountain?

• On-Premises SaaS Offerings With Mountain

• Mirrors and Replications On-Premises

• What Makes CIQ Good At Building Mountain?

• Why Is Mountain Valuable In The Linux World?

• Live Mountain Demo

• How to Access A Mountain Test Demo

• Non-LTS Versus LTS Support for Linux

• Rocky Linux Mountain Update Demo

• What Else Can Mountain Do?

• Sophisticated Patching With Mountain

• Can Customers Deliver Their Own Software Through Mountain?

• Using Mountain For Automated Updates and Patching

• Live Mountain Demo Update Results

• Can You Revert Linux Updates to Previous Versions?

• How Mountain Helps Avoid Accidental Version Updates

• What Rocky Linux Version Comes With Mountain?

• Will Mountain Support Future CIQ Software?

• Does Mountain Support Custom Kernel Workloads?

• Do Mountain Systems Still Need to Reboot After Patches?

• How To Get Involved With Mountain?

Speakers:

• Zane Hamilton, Sr. Vice President of Sales, CIQ

  • Linkedin

• Rose Stein, Solutions Engineer, CIQ

  • Linkedin

• Michael Ford, Leader of Sales Engineering, CIQ

  • Linkedin

• Justin Burdine, Director of Solutions Engineering, CIQ

  • Linkedin

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Note: This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors.

Full Webinar Transcript:

Zane Hamilton:

Hello, Rose. That was cool, wasn't it? You're on mute though.

Rose Stein:

There we go. Oh my goodness. That was amazing.

Introducing Mountain [5:36]

Zane Hamilton:

That was amazing. Great job team. You. So today's a very exciting day for CIQ. Great. Exciting. We are announcing something very new. Releasing it out to the public. We've had some people working on this for a very long time. So if your team has been working on this, thank you very much. This has been a long time coming and we're about to dive into what it is. I know we've been listening to a lot of customer feedback that has led to this moment and to this product. Rose, what are we releasing today?

Rose Stein:

Well, I mean, if you just watched that amazing video, thank you to everyone who worked on that. And a cool new logo as well. It is a product called Mountain and we actually had it internally, just so that you guys know, we had a tagline to Mountain contest, right? Where it was like, okay, everyone, put in your thoughts and your ideas, and it was like it was going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Slack was just on fire for days, and we finally settled on a Mountain of solutions, which is exactly it. That's exactly, there couldn't have been a better tagline for our new product, Mountain, a Mountain of solutions. So we're going to be showing you guys a little demo of that today, just to tease that a little bit. It's very exciting.

Zane Hamilton:

Absolutely. And we'll get into what it is today, what we're thinking, where it's headed. So there will be some foreshadowing in this. Just excited to share this with everybody we want to bring in. Michael and Justin.

Justin Burdine:

Hello. Hello.

Zane Hamilton:

Welcome guys. Welcome. Appreciate you joining. I'm going to make you guys introduce yourself. Michael, this is your first time, so I'm going to make you introduce yourself first.

Michael Ford's Experience at CIQ [7:17]

Michael Ford:

Absolutely. Good afternoon, I'm going to have to check the time. Good afternoon. My name is Michael Ford. I have now been with CIQ for I think a little bit over three months. Super excited to be here. I am the titled Director of Solutions Engineering and excited to work with all these fine folks in this call. And yeah, that's it for me, based in Chicago. And that's it.

Zane Hamilton:

Yeah. Thank you Michael. Justin? Yeah.

Justin Burdine:

And I'm Justin Burdine.

Zane Hamilton:

Go for it again.

Justin Burdine's Linux Background [7:45]

Justin Burdine:

Yeah, no, that's all right. And then I had your slot next, last week, but for those who are just joining, my name is Justin Burdine, and I work with these guys here in our solution engineering team based down here in College Station, Texas, home of the fighting Texas Aggies, and I love working at CIQ. Super excited to be here today to talk about our new launch here. So excited.

The History of Mountain at CIQ [8:06]

Zane Hamilton:

Let's get into it real quick. And I want to just start the story and how we got to where we are from a Mountain perspective, and then I'll let you guys fill in some blanks or add some context. When I started here, we were Fuzzball focused, and everything was very exciting around Fuzzball. We had Rocky, it was going, one of the things that we heard quite often was about patching, like, how do I deal with patching my Rocky Linux environment? So we started taking feedback from customers. What does that look like? What does it mean to us? How can we make it better than what everybody else is doing? So we know that there are other tools out there that other providers build on and provide and you have to manage and maintain. So we at CIQ started looking at how we can make this a better experience, an easier experience, something that people want to use, not dread using?

And we started going through what that would look like? What would we want to see in it? People like Greg Kurtzer obviously have a lot of background in doing this, and it became, if we were the end user and we could start fresh and build something we wanted to use because we are, and we can. That's what we went and started to tackle that problem. So we started off with Repo as a service, and it was well received, but it needed to be something more and something bigger. And that's really where Mountain was developed. It became great, you've got something that's a SaaS offering, but I needed to do other things. And Mountain's framework began to grow, and we started having more and more tasks. I want to be able to add to this later.

And as we heard customer feedback and as we listened to what these things were outside of patching, we started coming together with this, this platform, Mountain platform that we can bolt these other things into as we go. But a lot of this is, like I said, driven from a customer driven perspective. What do customers want to see? What do they expect and how can we make things easier for them? And that's how we landed on Mountain. So Justin, Mike, you guys have been around for a while and in the world in Linux, and I know you've heard this from customers as well, Rose, I know you have as well, so if you want to just gimme a little anecdotes, what have you heard, what have you been seeing from customers about this platform?

What Have Customers Said About Mountain? [10:01]

Michael Ford:

Mike, first I'll follow on.

Justin Burdine:

Yeah, absolutely. Are you going to make Mike go first? I'm good either way.

Zane Hamilton:

No, I make Michael go first. Absolutely.

