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container.training/slides/containers/Macro_View.md
2022-07-25 09:07:40 -04:00

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# A Macroscopic View
---
## Macroscopic Items
* The business case for containers
* The problem containers are solving
* What applications need
* What is the OS doing provides?
---
## What do CIOs worry about?
Who are the CIO's customers?
* Business Units: Need Computers to Run Applications
* Peak Capacity
* CFO: Demanding Budget Justifications
* Spend Less
---
## History of Solutions
For Each Business Application Buy a Machine
* Buy a machine for each application
* Big enough for Peak Load (CPU, Memory, Disk)
The Age of VMs
* Buy bigger machines and chop them up into logical machines
* Distribute your applications as VMs theses machines
* Observe what and when the application load actually is
* Possibly rebalance be to inform possibly moving
But Maintaining Machines (Bare Metal or VM) is hard (Patches, Packages, Drivers, etc)
---
## What Developers and Ops worry about
* Getting Software deployed
* Mysterious reasons why deployed application doesn't work
* Developer to Ops:
* "Hey it works on my development machine..."
* "I don't know why it isn't working for ***you***"
* "Everything ***looks*** the same"
* "I have no idea what could be different"
---
## The History of Software Deployment
Software Deployment is just a reproducible way to install files:
* Cards
* Tapes
* Floppy Disks
* Zip/Tar Files
* Installation "Files" (rpm/deb/msi)
* VM Images
---
## What is the Problem Containers are Solving?
It depends on who you are:
* For the CIO: Better resource utilization
* For Ops: Software Distribution
* For the Developer & Ops: Reproducible Environment
<BR><BR>
Ummm, but what exactly are containers....
* Wait a few more slides...
---
## Macroscopic view: Applications and the OS
Applications:
* What are the inputs/outputs to a program?
The OS:
* What does the OS provide?
---
## What are the inputs/outputs to a program?
Explicitly:
* Command Line Arguments
* Environment Variables
* Standard In
* Standard Out/Err
Implicitly (via the File System):
* Configuration Files
* Other Installed Applications
* Any other files
Also Implicitly
* Memory
* Network
---
## What does the OS provide?
* OS Kernel
* Kernel loded at boot time
* Sets up disk drives, network cards, other hardware, etc
* Manages all hardware, processes, memory, etc
* Kernel Space
* Low level innards of Kernel (fluid internal API)
* No direct access by applications of most Kernel functionality
* User Space (userland) Processes
* Code running outside the Kernel
* Very stable shim library access from User Space to Kernel Space (Think "fopen")
* The "init" Process
* User Space Process run after Kernel has booted
* Always PID 1
---
## OS Processes
* Created when an application is launched
* Each has a unique Process ID (PID)
* Provides it its own logical 'view' of all implicit inputs/output when launching app
* File System ( root directory, / )
* Memory
* Network Adaptors
* Other running processes
---
## What do we mean by "The OS"
Different Linux's
* Ubuntu / Debian; Centos / RHEL; Raspberry Pi; etc
What do they have in common?
* They all have a kernel that provides access to Userland (ie fopen)
* They typically have all the commands (bash, sh, ls, grep, ...)
What may be different?
* May use different versions of the Kernel (4.18, 5.4, ...)
* Internally different, but providing same Userland API
* Many other bundled commands, packages and package management tools
* Namely what makes it 'Debian' vs 'Centos'
---
## What might a 'Minimal' Linux be?
You could actually just have:
* A Linux Kernel
* An application (for simplicity a statically linked C program)
* The kernel configured to run that application as its 'init' process
Would you ever do this?
* Why not?
* It certainly would be very secure
---
## So Finally... What are Containers?
Containers just a Linux process that 'thinks' it is it's own machine
* With its own 'view' of things like:
* File System ( root directory, / ), Memory, Network Adaptors, Other running processes
* Leverages our understanding that a (logical) Linux Machine is
* A kernel
* A bunch of files ( Maybe a few Environment Variables )
Since it is a process running on a host machine
* It uses the kernel of the host machine
* And of course you need some tools to create the running container process
---
## Container Runtimes and Container Images
The Linux kernel actually has no concept of a container.
* There have been many 'container' technologies
* See [A Brief History of containers: From the 1970's till now](https://blog.aquasec.com/a-brief-history-of-containers-from-1970s-chroot-to-docker-2016)
* Over the years more capabilities have been added to the kernel to make it easier
<BR>
A 'Container technology' is:
* A Container Image Format of the unit of software deployment
* A bundle of all the files and miscellaneous configuration
* A Container Runtime Engine
* Software that takes a Container Image and creates a running container
---
## The Container Runtime War is now Over
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has standardized containers
* A standard container image format
* A standard for building and configuring container runtimes
* A standard REST API for loading/downloading container image to a registries
There primary Container Runtimes are:
* containerd: using the 'docker' Command Line Interface (or Kubernetes)
* CRI-O: using the 'podman' Command Line Interface (or Kubernetes/OpenShift)
* Others exists, for example Singularity which has a history in HPC
---
## Linux Namespaces Makes Containers Possible
- Provide processes with their own isolated view of the system.
- Namespaces limit what you can see (and therefore, what you can use).
- These namespaces are available in modern kernels:
- pid: processes
- net: network
- mnt: root file system (ie chroot)
- uts: hostname
- ipc
- user: UID/GID mapping
- time: time
- cgroup: Resource Monitoring and Limiting
- Each process belongs to one namespace of each type.
---
## Namespaces are always active
- Namespaces exist even when you don't use containers.
- This is a bit similar to the UID field in UNIX processes:
- all processes have the UID field, even if no user exists on the system
- the field always has a value / the value is always defined
<br/>
(i.e. any process running on the system has some UID)
- the value of the UID field is used when checking permissions
<br/>
(the UID field determines which resources the process can access)
- You can replace "UID field" with "namespace" above and it still works!
- In other words: even when you don't use containers,
<br/>there is one namespace of each type, containing all the processes on the system.