[00:08] Hi, welcome back to the "Fedora Podcast." I'm Eduard Lucena from the marketing team. And right now, I'm here with Dusty Maba...
Dusty Mabe:[00:16] Mabe. [laughs]
Eduard:[00:17] Mabe?
Dusty:[00:17] Yep.
Eduard:[00:18] He's one of the core contributors for the Fedora Atomic Project. Hi, Dusty.
Dusty:[00:23] Hey, how's it going?
Eduard:[00:24] Everything is fine. Thanks for coming. And one of the, the first question I want to ask to you is what is Fedora Atomic?
Dusty:[00:32] What is Fedora Atomic? So it's kind of interesting because it is not exactly what you would think it is. So to me, Fedora Atomic, the group, the organization essentially that we have where people come and collaborate together is a few different things.
[00:54] So number one, there is Atomic Host, which is what I primarily associate Fedora Atomic with. There's also a group of people within the Atomic community that are interested in containerization on Fedora, so like getting more applications within Fedora into containers and into the Fedora Container Registry.
[01:17] And there's also a group of people within that group that are interested in the container runtimes within Fedora. So, there's Docker that has been around for a while. There's a few new container runtimes, one called Podman, one specifically for Kubernetes called CRI-O
[01:36] So there's a group of people within, the Atomic group that are interested in those pieces. So when you ask, "What is Fedora Atomic?" a lot of times before we really dig into a subject, I'll try to get you to clarify which part of it are you interested in asking a question about.
[01:55] Um, if it's a user, I'll ask them what part of the group are they interested in, or, or what use case are they interested in kinda helping contribute to or modify, um, as they go along.
[02:09] So, so a long answer to a simple question, but, the Atomic word means a lot of different things today, and we wanna try to make sure we send people in the right direction.
Eduard:[02:21] Yeah, so Fedora Atomic is intended to optimize the work of containers, right?
Dusty:[02:27] That's one of the goals, definitely. It's to try to more or less get more things running in containers, less things running outside of containers on the host so that we can minimize the host's responsibility in the world of servers these days.
[02:47] And minimizing the host's responsibilities means that we can concentrate on what's left in the host and do that part really well. So we can deliver updates to a finite set of software that consists of the host including container runtimes, which is essentially your gateway to your applications.
[03:11] So if we do that really well, if we just focus on the host part and the container runtimes part, we can deliver, really reliably, updates to those pieces and not worry as much about breaking people's applications on top.
Eduard:[03:26] OK. So this, if some application get broke, you don't broke the whole system because it's running separately.
Dusty:[03:32] Right. Yeah, the idea is that there's an interface between the host and the applications are essentially the container runtimes.
Eduard:[03:41] Yeah.
Dusty:[03:41] If you get that part right, which we can make sure of because we try to do testing on that, then you have some sort of warm feeling in your heart that you're not going to break, right?
Eduard:[03:56] Yeah. One of the most recent, uh, news in this part of the technology world is that Red Hat acquired CoreOS. So what is the current situation between Fedora Atomic, the Team Silverblue that was supposed to be the new Atomic working group or a special interest group, and the CoreOS community?
Dusty:[04:18] Gotcha. So, yes, Fedora did acquire CoreOS. In there you asked, you know, "What's the new relationship between CoreOS and Fedora Atomic?" And then you also mentioned Silverblue. I'll break out the question real briefly and mention Silverblue.
[04:38] Silverblue itself was a rebranding of a different project called Atomic Workstation. So in the past, Atomic Host focused on your servers, you run containers, you know, like server-application-type stuff on Atomic Host.
[04:56] Atomic Workstation, which is now rebranded to Silverblue, is essentially take that same use case, but apply it to a workstation or a desktop scenario, right? So like, you know, you're including Firefox, you're including GNOME, you're including all of those pieces, and you're delivering it in the same image-based deliver approach that you would have with Atomic Host.
