4 ms·

Hey all, I'm part of the team at Gravitational - a company behind this effort. Will be happy to answer any questions about this project.

by alexk 7y ago

richardwhiuk 7y ago
This seems to assume that each app will run on a separate Kubernetes cluster. Have you given any thought to packaging apps which will run on a single Kubernetes cluster?
- alexk 7y ago
  Yep, check out integration with helm for multiple apps: https://gravitational.com/gravity/docs/catalog/#publish-an-application-image https://gravitational.com/gravity/docs/catalog/#publish-an-a... It's something we support right now, but still polishing UX, the idea is to add more support for Helm 3.0 in the future in addition to Helm 2.0 we already support.
  - llama052 7y ago
    Looks like that functionality is locked behind the Enterprise edition correct?
    - alexk 7y ago
      Seems like we have to fix the docs a bit, `gravity app` is supposed to work with any helm registry or even without one: tele build helm-package ->> tarball gravity app install tarball
- closeparen 7y ago
  Is cluster-per-app a thing people really do? Seems to defeat the purpose. We use Mesos rather than Kubernetes, but the point is that a central infrastructure team (maybe 15 people) manages the cluster itself. It provides service owners (several thousand people) with a small and straightfoward abstraction to provision, upgrade, and decommission their particular apps. If each service team had to deal with its own cluster scheduling, these systems would usually be massive timewasters relative to the old ways (Puppet, shell scripts, etc).
  - jacques_chester 7y ago
    > Is cluster-per-app a thing people really do? Seems to defeat the purpose. Yes it is and yes, it does. Kubernetes has a fairly soft tenancy model, so in practice, multi-cluster is becoming a big deal, despite the cost in utilisation efficiency. Various attempts are being made to recover the utilisation efficiencies, such as Virtual Kubelet or Project Pacific. I think that the original sin of Kubernetes was the lack of a firm, first-class, top-down, mandatory access control model of tenancy. Disclosure: I work for VMware, which is responsible for Project Pacific.
    - alexk 7y ago
      If you think of an application as composed of hundreds of micro services, than it makes perfect sense. It's a multi-tenant system, it's just each tenant is a part of the same app.
      - jacques_chester 7y ago
        I'm not sure I follow you, could you elaborate?
  - alexk 7y ago
    > Is cluster-per-app a thing people really do? Gravity enables a somewhat unique scenario of companies taking their complex micro-services stack and delivering it as an installer for software application. From the end users' perspective they don't even know that it's a k8s cluster, they consume an application that consists of multiple components. However Gravity supports the scenario when multiple applications are installed in the cluster as well.
chucky_z 7y ago
Would Gravitational ever think about creating a more generic layer on this, e.g.: to manage Mesos, Nomad, or something else entirely like Corosync via some kind of driver system? I love Teleport but don't use k8s anywhere.
- alexk 7y ago
  This is one of those ideas we always wanted to implement, but in reality, once we took on deploying K8s it completely consumed all the teams' resources :D
  - chucky_z 7y ago
    Anyway, just a 1-person note, but "here's an open source bottom layer for you to build (x) on top with the ux of teleport/gravity" would be incredible.
ablekh 7y ago
1. Is Gravity a fully open source software (with commercial support) or an Open Core software? If the latter, please point to a feature matrix or relevant part of documentation. 2. How Gravity solution (and/or approach) is different from a similar offering by Replicated? EDIT: Oops, sorry, just found the answer to my Q1: about halfway down on the following page: https://gravitational.com/gravity https://gravitational.com/gravity. However, some information on pricing structure and approximate numbers would be appreciated. Replicated is more transparent in this regard. :-) Q2 still stands. Looking forward to hearing from you.
mwcampbell 7y ago
I wonder if you've considered building a complete VM image instead of a tarball. A minimal, immutable VM image could be more finely tuned and hardened than a tarball installed on top of a general-purpose distro. You could take inspiration from CoreOS or LinuxKit here. Or do you find that the sysadmins in the kind of organization that install these on-prem packages really want to install on top of their favorite distro?
- alexwilliamsca 7y ago
  A minimal immutable VM image which is finely tuned and hardened is the exact approach we're taking with https://on-premises.com https://on-premises.com - except we haven't focused on k8s workloads. We've found that customers would much rather import a VM than "install" something, however there are valid use-cases which require special monitoring tools and other customizations which are not possible on an immutable system. Gravity is interesting and seems to meet that demand.
  - moondev 7y ago
    This look interesting, is there a way to try out meta without being funneled into the sales pipeline? What is the workflow for baking a machine? Are you using packer under the covers or some other tooling? What on-prem machine image formats are supported?
    - alexwilliamsca 7y ago
      There's still a bit of "manual" work to get someone up and running on our Meta appliance, so unfortunately you would have to go through our sales process. However if you just want a video or screen recording of how it works then I can put something online in the next hour or two. For baking the machine, we use Ansible under the covers and have a set of Lisp scripts to manage everything. As for image formats: qcow2, raw, vhd (and vmdk in the .ova file). Not trying to hijack Gravitational's thread, please contact me (email in profile, or 'aw-' on FreeNode) if you want to discuss more.
- alexk 7y ago