Justin Burdine:

There we go.

Michael Ford:

All right. Well, I mean, honestly, as I've been talking to customers, I want to learn more about what they need from a Linux distribution and what we can offer from Rocky perspective and Zane's point a lot of questions around how are we providing a single platform where we can do things as far as give container images, give RPMs, all that stuff. And just, I look at what we're offering with Mountain as a landing platform for several services, some of which are launching today, and some of which we'll launch with later on. And it's really going to be something that we can use to build out the ecosystem of infrastructure on Linux for our entire customer base. At least that's how I look at Mountain based on the customer conversations that I've been having.

Justin Burdine:

Justin? Yeah, no, to add on to that, that's what got me excited about coming over to this from my former employer. We expect in the Linux ecosystem to have things out there that are not just the operating system. They help the operating system. They help the users use that operating system in much more efficient ways and more ways that allow them to get creative with it. And I think that's what's exciting to me is that we are starting here with a platform that has some certain capabilities, and we're going to be able to grow on top of that and build what our customers want. And that keeps in line with our customer centric focus and our desire to really iterate fast and build things that are useful and not just out there to just be something to sell or something for people to consume. So they're excited about that and, and know where this will eventually go. So I got a lot of cool plans around that.

Zane Hamilton:

Thank you, Justin. Rose, I know you've had several conversations recently around Mountain.

Rose Stein:

Yeah, I have. And it's fun because today is our big reveal where we actually live right now, right? Going out into the world saying that we have this product and it is available, and this is what it is right now, and this is our vision and a bit of where we're going. Super exciting. But obviously to get to this point, we do have customers that are already using Mountain. And so the feedback that we've gotten there is, thank you, right? Like, thank you for the ease of it. Thank you for the ability to not only have Rocky as a trusted successor of CentOS and an option for them, but hey, I actually need to stay on a certain version. So how can I do that with ease? How can I get back boarded security bug fixes and updates and things like that on one specific version?

Zane Hamilton:

And so, oh, David, the Mountain Dwarves worked hard on this one.

Rose Stein:

That's true. Thank you, David. And all of our dwarfs, that are under the Mountain, making sure that we are standing strong. And so it's very exciting. Again, we have a vision for it, just like you guys were speaking. And what it is right now is just so necessary to keep the stability of people's environments. So yeah. Thanks guys.

Zane Hamilton:

Again, thank you for the engineering team. We know this was a Mountain of an effort, and we really appreciate you putting in the time, putting in the effort and building out this amazing tool. And from a dwarf perspective, I think we have like five or six people over six, eight. So we have a very large company,

Rose Stein:

Does that make me grumpy?

Zane Hamilton:

Does that make me grumpy? No. Neil, you're not grumpy. Yes.

Rose Stein:

What? I said yes.

Zane Hamilton:

So I think Neil's not grumpy. Come on. Just opinionated.

What Can You Do With Mountain? [13:56]

One of the things that we really wanted to focus on with this tool that it seems like it was missing quite often, especially when you look at just open source Linux and being able to get packages from anywhere was the security side of it. And making sure that everything that we delivered to a customer from beginning to end is actually a part of a supply chain. So we can actually prove when things came from where. And it's really important to a lot of people to have that SBOM or the software supply chain or software bill of materials, knowing where it came from, what it's running on. And that's something that Mountain's really enabling and delivering it through a tool that is actually secured from a single signup perspective. And then being able to make sure and go back and audit things. I know Michael and I in previous slides have worked a lot on being able to show things that are the way they are supposed to be.

Justin was a part of that as well. So it's important to the ecosystem to provide a very secure platform. And that's really what Mountain was built on, was to make sure that first and foremost everything is secure. We can provide cryptographic signatures of every package coming through it that our end customers are seeing, and that's what they're being able to show everyone else. So whenever people look at this on its face value, it's not just a repo it's so much more and the things that you can add onto it are just beyond that. So, the first thing I want to talk about is where can this thing be delivered, deployed, and run? And I'll open that up. Justin, you're off mute, so you can answer that one first.

On-Premises SaaS Offerings With Mountain [15:21]

Justin Burdine:

Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, it's going to be a SaaS offering. And so we'll be able to immediately get you access to a product that's in the cloud that's secured that has everything you need, wherever you need it. And then the other thing that we're future proofing is that talking about being able to deliver this on-prem, because there are customers out there who have air gapped in infrastructures who have highly secure infrastructures and they needed a solution that wasn't necessarily available out on the internet. So we're going to have that ability fairly soon to be able to deliver that locally to you in multiple ways and multiple areas. So that's to me is very exciting having come from a background in different industries that required that, that was always part of the conversation of saying, Hey, look, this is a great, great solution, but how can I get this into a place that doesn't see the light of day? And I think that that's super important and I'm glad we're able to deliver on that.

Zane Hamilton:

Michael.

Michael Ford:

Yeah, I was going to say one other thing just to double click on what Justin's talking about. In addition to having an air gap solution that our customers can take advantage of, one of the keywords that I think of when I'm talking with prospects and customers is curating. So instead of having a myriad of artifacts that organizations might have access to, that could introduce some security risk, even amongst things that have been certified and tested, maybe for an organization. Hey, I only want these artifacts and nothing else because we don't take advantage of anything else. Why do we even want to make this stuff available to our organization for development or production? I think that's another value of what on-Premise Mountain will offer as well. So just not take it away from what you're saying Justin, but just my 2 cents there too.

Justin Burdine:

No, that's a great point. I mean, I actually had not even really thought about the idea of basically isolating down to the bits and bytes that you have blessed down to like small individual packages saying you can have these nothing more. That's great. Great point.

Rose Stein:

Okay, so it can be small. What about big? Can this be global?

Justin Burdine:

I don't think there's anything stopping Rose. I mean that's what's exciting.

Rose Stein:

That is exciting.

Justin Burdine:

Yeah, absolutely. We've got global customers, we've got people who need this all around the world and yeah, absolutely.