[05:20] So Silverblue, uh, something separate. Um, and I'll get back to the, "How does, uh, the CoreOS acquisition affect like, you know, Fedora Atomic Host?" In this case we looked at, you know, the offering from CoreOS, Inc., the company and their offering is Container Linux.
[05:43] And we looked at Atomic Host, and we tried to see, "Well, these two things are really solving a very similar use case, right?" Image-based updates, you know, run your applications in containers, try to make the users not worry about updates.
[06:02] For Container Linux, they focused on automated updates from the beginning,which is not something we did with Atomic Host, which we actually think was a mistake. We probably should have focused on automated updates because we do think that is the future at this point.
[06:20] But we wanted to start from somewhere familiar. The problem is, if you start from that familiar place, it's hard to get people to switch over to automatic updates. If you start from the default of the unfamiliar and then allow people to disable them, it's easier to convince more people to do it.
[06:38] How does Fedora Atomic Host related to Fedora CoreOS? More or less, in the future, and we've made an announcement about this not too long ago, we announced Fedora CoreOS and that it would succeed both Fedora Atomic Host and CoreOS Container Linux, and essentially be the new upstream project for both of those two communities.
[07:01] Fedora CoreOS will take pieces from Container Linux that were really popular, the automated updates philosophy, the automatic rollback philosophy if something fails. The bootstrapping using a tool called Ignition, which essentially runs provisioning steps in the initramfs on boot. So those pieces are pieces that we would take from Container Linux and apply to Fedora CoreOS.
[07:28] And the pieces of Atomic Host that we really like are, for example, the technology rpm-ostree, that knows...It's like the "get for your operating system" approach. It knows about rpms. It's able to build an image-based update.
[07:45] If a new update comes out and only one rpm changed in the host, that's all that you're gonna download is that one rpm. And maybe there are only few files that changed in it. So like the "get for your operating system" like approach that we have with Atomic Host, we really that, so we want to carry that forward to Fedora CoreOS.
[08:03] As far as community goes, in the Fedora CoreOS working group, we are definitely looking at, what we...the other pieces of for-, Fedora CoreOS that we want to bring forward from the two different sub-projects that existed before and get engagement from all of those different people that were part of the Atomic Host working group and part of Container Linux before.
[08:31] We really want the new community to thrive as much as either of those old two did in the past.
Eduard:[08:38] Well, I, I don't know the, the CoreOS community as well because it was totally new for me. I worked more in part of marketing and using the desktop applications and this kind of end-users approach.
[08:54] But, the thing that I ever have to think about, uh, the Fedora community is that is the way we work, the way we met, we really have this enforcement about the friend F of our four foundations.
Eduard:[09:08] So I thought, I hope the CoreOS community can take that approach with them and feel warm with us.
Dusty:[09:17] Yes, absolutely. We want to...Everybody that's coming from the CoreOS community, whether it be engineers that were working on Container Linux in the past or users of Container Linux in the past or partners who may have like been interested in running Container Linux on multiple architectures or any situation like that.
[09:44] We would really like to have those people come to the Fedora community and even have a stronger voice in what goes on in the project and like more of, you know, more insight into how it's built and, and pieces like that. So yes, absolutely, you know, everybody in Fedora should extend their arms to the Container Linux community and, and those people coming in.
Eduard:[10:07] For the contributors that are interested in both Atomic group and then Container, the new CoreOS community that is coming from, how they can help the Atomic workgroup. There is an onboarding process, uh, for the Atomic working group?
Dusty:[10:28] For the Atomic working group, I don't know if I would call it an onboarding process, per se. But, you know, a lot of contributions from anybody in any community really is born out of necessity.
[10:42] So like they have an interest in using something for a particular need that they have, and they want to see if this project can help them out, right? with their need. Or maybe they've used the project and they want to change it slightly in some way that, in a way that would help other people or whatnot.
