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Lockheed Martin Taps Red Hat to Accelerate F-22 Raptor Upgrades
- ThreeFx 7y agoAm I reading this correctly as Kuberetes-powered fighter jets? That's certainly not going to shoot anyone in the foot...
- vipa123 7y agoI agree that Kubernetes-powered fighter jets is a bad idea, bordering on catastrophically bad. That said, I assume they'll be using Kubernetes as a development and test platform -on the ground- to produce some form of binary output that would go on the plane.
- throwaway5752 7y agoIf it's any k8s distro let it be openshift. Best selinux integration. That said, how can you not wince reading, "To do this, Lockheed wanted to adopt principles and frameworks common in software lexicon like agile, scrum, minimum viable product (MVP) and DevSecOps."
- ThreeFx 7y agoFlying on MVP software must surely be exhilerating.
- heavenlyblue 7y agoIf you read MVP with a German pronunciation of V then you get Minimum Flyable Product.
- rrss 7y ago"You guys have got a lot of nice words! Any way we can get some of those words over here?"
- Mvhsz 7y ago> ...today announced that Lockheed Martin worked with Red Hat to modernize the application development process used to bring new capabilities to the U.S. Air Force’s fleet of F-22 Raptor fighter jets. They later talk about agile vs waterfall as well as devops. It doesn't read like this is going on a plane, probably just dev and test environments.
- p_l 7y agoAvionics software on new systems is, in a way, logically similar to kubernetes actually :) Instead of having separate computers, you now tend to have fewer "servers" which run multiple modules in isolated partitions, communicating over the common network using unidirectional messages; whether using SAE AS5643 - aka IEEE-1394 - like in F-35 and X-47, or over mutated Ethernet known as AFDX (A380, A350, B787). However a big portion of JSF issues is also in ground software - there's a dedicated set of platforms required to operate F-35, which is also known for infamously depending on connectivity to Lockheed servers or the airplane stops working. The system involved, ALIS, had als infamously took more time to deploy during a test squadron redeployment than the whole redeployment - which I guess they might be trying to speed up using Kubernetes. From what I heard ALIS appears to still be done the same style as certain other logistics software from lockheed back in 2010, and that doesn't say anything good.
- checktheorder 7y agoI was thinking more along the lines of removing features to simplify maintenance, Gnome 3 style. "Good news, General. We've found a way to lower maintenance costs in the cockpit systems by 10% if we removed this thing here on the blueprints, so we've already gone ahead with that change." "But that's the emergency ejection system!" "Yes, and our data indicates that it's almost never used. It doesn't really make sense to devote manpower to keeping a system running that few people ever need. If we get rid of it, we can free up developer-hours to making the canopy opening/closing action a little smoother. Everyone uses the canopy."
- heavenlyblue 7y ago“There is no need to have a system that is not needed at all if our plane is done perfectly in the first place”
- dar7 7y agoRed Hat's new D-BUS service Fighter-Kit and systemd-missiled will address these shortcomings.
- orliesaurus 7y agoI bet somewhere on Redhat's sales pitch deck there was a mention of "1 - click deploy updates" slide, somewhere, for sure.
- jedberg 7y agoThat IBM acquisition is starting to pay off.
- ohaideredevs 7y ago"The Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor is one of the world’s premier fighter jets, thanks to its unique combination of stealth, speed, agility, and situational awareness." A huge understatement. It's the only true 5th gen that's tailored for performance, rather than cost savings (ala the F-35). The others are completely unproven (Chinese) or both unproven and in extremely limited quantities, while not providing true stealth (PAK FA, though if anything, the SU-35 family is the closer analogue).
- checktheorder 7y ago>cost savings (ala the F-35) What.
- ohaideredevs 7y agoHue hue, but it WAS the theory. The F-35 was planned as: A. The "light" F/A part of the heavy/light fighter model. B. Meant to save costs by having one aircraft with shared parts (across the three models) fill virtually all roles.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dharmab 7y agoYup, that was the original goal of the F-35. The idea was that by sharing parts across multiple variants and across multiple militaries, the F-35 would be a cheaper fighter than the F-22 that could scale to a larger fleet. It's not totally crazy on the face of it- The expensive but undefeated F-15 and the relatively cheaper F-16 successfully pulled it off in the 20th century.
- jandrese 7y agoIt was supposed to be the next generation F-16. The lightweight single engine jack of all trades fighter that could be exported to other countries to help defray development costs. There was even a notion that you could use the same plane across all branches of the military so the same supply chain could be used for all three and you could build them in higher quantities to spread the development costs over more aircraft. But then of course the aircraft got saddled with requirements from three different branches of the military at once which made it extremely difficult to design and build and thus very very expensive.