Mirrors and Replications On-Premises [17:49]

Zane Hamilton:

I think one of the interesting things that we're building into this is the ability to do mirrors and replications. So, you have the SaaS offering, you can pull down from that into what will at some point in time become an appliance that we can deliver to you on-prem. And those on-prem environments can have multiple mirrors. So if you need instances in other places, so in other cloud environments or in other data centers, or if you have that air gap environment and you need to physically take a thing, make sure it's updated, validated from a security standpoint, that it is what it needs to be and it is certified to go back into your air gap environment, you can physically take that thing and plug it in somewhere else. So being able to replicate and mirror across not only multiple geos, but maybe within the same data center just in different environments and air gap environments. So this thing is massively scalable globally, to your question Rose. And it gives you the ability to put the repositories and the content that you need, where you need it, when you need it. I think it's something very important that we've been able to do. I think we had a question.

Rose Stein:

That comes up. Yeah yeah. It comes up quite often. I mean, at least once or twice a week, I know that I get that question of like, well, what about this area? What about that area? And I can't be all on the internet. So that's really been important, the flexibility of this resource. So thank you for that. There we go. Mountain.

What Makes CIQ Good At Building Mountain? [19:15]

Zane Hamilton:

Mountain sneaker-net. Yes, Dave, it actually is. It makes sneaker-net easy. Let's be very clear. It's not as sneaker-nety, it's more of a fast sneaker-net. The other thing that we're really excited about being able to do with Mountain is provide subscriptions to other things. So we have customers who need very specific things in their Rocky environment. LTS is something we'll talk about here shortly. The long-term support. FIPS is coming soon. We've already submitted to the lab. So FIPS 140-3 for Rocky 8.6 will be out shortly and then be 9.2 soon thereafter. There are other pieces of content that we're going to be able to put in there from an end user perspective, if you have a very specific build of Rocky Linux that you need, that you want us to go work with and build, we can help you with that.

That's really what CIQ is really good at, is building custom things for people and then supporting it. Not just building it and telling you good luck, but being able to deliver that into Mountain. So you can take what we've built, you make sure it's still going through that same software supply chain, it's still secured, it's still getting delivered to you in a way that you can verify what it is and it will come through Mountain. So from a subscription perspective, being able to see all of the things that you've subscribed to that you want a user allowed to see, that's what Mountain's going to be for. When Justin shows you here in a minute, when he shows you Mountain, you'll be able to see that LTS in there. From an HPC perspective, it's going to be really interesting because we'll be able to have very specific things built out for very specific HPC environments for solutions that you can actually subscribe to.

It'll show up in Mountain and you can then deploy it out. A lot of different ways to go about that from a CIQ perspective, it will make it very easy if you are running something like Warewulf to go grab those images and then deploy them out as a compute node on your cluster. So trying to make this as turnkey and very simple for an end user to not have to go build and maintain those larger things or the more complex things. We want to help make this very fast and very seamless for you. So that's other things that you'll start seeing show up in Mountain as a part of, not just other pieces you can bolt on the side, the content that we can deliver to you and support from a CIQ perspective, if anybody wants the dog pile on that one.

Why Is Mountain Valuable In The Linux World? [21:23]

Justin Burdine:

Yeah, no, I'm glad you brought that up. Cause I think one of the things that people don't appreciate is that as part of being a company that releases an operating system, we have brilliant people, a few have chimed in who can essentially be helping our customers dial in their images of Rocky to essentially be streamlined in their environments. And that can be pointed to in, in our cloud partners that we work with and other, other customers. And that is something that we can then deliver through this so that you are getting that exact version of that operating system through Mountain. So I'm glad you mentioned that today.

Zane Hamilton:

Thank you.

Michael Ford:

And I mean, this is just from a personal experience there too. So we've talked a little bit like, about the dwarves that have been helping us and chiming in. So this is not, I'll tell you this, this is one of the things that I look at as a value of Mountain is not just the product itself. That part is great, but quite literally what is the value that I and we can bring to our customers is literally the people that you don't see. They're in the background, sometimes they're in the background, but sometimes they're actually with our customers, questioning them, making sure that they're offering the right value. That I cannot speak highly enough about those folks just from a support perspective, from the way they interact with customers and all that. So Mountain is not just a product, but it's the people behind it too. So I just want to make sure that doesn't go unsaid.

Zane Hamilton:

Oh, absolutely. That's great. Thank you, Michael. Justin, I know you're, you're about to show this, but I also wanted to bring up go ahead. I'll let you show it. I'll talk as we go ahead and tell us what you're going to do. Show us what you're going to show. And running, I know it takes a little bit of time.

Justin Burdine:

Well, first let me caveat. This is, this is the fun part. This is why people tune in. Cause I'm going to do a live demo. And the fun part is, I haven't actually tested the conclusion, but I've done this many times before, but I just got notification we wanted to do this a few minutes ago. So this will be fun. No, but this is good. This is why I love doing this. 

Zane Hamilton:

Mountain works.

Justin Burdine:

Mountain, yeah. Sorry,

Zane Hamilton:

Making it work live, in the infrastructure that we have made Justin do this in that is.

Live Mountain Demo [23:40]

Justin Burdine:

Absolutely, absolutely no Mountain. I have no problems with whether VMs are set up correctly. So let's dive in. Let's actually see this thing. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually just give you a quick run through, through LTS. I've got a really good demo that I did that certainly shortens this without all the extra banter. You get to see my YouTube face on, and I'm doing my best impression of an influencer. So I'm going to run through what that looks like, first of all, I'll give you a rundown of what Mountain looks like at its current state. Really the, the repository as a service is what you're really going to see. But I'm going to highlight the LTS, which is our long-term support service that we have in here that, again, allows you to take a system and keep it on a specific version of Rocky.