[11:04] So usually contributions or involvement is born out of, you know, necessity or, or self-interest, you know. And that is really what makes, uh, open source tick, right?
[11:17] So as far as an onboarding process, usually the way it works is people come in and they try something. They either say, "This is great. This is the future of, you know, how operating systems are delivered. I wanna be involved in this," or, "I wanna change this particular piece 'cause I think it would make it easier."
[11:36] 'Cause, you know, going from a model where you do everything in rpms to a model where you do most things in containers, it, it's a big jump from where you used to be to the new world, right? So like there's a lot of opportunity for adding in glue to help people make that jump, right?
[11:53] So there are people that get involved, they wanna help, help do that. An onboarding process is probably, I don't know if we have like an official one, but the, most of the time, the way it works is somebody comes in, they're interested for whatever reason.
[12:09] They start to join the meetings. They add meeting topics to our issue tracker and then we talk about it and we try to figure out, you know, "Is this something that we should do as a community? That's a great idea. Let's implement it."
[12:22] As far as, if somebody's interested in Atomic Host today, I would say that, you know, following the Fedora CoreOS community and getting involved in that, because that is the future, is something that I would recommend doing.
[12:38] Atomic Host will live for Fedora 29. So like we will have an official release of Atomic Host for Fedora 29, but for Fedora 30, it'll be Fedora CoreOS. So, you know, if you happen to be using Atomic Host today, you've got a little bit of time.
[12:52] But definitely looking at what's coming in the future would be useful so that you don't end up on EOL release without updates after a little while.
Eduard:[13:03] So, just for the records, when the meetings are?
Dusty:[13:09] When do they start?
Eduard:[13:10] Yes.
Dusty:[13:11] The meetings, we have them once a week. We didn't have it this week because we had Flock, and a few people, you know, were all over the world. But we have them once a week. They are on Wednesdays. I think it is 14:30 UTC.
[13:27] It is at current time, which this is what, uh, you know, first week in August or around that. Um, current time, it is at, uh, 12:30 Eastern, which is my time zone that I'm in. But I think that relates, that's 14:30 UTC. If it's not, please don't kill me...
[13:45] [laughter]
Eduard:[13:50] If for some reason it's not that time, we can just mention it in the podcast.
Dusty:[13:53] Yeah, exactly. So there, if you go to Fedocal and you click on CoreOS, the meeting is in like the Fedora Calendar.
Eduard:[14:01] Yeah.
Dusty:[14:02] So if you have...And that will convert it to anybody's local time zone, so that's probably the best way to figure out if I was wrong. [laughs]
Eduard:[14:10] OK, for that one that doesn't know, Fedocal is the Fedora calendar application that we put all our meetings to let people both get, uh, notify and to know when the meetings are, uh, of each team is going on.
Dusty:[14:24] And one thing I should mention there is, it is in the Fedora-meeting-1 IRC channel on Freenode.
Eduard:[14:32] Yeah, well, almost all the meetings are. [laughs]
Dusty:[14:33] Yeah, exactly.
Eduard:[14:35] So there is any final comment or any thoughts you want to share with our audience?
Dusty:[14:41] I may have already mentioned this before, but I do wanna reiterate, you know, we do want more and more people involved, we want people who have these particular use cases to come and help us know how we can reach them better and to also push their own agenda as far as, adding in a particular feature that would help everybody with these use cases.
[15:06] Or, you know, maybe you come in and you say, "Hey, I have different use cases. How do I build my own?" and help us build out documentation there. Because it is totally possible to take all of the pieces of the pizza and build your own pizza out of it, right? Which sometimes is the better scenario for you. It all depends on who you are.
[15:26] So, get involved. We have the Fedora CoreOS community. We also have, you know, the Atomic community, which you can still use to reach out and, and affect things there. But, get involved.
Eduard:[15:40] Well, thank you, Dusty, for share your knowledge with us. And we will have another episode release in two more weeks. Thank you for everything.
Dusty:[15:49] Thank you.