Category Archives: Conferences

One year of freelancing

Posted on 2024/07/07 by Stéphane Graber

Introduction

It was exactly one year ago today that I left my day job as Engineering Manager of LXD at Canonical and went freelance. It’s been quite a busy year but things turned out better than I had hoped and I’m excited about year two!

Zabbly

Zabbly is the company I created for my freelance work. Over the year, a number of my personal projects were transferred over to being part of Zabbly, including the operation of my ASN (as399760.net), my datacenter co-location infrastructure and more.

Through Zabbly I offer a mix of by-the-hour consultation with varying prices depending on the urgency of the work (basic consultation, support, emergency support) as well as fixed-cost services, mostly related to Incus (infrastructure review, migration from LXD, remote or on-site trainings, …).

Other than Incus, Zabbly also provides up to date mainline kernel packages for Debian and Ubuntu and associated up to date ZFS packages. This is something that came out as needed for a number of projects I work on, from being able to test Incus on recent Linux kernels to avoiding Ubuntu kernel bugs on my own and NorthSec’s servers.

Zabbly is also the legal entity for donations related to my open source work, currently supporting:

And lastly, Zabbly also runs a Youtube channel covering the various projects I’m involved with.
A lot of it is currently about Incus, but there is also the occasional content on NorthSec or other side projects. The channel grew to a bit over 800 subscribers in the past 10 months or so.

Now, how well is all of that doing? Well enough that I could stop relying on my savings just a few months in and turn a profit by the end of 2023. Zabbly currently has around a dozen active customers from 7 countries and across 3 continents with size ranging from individuals to large governmental agencies.

2024 has also been very good so far and while I’m not back to the level of income I had while at Canonical, I also don’t have to go through 4-5 hours of meetings a day and get to actually contribute to open source again, so I’ll gladly take the (likely temporary) pay cut!

Incus

A lot of my time in the past year has been dedicated to Incus.

This wasn’t exactly what I had planned when leaving Canonical.
I was expecting LXD to keep on going as a proper Open Source project as part of the Linux Containers community. But Canonical had other plans and so things changed a fair bit over the few months following my departure.

For those not aware, the rough timeline of what happened is:

So rather than contributing to LXD while working on some other new projects, a lot of my time has instead gone into setting up the Incus project for success.

And I think I’ve been pretty successful at that as we’re seeing a monthly user base growth (based on image server interactions) of around 25%. Incus is now natively available in most Linux distributions (Alpine, Arch Linux, Debian, Gentoo, Nix, Ubuntu and Void) with more coming soon (Fedora and EPEL).

Incus has 6 maintainers, most of whom were the original LXD maintainers.
We’ve seen over 100 individual contributors since Incus was forked from LXD including around 20 students from the University of Texas in Austin who contributed to Incus as part of their virtualization class.

I’ve been acting as the release manager for Incus, also running all the infrastructure behind the project, mentoring new contributors and reviewing a number of changes while also contributing a number of new features myself, some sponsored by my customers, some just based on my personal interests.

A big milestone for Incus was its 6.0 LTS release as that made it suitable for production users.
Today we’re seeing around 40% of our users running the LTS release while the rest run the monthly releases.

On top of Incus itself, I’ve also gotten to contribute to both create the Incus Deploy project, which is a collection of Ansible playbooks and Terraform modules to make it easy to deploy Incus clusters and contribute to both the Ansible Incus connection plugin and our Incus Terraform/OpenTofu provider.

The other Linux Containers projects

As mentioned in my recent post about the 6.0.1 LTS releases, the Linux Containers project tries to do coordinated LTS releases on our core projects. This currently includes LXC, LXCFS and Incus.

I didn’t have to do too much work myself on LXC and LXCFS, thanks to Aleksandr Mikhalitsyn from the Canonical LXD team who’s been dealing with most of the review and issues in both LXC and LXCFS alongside other long time maintainers, Serge Hallyn and Christian Brauner.

NorthSec

NorthSec is a yearly cybersecurity conference, CTF and training provider, usually happening in late May in Montreal, Canada. It’s been operating since 2013 and is now one of the largest on-site CTF events in the world along with having a pretty sizable conference too.

I’m the current VP of Infrastructure for the event and have been involved with it from the beginning, designing and running its infrastructure, first on a bunch of old donated hardware and then slowly modernizing that to the environment we have now with proper production hardware both at our datacenter and on-site during the event.

This year, other than transitioning everything from LXD to Incus, the main focus has been on upgrading the OS on our 6 physical servers and dozens of infrastructure containers and VMs from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

At the same time, also significantly reducing the complexity of our infrastructure by operating a single unified Incus cluster, switching to OpenID Connect and OpenFGA for access control and automating even more of our yearly infrastructure with Ansible and Terraform.

Automation is really key with NorthSec as it’s a non-profit organization with a lot of staffing changes every year, around 100 year long contributors and then an additional 50 or so on-site volunteers!

I went over the NorthSec infrastructure in a couple of YouTube videos:

Conferences

I’ve cut down and focused my conference attendance a fair bit over this past year.
Part of it for budgetary reasons, part of it because of having so many things going on that fitting another couple of weeks of cross-country travel was difficult.

I decided to keep attending two main events. The Linux Plumbers Conference where I co-organizer the Containers and Checkpoint-Restore Micro-Conference and FOSDEM where I co-organize both the Containers and the Kernel devrooms.

With one event usually in September/October and the other in February, this provides two good opportunities to catch up with other developers and users, get to chat a bunch and make plans for the year.

I’m looking forward to catching up with folks at the upcoming Linux Plumbers Conference in Vienna, Austria!