So a lot of people ask me, well, why would you ever need that? But a lot of our customers, believe it or not, need to have a platform that either they're going to certify their product on top of, or we are going to or they need to let's say they have a piece of software from a vendor that needs to run a specific version. The cool part about that is we have the ability now to offer that up to our customers so that your version of Rocky will stay that version for more than the typical six month development window that we have. So what's nice about this is it now allows you to have let's say, I'm going to use 8.6 right now as our example but it allows you to keep that 8.6 system for all the way out to, up to two years. So what's great about that is it gives you that longevity. You're not having to upgrade. Typically, if you're going to upgrade your system, the minute we move to, let's say 8.7, when you go do an update of an 8.6 box, it's going to move up to that next version of Rocky, which would be 8.7. And again that's great, but it's going to break that certification that you're going to have with those point visions. So, did I miss anything in there, guys?

Zane Hamilton:

Nope. But Godlove's calling you out, waiting for your live demo.

Justin Burdine:

Oh, no.

Zane Hamilton:

Oh, you just got Godloved.

Justin Burdine:

No. Cool. That's not cool. Is not cool. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and share this. Hopefully you guys can see this.

How to Access A Mountain Test Demo [25:55]

Zane Hamilton:

While we're starting that, I'm going to go ahead and say that if you want a condensed version of this, if you want to go back and share it with your colleagues or with other people, you want to see this. If you hit the CIQ website and go to the Mountain page this is actually linked on there, and I think we're actually going to add a link at the bottom of the YouTube video as well. Sorry, go ahead Justin.

Justin Burdine:

Cool. All right. Well, so this is the first thing we're going to drop into, which is our subscriptions of the different types of things that we can offer up through Mountain. So the one specifically I'm going to highlight here is our LTS subscription here. So we can see this is CIQ LTS for Rocky Linux, and I can click inside there and immediately I'm given a bunch of instructions on how to set up my system. So what's great is I can use a very quick version, which is what I'm going to do today just for time. There's also a more advanced version if you want to really dive in and set up your box. We also have versions of this to set it up for Apptainer containers as well as Docker. I would love to at some point bring Mr. Godlove in, and I would love for him to walk through this demo so the Gauntlet has been thrown down.

Zane Hamilton:

That would be great. Yes. Right, for a future Webinar.

Justin Burdine:

Absolutely. But, that's what we have offered up here. And again, it's as simple as six steps drop through here and you'll get your system up and running connected to this repository so that the minute we do a DNF update on that system, it's only going to get the packages that have been backed from future versions into that 8.6 repository. Again, that's capitalizing on the hard work that our developers and maintainers do for Rocky. And so hats off to them for that great work. The other thing to call out here is that we have our access keys, right? So in order to have a subscription to these repositories, we need to have a secure way of making sure that those boxes are connecting up securely.

So it's basically, essentially getting a set of keys, a custom set of keys for your system and your systems to this specific repository. And so that's what's in there, and so I'll walk you through what that looks like. So what I'm going to do first is, let's see, how do I want to do this? Let's actually, let me, let me just show you this pop over here and I'm going to pop into my VMs that I have up and running just so we can actually see what those look like. This is going to frame what I'm going to bounce back and forth between, so you can see it. So Alex, whenever you get a chance, let me know. We've got that up.

Non-LTS Versus LTS Support for Linux [28:29]

Hopefully we should be seeing each other here. There it is. Okay, cool. So what I'm going to do here, this is basically two terminal windows. I've got one for a non-LTF system. So what I'm going to do on this one, let's actually just first do a CAT of /etc/os-release, and we're going to see that this is 8.6, right? That's exactly what we'll see here. And we'll do the same thing here. Cat /etc/os-release. Same thing here. So if I just do a DNF update, and this is without connecting to the LTS repository, this is just hitting the typical repositories. We're going to see a whole bunch of packages in here, right? And so all these are all packages that will, if we look at them, we're going to see, see this 8.7.

That means that this box is going to be going to 8.7. That's because it's hitting the main repo. And as I said before, you're typically the, the default nature of these systems are going to basically walk you up through those point revisions. So I am now going to yes, we'll say yes. We'll update that. And now I'm going to go back over here and I'm going to start cutting and pasting some of these things. So let me, let me actually just show you. We'll go Alex, while that's running, I'm going to go back over to my other system and we'll see this page. And from here I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to skip, because I like doing this first because what this does, if you generate the access key first, it's actually going to populate the instructions, which makes it a lot easier.

And I'm a lazy system man. And that's just what you do. So what you do here, you can say, I've already done this a billion times, but I'm going to go ahead and create Justin's LTS 8.6 key. I'm going to hit create. And now what it's doing is giving me a custom key here. Then I will be able to use, so typically if we weren't doing a demo here, I would grab this, cut and paste it, and I can cut and paste quickly by just clicking this little button over here to the right. I'd throw that into my key pass or whatever I'm using to keep my keys because you want to keep that for safekeeping so that if you ever have to do this instruction again, you're not necessarily needing to create a key every time you do it. Because once you delete that key, if you, if you update that key your access to that specific system that used that key will go away. So we've got the key here and now you can see that it auto-populates that into my command. So I'm just going to go ahead and cut paste here and we'll back over to, sorry, this is going to be a lot of back and forth, but I actually may just stay on these guys right here. That way you'll see this easier.

Zane Hamilton:

Everybody's coming out, I know where it's coming from.

Justin Burdine:

All right, cool. So I'm going to go ahead and update that and yep, Dave.

Zane Hamilton:

Your failure is still one of my favorite YouTube moments. That was fantastic.

Rocky Linux Mountain Update Demo [31:18]

Justin Burdine:

So then we're going to cut and paste the next command which is to install the CIQ command line, which actually just allows you to run the CIQ subscription command directly from the command line here, which we'll do here in a second. So that's installing that. We've already generated our key, which is that third step. So now I'm going to actually enroll in the system using that CIQ command that I just used. So we'll do that, we're using the access key. And so now we are enrolled. So now what I can do is enable this repository. That's the last step.