- mtmail 7y ago"By knocking down walls and creating open spaces to work in its new dojo, [...] team now has a dedicated space for continued learning, thinking and problem-solving [...]" I imagine a couple of couches and a book shelf in a corner.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoWhy not a crusty VBSS black belt duking it out with these agile newcomers.
- tibbydude 7y agoCouches are so 90's ... creative thinking needs beanbags.
- m_b 7y agoNot proud that open source I contribute to help USA kills people, it really sucks.
- walrus01 7y agoI don't think you can realistically expect anybody in the world, of any political ideology, to not use something that is GPL/BSD/LGPL/Apache/whatever licensed, if you've published the source code to the Internet. I would be entirely unsurprised to find north korean telecoms/state government agencies using centos or debian. In fact if you google "north korea linux" you'll find that they already created their own weird custom GUI desktop distribution. In the bigger picture, far more people use your code, whatever it is, to do useful and good things in random places in the world than people using it for purposes you find objectionable.
- m_b 7y agoThanks for lecturing me about licensing, as a contributor I already know that. Isn’t it allowed to go further that sources access, what’s written on a piece of paper, and caring about ethics? Does OSS contributors really needs to be so alienated?
- walrus01 7y agoI honestly don't know what you expect, if you want to find some way to force autocratic regimes somewhere in the world to not use source code that's published to the open internet. If you discover some way to bend north korea to your will, please let us know.
- Rebelgecko 7y agoJSLint made up its own license, which was essentially the MIT license with a sentence about "use this software for good; do not use this software for evil". FWIW that was enough for lots of people to make the determination that it wasn't really open source software since evil is often in the eye of the beholder and there was a gray area for "lawful neutral" type use.
- 7y ago
- walrus01 7y agowhat the hell is DevSecOps? I've been doing network security for twenty years, so I know what that is, this just sounds like some marketing and sales people started mashing buzzwords together.
- Mvhsz 7y agoCommon term in defense, basically just an organizational efficiency. Since the devops people kept breaking security, we made them sit next to the security people.
- freehunter 7y agoDevOps is mashing development and operations together. But that ignores security, often putting security reviews after the code has been deployed or at least after it's done being written, which necessitates re-work. DevSecOps makes sure security is a part of the development and operations work. Yes it's a re-wording of an existing concept. No, it is not a new idea. Yes, it is important enough to call it out because so many companies don't let security/operations/development work together. You're not the target audience, your CISO or CTO is.
- heavenlyblue 7y agoWhat is the size of the company when CISO, on average - exists as part of the company? I know Google has security teams, but what about the smallest company that has one?
- freehunter 7y agoWhether a company has someone with the title "CISO" or not matters very little to how they design security into their products. The term "DevSecOps" is designed to eliminate the need for a discreet "security" workforce. To answer the question more directly: I've worked with 10,000+ employee companies with no CISO and I've worked with <1,000 employee companies with separate CTO, CIO, and CISO roles. At the executive level, job titles are more of suggestions than strictly defined silos. It all depends on how the company is organized and what their strategic priorities are.
- rurban 7y agoDuring an "enablement session" really? This is a sales jargon AFAIK, the developer-unfriendly term for "hands-on training". Such jargon shouldn't be used in agile.
- cameldrv 7y agoI'm a little bit surprised to see this. One thing I've observed working on many different types of software projects is that there exists a continuum between waterfall and agile/scrum, and one way of thinking of it is what the length of the sprint is. Waterfall is a single sprint the length of the product, spiral development is several sprints over the length of the product, and agile/scrum is sprints of a couple of weeks to a month. The length of the sprint is simply the length of the planning cycle. What I've observed is that systems with certain characteristics, such as safety critical systems or systems that involve hardware that doesn't yet exist or is expensive or time consuming to test typically don't work with an agile/scrum planning cycle. If you want to deliver them in a reasonable time, complex and parallel requirements mean that you must plan things far in advance so that everyone is ready at the same time.
- vemv 7y agoScrum has been a catastrophe to the software industry (argued elsewhere countless times) - I don't want to imagine the consequences it can have for jet figthers. For such environments you definitely want to have no deadlines at all, to have a special focus on well-defined requirements, and in software quality. That investment should be marginal compared to hardware costs. And in fact, by going more slowly, you end up delivering faster after a couple years, when you enjoy zero tech debt and an excellent foundation.
- smileysteve 7y ago> when you enjoy zero tech debt and an excellent foundation. This implies that you plan exactly when and where tech debt is accumulating or found. The scrum argument is that by iterating and releasing, you find out where unexpected tech debt is more rapidly; and you go back and fix it. One way that #AgileIsDead happens is when products disregard the tech debt for features even as it becomes apparent.