What’s next

I’ve got quite a lot going on, so the remaining half of 2024 and first half of 2025 are going to be quite busy and exciting!

On the Incus front, we’ve got some exciting new features coming in, like the native OCI container support, more storage options, more virtual networking features, improved deployment tooling, full coverage of Incus features in Terraform/OpenTofu and even a small immutable OS image!

NorthSec is currently wrapping up a few last items related to its 2024 edition and then it will be time to set up the development infrastructure and get started on organizing 2025!

For conferences, as mentioned above, I’ll be in Vienna, Austria in September for Linux Plumbers and expect to be in Brussels again for FOSDEM in February.

There’s also more that I’m not quite ready to talk about, but expect some great Incus related news to come out in the next few months!

Posted in Conferences, Incus, LXC, LXCFS, Planet Ubuntu, Zabbly | 2 Comments

Linux Plumbers Conference in Vienna, Austria

Posted on 2024/06/06 by Stéphane Graber

This year’s edition of the annual Linux Plumbers Conference will be in Vienna, Austria between September 18th and 20th.

I’ll once again be one of the organizers for the Containers and Checkpoint/Restore micro-conference where I’m looking forward to a half-day of interesting topics on containers, namespacing, resource limits, security and the ability to serialize and restore all of that stuff!

We just published our CFP for that micro-conference with a deadline of July 15th for anyone interested in presenting their work. You may also want to look at the extensive list of other micro-conferences and tracks.

As usual for this conference, presenting within one of the many micro-conferences doesn’t provide you a ticket to attend the conference. So anyone interested in attending or presenting should be looking at getting their registration done now while early bird tickets remain!

LPC runs as a hybrid event with remote participation possible through video-conferencing and accessing shared notes. While it’s technically possible to present remotely too, it’s usually preferred to do that in person.

See you all in Vienna!

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Schedule for the containers and kernel devrooms at FOSDEM 2024

Posted on 2023/12/17 by Stéphane Graber

It’s been a busy week for the organizers of both the containers and kernel devrooms at FOSDEM 2024!

We received just under 100 submissions in total which had to be individually reviewed and voted on by our team of 8 volunteers. Then came the usual fun of checking that all speakers can still come to FOSDEM and finally finding room on the schedule for the selected talks!

This year, FOSDEM switched platform from the old and dated Pentabarf over to Pretalx, while we obviously hit a number of odd edge cases and issues, the overall experience was a massive improvement. Voting and scheduling could all be done intuitively directly in the platform instead of having to rely on data export and spreadsheets!

And so, after a few days of voting and scheduling, I present to you the schedules for the containers and kernel devrooms at FOSDEM!

Containers (Saturday 3rd of February 2024)

Schedule: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/containers/

Kernel (Sunday 4th of February 2024)

Schedule: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/kernel/

See you in Brussels!

Thanks to everyone who submitted talks to either of the devrooms and thanks to everyone who helped review and vote on those submissions!

I look forward to seeing you all in Brussels at the beginning of February!

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Containers and kernel devrooms at FOSDEM 2024

Posted on 2023/11/26 by Stéphane Graber

As has become a bit of a tradition by now, I’ll be attending FOSDEM 2024 in Brussels, Belgium on the weekend of the 3-4th of February 2024.

I’m once again one of the organizers of the containers devroom, a devroom we’ve been running for over 5 years now. And on top of that, will also help organize the kernel devroom. This is going to be our second year for this devroom after a very successful first year in 2023!

The CFPs for both devrooms are currently still open with a submission deadline of December 10th:

If you have anything that’s containers or kernel related, please send it, we have a variety of time slot lengths to accommodate anything from a short demo to a full size talk.

But those are just two of a lot of different devrooms running over the weekend, you can find a full list here along with all the CFP links.

See you in Brussels!

PS: A good chunk of the LXC/Incus team is going to be attending, so let us know if you want to chat and we’ll try to find some time!

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Running Steam in a LXC container

Posted on 2012/11/16 by Stéphane Graber

Anyone who met me probably knows that I like to run everything in containers.

A couple of weeks ago, I was attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen, DK where I demoed how to run OpenGL code from within an LXC container. At that same UDS, all attendees also received a beta key for Steam on Linux.

Yesterday I finally received said key by e-mail and I’ve been experimenting with Steam a bit. Now, my laptop is running the development version of Ubuntu 13.04 and only has 64bit binaries. Steam is 32bit-only and Valve recommends running it on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

So I just spent a couple of hours writing a tool called steam-lxc which uses LXC’s new python API and a bunch more python magic to generate an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 32bit container, install everything that’s needed to run Steam, then install Steam itself and configures some tricks to get direct GPU access and access to pulseaudio for sound.

All in all, it only takes 3 minutes for the script to setup everything I need to run Steam and then start it.

Here’s a (pretty boring) screencast of the script in action:

This script has only been tested with Intel hardware on Ubuntu 13.04 64bit at this point, but the PPA contains builds for Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 12.10 too.

To get it on your machine just do:

  • sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-lxc/stable
  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get install steam-lxc
  • sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/lxc /var/cache/lxc

Then once that’s all installed, set it up with sudo steam-lxc create. This can take somewhere from 5 minutes to an hour depending on your internet connection.

And once the environment is all setup, you can start steam with sudo steam-lxc run.

The code can be found at: https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-lxc/lxc/steam-lxc

You can leave your feedback as comment here and if you want to improve the script, merge proposals are more than welcome.
I don’t have any hardware requiring proprietary drivers but I’d expect steam to fail on such hardware as the drivers won’t get properly installed in the container. Adding code to deal with those is pretty easy and I’d love to get some patches for that!

Have fun!

Posted in Canonical voices, Conferences, LXC, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | 37 Comments