And now what's cool about this is we can do a DNF update and we're going to refresh from the repository here in a second. And so now you'll notice, see last time we did this on this other system, it was 230 packages. Now we're down to 57 packages, which means, and we actually see it here. We're seeing that these are just the 8.6 packages that have been back boarded or packages that just weren't updated on the system from 8.6 between when I set these systems up and whenever updates came out. But what we get to see here is that indeed we are pulling from a completely different repository. We can actually see that repository listed over here on the right. These are the specific files that it's actually grabbing from that repository. So we now know that I can update this system as well. And we don't have to sit and wait the entire time. But what this is going to do, and we can cut back to this once it's all done, unless it's going to be done that fast is that this will actually show us that we are still showing up on 8.6. So let's go back to our panel, see if anybody has any questions and I'll bring this back up once we get it completed. Stunned silence.

Zane Hamilton:

I know questions for that specifically? I was just waiting.

Justin Burdine:

Right?

What Else Can Mountain Do? [33:26]

Zane Hamilton:

I was going to start talking about whether we're showing this right now as a Linux tool or as a Rocky tool and being very focused on what we're doing with Rocky Linux and patching specifically. One of the things we haven't really talked about is what else is Mountain going to be able to do? We talk about a Mountain of solutions and so far we've talked about one thing that's doing really well. Part of it, what we haven't talked about from an overall infrastructure piece, there's going to be a lot more, we're going to start building into things like an automation platform behind this to be able to not just do your Rocky Linux Real Estate or any other version of Linux, but actually be able to reach further back into the data center and do networking, storage, anything else that you can connect to, you'll be able to work with and automate and pull artifacts out of this to do your work. That's just one part and I think that one's incredibly exciting to me. I've looked for that for a very long time. So I'll stop and see if there are any thoughts on that one before you go any further. I think we could actually have a patching conversation around automation, but I'll wait and then we'll go into the rest of it.

Sophisticated Patching With Mountain [34:29]

Michael Ford:

Yeah, definitely from that perspective, I think more sophisticated patching is something that, one, one of the things that I've gotten from some of my customers is one of the things we want to offer. But again, to double click what was talking about, if we want to get into more holistic infrastructure management, whether it's your Enterprise Linux workloads, whether it's, you talked about networking Zane, but I'm thinking about everything, whether it's your cloud environments security platforms, all that stuff. We want to be able to automate and manage those platforms, then that's what Mountain's going to be able to do in the future. And that goes back to, I think my comment at the beginning was just looking at Mountain as not just managing your analytics workloads, but being a platform for other services that are going to come, one of which is going to be this automation. So I'm really looking forward to that too.

Rose Stein:

Yeah that's definitely something that's come up with customers or like, okay, well, so there's a security patch that needs to happen. Like how am I going to know about it? How am I going to know when to go in there? Like, do I need to do this manually like every week or every month or whatever, like, is there a way to automate this? So you said that's coming. Do we have a, put you on the spot here, do we have a timeline? Cause obviously like we're saying, Hey, this is available, when is that part available? Do you know?

Zane Hamilton:

Very soon, like within the next few days to a couple of weeks, that will be something that we can start showing people and working through and deploying and actually have customers using it. So I'm very excited about that.

Rose Stein:

And do you imagine it being an option where you can have it do automatic updates on your say, 8.6 boxes or not?

Zane Hamilton:

So I think with Michael's sophisticated patching there, we will give an example of that. Cause I know that three of us have worked on that very specifically. And it's very interesting alluding to the other part of the question that you asked. This thing will be able to be deployed into your cloud environment. Whenever we get Mountain on-prem, we are able to deploy this thing on-prem as well and then replicate between the environment. So again, going to be able to be global in scale, very excited about what we can automate and how that's going to look. But whenever Michael said sophisticated patching earlier, this is a use case that we've been seeing for a long time of people not necessarily doing, but wanting to do. It's always just been a hard thing to do when you start looking at how you patch an entire environment, or if you look at an application specifically, I have to take pieces of that infrastructure down and I need to make sure I've bled off connections.

I want to make sure nothing else is going there. Whatever replication is turned off, monitoring turned off, that becomes a task that someone has to go do. And being able to automate that away so that this tool via workflow can do all the steps necessary to do the patching. Patch, bring it back up, validate that it's done, and then put everything back on that needs to be on before it puts it back into the infrastructure. And then move to the next one is what Michael is alluding to when he says sophisticated patching. So being able to go into a lead load balance or bleed off connections, take it out of the pool, disconnect the database so that we don't corrupt data, do whatever patching we need to, and reverse it all back out. And if it fails during that workflow, actually have a rollback type function. So, oh, this thing failed, I've got to put it back the way it was before I started and it'll do that without having to be touched. So taking this to an extreme level of a really, really capable patching solution is very exciting and I can't wait to actually have people doing that.

Justin Burdine:

yeah, I was going to add on, I mean, the cool part is we can, we can already start talking about this, so if you are an interested party who would like to have conversations, I'm ready to have those conversations now. I know we all are, we're very eager. I think it's going to really help quite a few people. Especially from the, like I said, complex patching, really exotic patching. There some scenarios we've talked about where these isolated systems that maybe come in and out of being able to connect to internet or wifi I'm thinking on like cruise ships or things to that scale where they've got these mobile data centers that need to connect up regularly to get patched, but they just don't have internet. So lots of interesting things we can do with this and I'm really, really excited to start having this conversation. So reach out. I'm ready.

Can Customers Deliver Their Own Software Through Mountain? [38:59]

Zane Hamilton:

So we do have a question from Dave and it kind of leads into the next thing we're going to talk about a little bit. So what about general software deliveries? This is something else. Thank you for bringing up Dave. You're alluding to the next part of this conversation. So outside of being able to automate, once we started having conversations with customers about what else can you do with Mountain, it quickly became the ask of, I want to be able to put other things into Mountain and make sure that they're behind that secure wall, being able to deliver them to other parts of infrastructure that may not be a part of your Linux estate. One of the things that we look at is containerization or being able to use Fuzzball and deliver those assets from a secure place, that centralized place that we can replicate with mirrors.