Hey all, I'm part of the team at Gravitational - a company behind this effort. Will be happy to answer any questions about this project.

by alexk 7y ago

Hey all, I'm part of the team at Gravitational - a company behind this effort. Will be happy to answer any questions about this project.

richardwhiuk 7y ago

This seems to assume that each app will run on a separate Kubernetes cluster. Have you given any thought to packaging apps which will run on a single Kubernetes cluster?

alexk 7y ago
Yep, check out integration with helm for multiple apps: https://gravitational.com/gravity/docs/catalog/#publish-an-application-image https://gravitational.com/gravity/docs/catalog/#publish-an-a... It's something we support right now, but still polishing UX, the idea is to add more support for Helm 3.0 in the future in addition to Helm 2.0 we already support.
- llama052 7y ago
  Looks like that functionality is locked behind the Enterprise edition correct?
  - alexk 7y ago
    Seems like we have to fix the docs a bit, `gravity app` is supposed to work with any helm registry or even without one: tele build helm-package ->> tarball gravity app install tarball
closeparen 7y ago
Is cluster-per-app a thing people really do? Seems to defeat the purpose. We use Mesos rather than Kubernetes, but the point is that a central infrastructure team (maybe 15 people) manages the cluster itself. It provides service owners (several thousand people) with a small and straightfoward abstraction to provision, upgrade, and decommission their particular apps. If each service team had to deal with its own cluster scheduling, these systems would usually be massive timewasters relative to the old ways (Puppet, shell scripts, etc).
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  > Is cluster-per-app a thing people really do? Seems to defeat the purpose. Yes it is and yes, it does. Kubernetes has a fairly soft tenancy model, so in practice, multi-cluster is becoming a big deal, despite the cost in utilisation efficiency. Various attempts are being made to recover the utilisation efficiencies, such as Virtual Kubelet or Project Pacific. I think that the original sin of Kubernetes was the lack of a firm, first-class, top-down, mandatory access control model of tenancy. Disclosure: I work for VMware, which is responsible for Project Pacific.
  - alexk 7y ago
    If you think of an application as composed of hundreds of micro services, than it makes perfect sense. It's a multi-tenant system, it's just each tenant is a part of the same app.
    - jacques_chester 7y ago
      I'm not sure I follow you, could you elaborate?
- alexk 7y ago
  > Is cluster-per-app a thing people really do? Gravity enables a somewhat unique scenario of companies taking their complex micro-services stack and delivering it as an installer for software application. From the end users' perspective they don't even know that it's a k8s cluster, they consume an application that consists of multiple components. However Gravity supports the scenario when multiple applications are installed in the cluster as well.

chucky_z 7y ago

Would Gravitational ever think about creating a more generic layer on this, e.g.: to manage Mesos, Nomad, or something else entirely like Corosync via some kind of driver system? I love Teleport but don't use k8s anywhere.

alexk 7y ago
This is one of those ideas we always wanted to implement, but in reality, once we took on deploying K8s it completely consumed all the teams' resources :D
- chucky_z 7y ago
  Anyway, just a 1-person note, but "here's an open source bottom layer for you to build (x) on top with the ux of teleport/gravity" would be incredible.

ablekh 7y ago

1. Is Gravity a fully open source software (with commercial support) or an Open Core software? If the latter, please point to a feature matrix or relevant part of documentation. 2. How Gravity solution (and/or approach) is different from a similar offering by Replicated? EDIT: Oops, sorry, just found the answer to my Q1: about halfway down on the following page: https://gravitational.com/gravity https://gravitational.com/gravity. However, some information on pricing structure and approximate numbers would be appreciated. Replicated is more transparent in this regard. :-) Q2 still stands. Looking forward to hearing from you.

mwcampbell 7y ago

I wonder if you've considered building a complete VM image instead of a tarball. A minimal, immutable VM image could be more finely tuned and hardened than a tarball installed on top of a general-purpose distro. You could take inspiration from CoreOS or LinuxKit here. Or do you find that the sysadmins in the kind of organization that install these on-prem packages really want to install on top of their favorite distro?

alexwilliamsca 7y ago
A minimal immutable VM image which is finely tuned and hardened is the exact approach we're taking with https://on-premises.com https://on-premises.com - except we haven't focused on k8s workloads. We've found that customers would much rather import a VM than "install" something, however there are valid use-cases which require special monitoring tools and other customizations which are not possible on an immutable system. Gravity is interesting and seems to meet that demand.
- moondev 7y ago
  This look interesting, is there a way to try out meta without being funneled into the sales pipeline? What is the workflow for baking a machine? Are you using packer under the covers or some other tooling? What on-prem machine image formats are supported?
  - alexwilliamsca 7y ago
    There's still a bit of "manual" work to get someone up and running on our Meta appliance, so unfortunately you would have to go through our sales process. However if you just want a video or screen recording of how it works then I can put something online in the next hour or two. For baking the machine, we use Ansible under the covers and have a set of Lisp scripts to manage everything. As for image formats: qcow2, raw, vhd (and vmdk in the .ova file). Not trying to hijack Gravitational's thread, please contact me (email in profile, or 'aw-' on FreeNode) if you want to discuss more.
alexk 7y ago