- vemv 7y agoInteresting, I hadn't heard of tech debt being something so subjective/invisible that it just creeps in and you have to discover it. (I'm open to be convinced) Generally I have witnessed tech debt as something pretty blatant and obvious - generally it's detected in the code review process. Sometimes it's big faults being introduced, more often it's small faults leading to 'death by a thousand cuts'. My current policy is to allow zero tech debt, following the "no broken windows" principle. https://pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer/extracts/software-entropy https://pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer/extracts/softw... That involves a greater investment in code reviews.
- ergothus 7y ago> My current policy is to allow zero tech debt I was in an office that had such a policy - it didn't go well. Perhaps it's a matter of definition, because: > I hadn't heard of tech debt being something so subjective/invisible that it just creeps in and you have to discover it. Tech debt is _inevitable_. Any decision will eventually be debt - rot begins before the code is even finalized. Focusing on avoiding short term gains at long term cost is totally fine, and I think that's the point of your "zero tech debt" strategy, but that's not zero tech debt. And even when maximizing for the long-term, you're picking between options, which means you're picking the FORM of your tech debt, not the existence of it. To return back to my (admittedly anecdotal) experience with "zero tech debt": What happened was a language shift. People would avoid the phrase "tech debt", but still dealt with the reality. The decisions were being made, uncovered debt (such as a paradigm shift in the industry, or a change in dependent technology, or just an anticipated business flow that turned out to play out differently) was hidden. Basically, it seemed fine for a while, but management was getting out of the loop because management had decided an unachievable purity was more important than frank and open communication. The result was what happens any time management pushes themselves out of the loop - at some point, the compound interest on the debt came due. By then, multiple devs had left because in an industry with so much choice, why choose to work somewhere that refuses to face reality? Not selling the long term for the short term is a great approach, but if you're trying to enforce "zero tech debt", I suggest you talk with your devs to see what they think that means and make sure that you're all on the same page, because tech debt is maintenance costs, and those will never be zero. If you're being told they are zero, then there may well be a disconnect.
- wikibob 7y agoThis is pretty hilarious. So some consultants swooped in, there was 8 weeks of training, and now everything is going to go back to how it was. Source: seen more than one of these external “transformation” efforts. “ Through an eight-week Red Hat Open Innovation Labs residency, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics replaced the waterfall development process it used for F-22 Raptor upgrades with an agile methodology and DevSecOps practices that are more adaptive to the needs of the U.S. Air Force.“
- wil421 7y ago“Colonel, instead of requirements you’ll call them user stories.”
- dmix 7y agoAnd don't worry there's even more mandatory meetings than before.
- dmix 7y agoWhat year is this again?
- drdeadringer 7y ago> So some consultants swooped in, there was 8 weeks of training, and now everything is going to go back to how it was. I used to work for Lockheed Martin. I believe it. I found it so hilarious I was relieved when I finally got caught up in the layoffs.
- semantic_x 7y agoNext week: this weeks sprint is behind schedule by 8 weeks, we need to push all sprints out by 6 months. Also we found some security vulns that need hot patched, which could either take 6 weeks or 6 months. We should probably bring the consultants back for another 12 weeks to get the ball rolling. We might be able to save a few weeks if we outsource some of the work to our subs in india...
- Sil_E_Goose 7y agoI worked at Lockheed with Red Hat doing exactly what they are talking about here on the F-35. Unsurprisingly, It was a total disaster from the top down. I guarantee this will be as well. I was happy to get out after a year.
- stickfigure 7y agoPlease elaborate! You seem to have direct relevant knowledge but this tweet-length jab doesn't add much to the conversation. Even just a couple paragraphs would help us all understand.
- PedroBatista 7y agoNow that IBM owns Red Hat, we should get used to these hilarious/tragic "success stories".
- Glawen 7y agoI work in embedded sw in the automotive world and I absolutely did not understand how container accelerates their development. Could someone here with experience in this things enlighten me ? F22 raptor is still an embedded system, I cannot believe that it runs a linux with container. What I am missing to comprehend this article.
- regularfry 7y agoMight it be a particularly bonkers toolchain for an obscure piece of critical hardware which needs containerising so whatever nightmare of an install process only needs to be done once?
- lucas_membrane 7y agoOmigosh! The F-22 was the example of avionics software that worked, standing in contrast to the F-35 (sometimes) flying tarpit of tens of millions of lines of C and C++. Does this mean the DoD is now acquiring assured and acceptable agile-accelerated advanced armed airborne Ada avionics assets?
- natpalmer1776 7y agoSo a government contractor subcontracts another government contractor's new acquisition to do some unnecessary, yet likely expensive, consulting work that has no net benefit to the project. Nothing to see here folks, just the mold poking through the cracks of our public sector.