Welcome to the webpage and inaugural blog post of the Kubic Project. This post should serve as a basic introduction to Kubic for anyone interested in what we’re doing.

What is Kubic?

The Kubic Project is a sub-project of the broader openSUSE Project.

We’re focused on new and emerging technologies surrounding containers. We’re exploring, developing, adapting and integrating these technologies, helping bring them to the world of openSUSE and helping to improve them directly in their respective upstream projects.

Many of these technologies also serve as upstreams for SUSE’s CaaS Platform Product.

Why?

To put it simply, because these technologies are fun.

But to try and be a little serious, the ongoing trends with Containers, Micro-Services, and alternative methods of application delivery are disruptive and changing peoples’ expectations. Instead of complicated manual setups, a growing number of apps & services are just a simple ‘pull’ away, and this changes what users need and expect from their operating systems & surrounding tooling.

The Kubic Project aims to be at the forefront of these trends, taking the best of these new concepts and bringing them to openSUSE while also helping adjust openSUSE to best support these new technologies.

What are we working on?

As of March 2018 we’re currently working on:

Transactional Updates

MicroOS

Tumbleweed Kubic

Velum

Alternative Container Runtimes (CRI-O, Podman)

Rootless Containers

As the world of containers moves very quickly, this list is bound to be incomplete and incorrect for readers in the future, but below is a brief summary of each to give a flavour of what we’re working on.

transactional-update is a command-line tool that brings atomic updates to openSUSE & SUSE distributions.

It leverages our long experience with btrfs , zypper and snapper to update a system without touching the running system.

All package updates are prepared as a single operation in a btrfs snapshot. This snapshot is not used until the next reboot.

Any problems can be immediately rolled back by discarding this transactional snapshot and rebooting again, instantly returning the system to its working order.

When coupled with a read-only root filesystem, users are left with a robust running operating system that they can be confident will not change in any way at all while it’s running, and can be confidently returned to working order if updates have unintended side-effects.

Transactional Updates with read-only root filesystem are currently available by default in Tumbleweed Kubic and will soon be available as an installation option in both openSUSE Tumbleweed and openSUSE Leap 15.

MicroOS

MicroOS is the base system for Tumbleweed Kubic.

It is an openSUSE Tumbleweed derivative designed to run containers and optimised for large deployments.

It includes both a read-only root filesystem and fully automated transactional updates out of the box. Its development and release is fully aligned and tested as part of Tumbleweed, meaning any new Tumbleweed release automatically includes updates to Kubic’s MicroOS.

MicroOS can currently be installed as by selecting the System Role when installing Tumbleweed Kubic.

In the future we also intend to offer VM images.

Tumbleweed Kubic

Tumbleweed Kubic is our Container-as-a-Service Platform using Kubernetes atop MicroOS.

In addition to the MicroOS System Role, Tumbleweed Kubic currently offers the Unconfigured Cluster Node role, allowing users to get started with setting up their own Kubernetes Cluster.

In the future Tumbleweed Kubic will also offer a further streamlined and automated cluster configuration workflow based on Velum.

Velum

Velum is our Cluster Dashboard & Bootstrap Tool which will allow you to:

Bootstrap a Kubernetes Cluster in a simple WebUI

Manage your cluster, including adding & removing nodes, monitor faulty nodes, etc.

Setup an update policy to help define when and how you want Transactional Update to run across your cluster.

Velum is under active development and we are hopeful to offer Tumbleweed Kubic images containing Velum in the near future.

Alternative Container Runtimes

We are currently investigating alternative container runtimes such as CRI-O and its companion tooling Podman as more lightweight option for running containers both within Kubernetes and as a stand-alone runtime.

Both are already available in both Tumbleweed & Tumbleweed Kubic today.

Rootless Containers

This is a project that was spear-headed by our team (based on the work of the larger container community). The idea was to allow completely unprivileged users to create containers on their own machines using a standardised container runtime (runc). We also wrote umoci which allows unprivileged (and privileged) users to operate easily on OCI images.

Currently the main interest being worked on (along with some of the containers community) is the ability to have unprivileged networking using TAP. This would (theoretically) push us closer to having the possibility of a rootless Kubernetes deployment. You can keep a close eye on rootlesscontaine.rs if you’re interested in more about this effort.

Rootless containers already work flawlessly on all modern openSUSE distributions.

How can I get involved?

Most importantly, like every openSUSE Project, Kubic is an open community.

We would like your help.

Our sources can be found on GitHub.

If you’re interested in helping us on anything mentioned here, or have ideas on what we should be looking at, then please get in touch either on our Mailing List or on IRC where you can find us in #Kubic on Freenode.