And that's something else that we are building into Mountain that yes, Dave, we will be able to do this very shortly to deliver content and assets that are not just specific to Rocky Linux, but actual customer assets that they want to put in here and deliver out however they would like to. So I think container registry type thing for custom containers that you've built yourself, not just the ones that we have that like Justin showed in Mountain today that are LTS, but a customer specific that you want to deliver to your end users and be able to do that in a secure way behind the single sign on. So, great question Dave. Yeah, thank you for that.

Justin Burdine:

For anybody. And Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead Michael.

Using Mountain For Automated Updates and Patching [40:20]

Michael Ford:

Yeah no. Oh, and to very briefly backtrack on my comment about sophisticated patching. I would also say that if we're doing something from an automation perspective, that could either be something that the organization themselves custom builds Zane, as you alluded to, or perhaps even if you wanted to install something, whether it comes from GitHub or somewhere else public that or some other place that that is trusted by the organization, that's another part where we could deliver custom software for lack of better phrasing to our workloads as well. So I just, just to briefly touch back into automation, but not the takeaway from the direction you're going.

Zane Hamilton:

No, thank you for that. Yeah, because there are going to be other places that people want to pull content from, so it does not have to be in Mountain, it's just that we're giving the option, the ability to put it in Mountain if you would like. So thank you for that clarification. Or your systems at Justin. They finished.

Justin Burdine:

I'm glad you asked.

Zane Hamilton:

Look at that.

Michael Ford:

He's got ESPN.

Justin Burdine:

He does, he does have ESPN. All right. So it looks like our systems are complete from being updated. So I'm just going to pop these in here and hit return and you'll see that our non-LTS system here got upgraded to 8.7 and our LTS system here is still 8.6. So we indeed did indeed have a live demo that actually worked.

Michael Ford:

Woohoo.

Justin Burdine:

I know.

Zane Hamilton:

Nice job.

Live Mountain Demo Update Results [42:03]

Justin Burdine:

Shocker. Shocker. So yeah, that's as simple as it is. I mean, as I said, it's not rocket science, but man is this an important thing for some folks out there. And I've had numerous conversations with customers who like this is just something they've been waiting on much like the FIP stuff that's coming out and like all of that it's super important to folks as they're looking to transition to a new operating system, they need to have alternatives. And this gives them those alternatives.

Zane Hamilton:

Yeah, one of the things that I've been surprised about is being able to replicate repos. I guess I take for granted where repos are and how that lives today. There are a lot of environments where being able to replicate a repo inside and do mirroring of your own content is needed. And it seems like a simple task to do, but being able to do it in a way that is also secure, there's not a lot out there that can do that in an easy way that's easy to manage and maintain and own. I think it's something a lot of people have been very excited about recently. Whenever you say we can do this as a private mirror between Mountains, it gets a lot of attention. It's very exciting.

Can You Revert Linux Updates to Previous Versions? [43:13]

Rose Stein:

Yeah. Maybe this is a silly question, but has anyone ever updated their system accidentally?

Zane Hamilton:

Yes.

Justin Burdine:

Are you asking personally? Cause I don't know if I want to answer.

Zane Hamilton:

May or may not ever have been a part of an accident. Yeah.

Michael Ford:

I definitely have myself, but it's from the safety of my home, so.

Rose Stein:

Right. So

Michael Ford:

I didn't break anything.

Rose Stein:

Right. So if you did, right, if somebody did accidentally upgrade from say 8.6 to 8.7 and they broke some things that needed 8.6, can you go back, can you like, can you grab LTS and go backwards and reboot it all with LTS 8.6?

Zane Hamilton:

No. So this becomes a very different conversation and I'm glad you asked this Rose. I have done this before with a very large other company's database platform that is very dependent on versions and a lot of very specific settings. And if you upgrade, there's a lot of times you can actually get out of a support window and we've had that happen where it actually does break and then that at that point in time, a lot is just a rebuild. You have to rebuild the system back to the version that you needed before because there's no really easy way to roll back. There are ways that CIQ is actually working on with the RESF of how we can make a version of Linux that is capable of doing such things. And that's really where things like OS-3 come into play. So you actually could do a patch and have that version and if it fails for some reason, you can just OS-3 back over to the other version. So the answer is yes, it's becoming more popular and it's something that we can certainly work with customers to be able to do in practice. And I'm coming from this, from a database perspective, it's not something that is easily done in a traditional deployed environment. No, I mean you could go roll back every one and put back the old one. It's hard.

How Mountain Helps Avoid Accidental Version Updates [45:15]

Rose Stein:

So that's one of the benefits of getting Mountain, which is secure and enrolling your system in the 8.6 or whatever version that it is, that you need at that time in the LTS. So then it doesn't matter, like you just, you showed it, right? Like you did a DNF update and it was like cool, I'm going to whatever patches and bug fixes that you need that are relevant to 8.6, we'll do that, but it's going to stay on eight six regardless of what mistake that you make.

Zane Hamilton:

Absolutely.

Justin Burdine:

That's a good point.

Zane Hamilton:

Oh, I mean, it gives you a really nice path so that you can actually prove to an auditor that I am doing patching and there are things going into those that are being patched and kept to CDEs at bay. I'm being proactive, but I'm not being so proactive that I'm breaking things by being proactive. There's a lot of times that people who are going through a patching cycle may not know what's even on the box they're patching, they'll just run the update. They don't know if it's going to break something they don't care about. It's not their job. So you're right, being able to do that and actually have it pinned to a repository, not just LTS, but if you have a custom written application that's very dependent on very specific things you and Mountain could go have a specific custom repo that you've dedicated only these things go into this repo and do exactly what you're talking about. So that's a great point.

Michael Ford:

Another thing I would say too is going back to my, when I keep saying sophisticated patching, but if you mitigate the possibility of having said accident, right? So if you're implementing, I like to use the phrase least privileged access so we're all capable of doing something, but if Justin, for example, is the only person who needs to do something, I'm going to make sure to lock it down so that only he has the rights to perform said patch, right? That's something as we're getting into the future features services of Mountain that'll be something where you're doing against investigative patching tools and part of that is implementing Leaf, so that the right person has access to the right resources at the right time and that's it.

Justin Burdine:

And I think that can even be extended. Michael, I'm sorry.

Zane Hamilton:

Go ahead Justin. Nope, go.

Justin Burdine:

Ahead. I was just going to say, I think that could even be extended into the automation as well. I mean that's something we absolutely want to have. So I would anytime you're touching systems, anytime you're doing elaborate things, absolutely you need to have role-based access control and a good plan for how users are tired and built into that. So Absolutely.

Zane Hamilton:

And I was speaking from, my experience was with Bare Metal, if you're doing things, back to what Michael was talking about with sophisticated patching. If you're doing things in a virtualized environment where you can do a snapshot, then you could immediately roll back and it would not be hard. It would just be a matter of reapplying a snapshot. Yeah, to some degree you could do that on Bare Metal as well. If you have tools, NAS or SAN tools that are actually running your operating system so you're not running it locally that you're taking snapshots, there's a lot of ways you could mitigate that and do it. And the automation behind what we're building could help you with that. It's still not going to be as easy on Bare Metal as it's virtualized to click a button.

Justin Burdine:

Yeah. So to answer your question, Rose, those two systems I just showed, those are both VMs. So I can literally click a button, or I can have an automation click if I want, that will immediately roll it back to where it was before I even did anything.

Zane Hamilton:

Thank you for that.

Justin Burdine:

Yeah.

What Rocky Linux Version Comes With Mountain? [48:41]

Zane Hamilton:

So whenever you subscribe to Mountain, whenever you get that SaaS version, the Base Mountain, what comes in it by default? Rocky 8, 9?

Justin Burdine:

Oh are you asking me as far as what's in that specific subscription? Yeah. Yeah, that's 8.6. And I think that is good until next May.

Zane Hamilton:

Not the LTS one I'm talking about. So the other one, the regular report for 8 and 9, like the current version, right?

Justin Burdine:

Yeah.

Zane Hamilton:

And then you can add on LTS. The other one that's coming in there is going to be FIPS whenever that happens. So those are the four main ones you can get today, right?

Justin Burdine:

What I shipped there had a bunch of extra stuff in there that we're testing and tinkering with. So yeah.

Zane Hamilton:

I mean we are working with other chip vendors and network vendors, hardware vendors to build very specific versions of Rocky for very specific workloads that will be available there as well for a subscription. Gems come from Mountains. I love it. Dave, he's on fire today.

Justin Burdine:

Dave is dropping Gems.

Zane Hamilton:

Thank you Dave. Dave DeBonis, not Dave Godlove because Right. We are the company of Dave's.

Rose Stein:

Oh that is accurate.

Will Mountain Support Future CIQ Software? [49:54]

Zane Hamilton:

Ah, I think one of the other things I wanted to talk about was how this helps, cause I know on the website we listed agility and it's one of the things we hear quite often is how does this help me be more agile and comparing that to other places and the ways that they approach patching and even to some degree configuration management automation. How is this tool going to help someone be more agile to the question?

Justin Burdine:

Well, one of the things I didn't show off here is that if you are a CIQ customer and you're buying into the ecosystem and obviously that the more things will be coming out, most of our products, you'll start seeing them inside of Mountain. So it's going to be your one stop shop. And almost I think I've heard us talk about the idea of even dreaming about having a marketplace or you can just go in and pull up things that would be useful. A catalog of things that you could then pull from also support will be embedded in this portal so you'll be able to interact. And so it becomes a very quick way of saying, Hey, all of my systems, if you're all in on Rocky and some of the other things that we have in here, this will be an easy way for you to come in and say, Hey look, I've got every access to everything from one point.

So I think that's what I'm excited about. And when I think back to my days as an admin having automation and having these things all in one place that I can access I think is really something I could have used way back then.

Does Mountain Support Custom Kernel Workloads? [51:26]

Zane Hamilton:

So as we're sitting here chatting behind the scenes, there is one topic that Rose brings up that we probably should touch on a little bit. And I know when we talk about Linux and you go down the rabbit hole of people needing custom things for custom workloads or very specific topics. And if you look at the kernel that's available in Enterprise Linux typically a little bit legacy for a lot of different reasons. It's 18 months to two years behind some of the other variants out there that are more Debian and based, there are desires to have something more new and we can have that as another conversation at some time, but that's something that we will be able to address in here as well. I think mainline kernels, but there are the abilities to do other things. One of our use cases that we have is that a customer asked us to build a very custom kernel around real-time processing of data very quickly of things coming in, something else that we can help build and deliver through Mountain. So being able to address you have a very specific kernel need, we can help you with that and that's something that can be delivered through Mountain. And I'll stop if anybody has anything to add. Great question, Rose. Thank you.

Justin Burdine:

Yeah, when I have conversations with customers, I think the one thing that has always amused me is how surprised they are when we start talking about these other things. Most people are coming in either from the HPC side, and know the products that we've had, like Warewulf and Apptainer. Stuff that's been out there for years and years and years. But I think they're very surprised when they start hearing that there's these other things that we're diving in and offering a lot more, especially our capabilities around kernel development, kernel management and customization. So I'm glad we're covering it here. Cause I think it's one of the things I always try to reiterate because it's important.

Do Mountain Systems Still Need to Reboot After Patches? [53:14]

Rose Stein:

That actually brings up a question about rebooting. So when you do an LTS update and you get some of your backported security bug fixes and things like that, does your system then need to reboot?

Justin Burdine:

It does.

Zane Hamilton:

Yeah. Rose's trying to pick a fight. She's trying. The religion of rebooting. Oh boy.

Rose Stein:

Well, because my understanding is that it doesn't always. That's like the first time it does, if your kernel isn't updated to the last version of the 8.6 before it went to 8.7, but, and so then it might need an update, but then on moving forward, it might not.

Justin Burdine:

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think you bring up a good point. I think there are things like live kernel patching, if that's what you're alluding to. But I think that that becomes where there's some thoughts behind why you would want to do that, why you wouldn't. But typically I mean, I always, when I'm running systems, I would always want to reboot because I don't trust that system. If it stays up and I do an upgrade, I want to know what that looks like on the other side. Right? Because there's a lot of changes. You just saw that in that non-LTS system that's 230 packages that are now new to that system. I certainly want to know before I go back to bed or whenever I'm doing these patches that I'm not going to get called again at some point when the system does reboot and it's broken, I haven't tested that.

So that's always been my practice. And I know there are things like live kernel patching and things like that. I personally, maybe it's just me being old school, I really fear going down that road. So usually I, as part of the practice, reboot the system. This is probably a lot of times or usually when I've set this up more recently with automation, that's part of the process. Reboot, do some tests, and then if they pass tests, then we're good to go and move on. So that's just my perspective. I'll let others chime in.

Michael Ford:

No, I agree. And I, so I'll be the first to confess, I've not been a Linux administrator as my profession. But I think based on the customer conversation that I've been having, what I've been having rather than whether or not it's technically required, I think it becomes a philosophical discussion of what's best practice. I'd be more inclined to be on the side of caution. So if I was in that role, I'd probably lean towards rebooting every time and making that part of the process.

Zane Hamilton:

And this is where things get fun, because then you have the business unit that won't let you reboot because they've got some SLA with their end users. They didn't write an application that's capable of being able to be split or have things taken out and it just gets ugly. We have talked about this a lot inside of how we can help. I say that in a, how can we help with that? I think if you look at, I'm watching this, I'm waiting to see if Dave Debonis a comment or Greg, things like doing a K-EXEC so that you're not actually forcing the hardware to go back through its recheck of everything. Because a lot of times that's what takes the longest is waiting for the hardware to check. There are other ways to get around long reboot cycles. I think there are other things that CIQ is working on outside of just OS-3 and Rocky itself to get around a lot of that.

I mean, you can look at doing in-memory deployments of it. So, there are a lot of ways to address this, but it does come up quite a lot. Rose, this is a question that we get asked quite frequently, is, how can I get around this? And it is almost always because of some odd business reason that the thing was built in a way that it's to the point now where it can't be rebooted. So I love having that conversation to just design your stuff so you can reboot. I mean save yourself the pain because it's going to turn to pain at some point. Sorry, get off my soapbox.

Rose Stein:

Yeah.

Zane Hamilton:

Yep. Dave, thank you. There we go. All about the services.

Rose Stein:

It's May 4th and May the fourth be with you.

Justin Burdine:

What in the world, Rose?

Zane Hamilton:

I'll take it.

Justin Burdine:

Great. That's fantastic.

Zane Hamilton:

So great. I'm waiting, waiting for the moment for the dog to come over her shoulder though.

Rose Stein:

Oh, I know. Yeah, she gets out. I can hear her.

Justin Burdine:

What is that?

Rose Stein:

That sound?

Zane Hamilton:

Talking back to Chewy.

Rose Stein:

Ah, good times. Chewy.

How To Get Involved With Mountain? [58:00]

Zane Hamilton:

Thank you for that, Rose. That's fantastic. You're welcome. Happy fourth. Absolutely. So we are up on time. Guys, we are really excited about Mountain. If you want to chat about this or let's get working on this together, you want to try it out to see what else we're talking about from a future perspective and how this can help, reach out to us. Let us know. We're here for you. We want your customer feedback. We want you to tell us the things that you would like to see in it. Tell us what you like, what you don't like, how you'd like to see it done differently. That's really what CIQ is here for and we really appreciate you watching and taking the time. And I'll leave parting words for everyone else. Rose,

Rose Stein:

Yes. May the fourth be with you. You are totally amazing. Make sure that you like and subscribe. Share this with your friends. Just as Justin was saying, he actually created, he is like our star right now. Okay, so Justin, you did a live demo, which was amazing, but he also did a recorded one where there's some editing and it goes real quick and you can check that out on our website under a products Mountain and then you'll see his beautiful face right there. So we are all very excited to chat with you and just want to reiterate how responsive we are to our customers in what it is that they want. And that's one of the reasons why we have this platform where we're like, okay, we can do this and this and this. We can easily customize things for you. So reach out to us, looking forward to seeing you.

Zane Hamilton:

Thank you Rose. Michael, I'm not going to make you go last. I'm going to make you go next to last.

Rose Stein:

There you go.

Zane Hamilton:

This is the way, that's it. This is the way. Oh, love it. This is the way I love it. Mountain of solutions. So good. I don't know how you're going to follow that up, Justin.

Justin Burdine:

That's what I was about to say. There's no way I was going to grab my Mandalorian helmet back here and put it on, but I won't even go that far. No, I would say hopefully you've gotten out of this and out of these webinars that we are beyond eager to talk to people about what we're doing. We are very excited. We all love what we do and hopefully that's evident through these conversations we have. So yeah, definitely hit us up. Let's talk about stuff, let's dream together because ultimately that's how we solve some really cool problems. So yeah, that's all I got. If, if I'm the last one, do I get to say see you next time or?

Zane Hamilton:

Yes, you do.

Justin Burdine:

All right.

Rose Stein:

Same time, same place.

Justin Burdine:

Yeah, same time, same place. Thanks again guys.

Zane Hamilton:

Thank you everyone.