cloud infrastructure
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How Roblox completely transformed its tech stack
Picture yourself in the role of CIO at Roblox in 2017.
At that point, the gaming platform and publishing system that launched in 2005 was growing fast, but its underlying technology was aging, consisting of a single data center in Chicago and a bunch of third-party partners, including AWS, all running bare metal (nonvirtualized) servers. At a time when users have precious little patience for outages, your uptime was just two nines, or less than 99% (five nines is considered optimal).
Unbelievably, Roblox was popular in spite of this, but the company’s leadership knew it couldn’t continue with performance like that, especially as it was rapidly gaining in popularity. The company needed to call in the technology cavalry, which is essentially what it did when it hired Dan Williams in 2017.
Williams has a history of solving these kinds of intractable infrastructure issues, with a background that includes a gig at Facebook between 2007 and 2011, where he worked on the technology to help the young social network scale to millions of users. Later, he worked at Dropbox, where he helped build a new internal network, leading the company’s move away from AWS, a major undertaking involving moving more than 500 petabytes of data.
When Roblox approached him in mid-2017, he jumped at the chance to take on another major infrastructure challenge. While they are still in the midst of the transition to a new modern tech stack today, we sat down with Williams to learn how he put the company on the road to a cloud-native, microservices-focused system with its own network of worldwide edge data centers.
Scoping the problem
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Kong launches Kong Konnect, its cloud-native connectivity platform
At its (virtual) Kong Summit 2020, API platform Kong today announced the launch of Kong Konnect, its managed end-to-end cloud-native connectivity platform. The idea here is to give businesses a single service that allows them to manage the connectivity between their APIs and microservices and help developers and operators manage their workflows across Kong’s API Gateway, Kubernetes Ingress and Kong Service Mesh runtimes.
“It’s a universal control plane delivery cloud that’s consumption-based, where you can manage and orchestrate API gateway runtime, service mesh runtime, and Kubernetes Ingress controller runtime — and even Insomnia for design — all from one platform,” Kong CEO and co-founder Augusto “Aghi” Marietti told me.
The new service is now in private beta and will become generally available in early 2021.
Image Credits: Kong
At the core of the platform is Kong’s new so-called ServiceHub, which provides that single pane of glass for managing a company’s services across the organization (and make them accessible across teams, too).
As Marietti noted, organizations can choose which runtime they want to use and purchase only those capabilities of the service that they currently need. The platform also includes built-in monitoring tools and supports any cloud, Kubernetes provider or on-premises environment, as long as they are Kubernetes-based.
The idea here, too, is to make all these tools accessible to developers and not just architects and operators. “I think that’s a key advantage, too,” Marietti said. “We are lowering the barrier by making a connectivity technology easier to be used by the 50 million developers — not just by the architects that were doing big grand plans at a large company.”
To do this, Konnect will be available as a self-service platform, reducing the friction of adopting the service.
Image Credits: Kong
This is also part of the company’s grander plan to go beyond its core API management services. Those services aren’t going away, but they are now part of the larger Kong platform. With its open-source Kong API Gateway, the company built the pathway to get to this point, but that’s a stable product now and it’s now clearly expanding beyond that with this cloud connectivity play that takes the company’s existing runtimes and combines them to provide a more comprehensive service.
“We have upgraded the vision of really becoming an end-to-end cloud connectivity company,” Marietti said. “Whether that’s API management or Kubernetes Ingress, […] or Kuma Service Mesh. It’s about connectivity problems. And so the company uplifted that solution to the enterprise.”
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Pixie Labs raises $9.15M Series A round for its Kubernetes observability platform
Pixie, a startup that provides developers with tools to get observability into their Kubernetes-native applications, today announced that it has raised a $9.15 million Series A round led by Benchmark, with participation from GV. In addition, the company also today said that its service is now available as a public beta.
The company was co-founded by Zain Asgar (CEO), a former Google engineer working on Google AI and adjunct professor at Stanford, and Ishan Mukherjee (CPO), who led Apple’s Siri Knowledge Graph product team and also previously worked on Amazon’s Robotics efforts. Asgar had originally joined Benchmark to work on developer tools for machine learning. Over time, the idea changed to using machine learning to power tools to help developers manage large-scale deployments instead.
“We saw data systems, this move to the edge, and we felt like this old cloud 1.0 model of manually collecting data and shipping it to databases in the cloud seems pretty inefficient,” Mukherjee explained. “And the other part was: I was on call. I got gray hair and all that stuff. We felt like we could build this new generation of developer tools and get to Michael Jordan’s vision of intelligent augmentation, which is giving creatives tools where they can be a lot more productive.”
Image Credits: Pixie
The team argues that most competing monitoring and observability systems focus on operators and IT teams — and often involve a long manual setup process. But Pixie wants to automate most of this manual process and build a tool that developers want to use.
Pixie runs inside a developer’s Kubernetes platform and developers get instant and automatic visibility into their production environments. With Pixie, which the team is making available as a freemium SaaS product, there is no instrumentation to install. Instead, the team uses relatively new Linux kernel techniques like eBPF to collect data right at the source.
“One of the really cool things about this is that we can deploy Pixie in about a minute and you’ll instantly get data,” said Asgar. “Our goal here is that this really helps you when there are cases where you don’t want your business logic to be full of monitoring code, especially if you forget something — when you have an outage.”
Image Credits: Pixie
At the core of the developer experience is what the company calls “Pixie scripts.” Using a Python-like language (PxL), developers can codify their debugging workflows. The company’s system already features a number of scripts written by the team itself and the community at large. But as Asgar noted, not every user will write scripts. “The way scripts work, it’s supposed to capture human knowledge in that problem. We don’t expect the average user — or even the way-above-average developer — ever to touch a script or write one. They’re just going to use it in a specific scenario,” he explained.
Looking ahead, the team plans to make these scripts and the scripting language more robust and usable to allow developers to go from passively monitoring their systems to building scripts that can actively take actions on their clusters based on the monitoring data the system collects.
“Zain and Ishan’s provocative idea was to move software monitoring to the source,” said Eric Vishria, general partner at Benchmark. “Pixie enables engineering teams to fundamentally rethink their monitoring strategy as it presents a vision of the future where we detect anomalous behavior and make operational decisions inside the infrastructure layer itself. This allows companies of all sizes to monitor their digital experiences in a more responsive, cost-effective and scalable manner.”
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Microsoft challenges Twilio with the launch of Azure Communication Services
Microsoft today announced the launch of Azure Communication Services, a new set of features in its cloud that enable developers to add voice and video calling, chat and text messages to their apps, as well as old-school telephony.
The company describes the new set of services as the “first fully managed communication platform offering from a major cloud provider,” and that seems right, given that Google and AWS offer some of these features, including the AWS notification service, for example, but not as part of a cohesive communication service. Indeed, it seems Azure Communication Service is more of a competitor to the core features of Twilio or up-and-coming MessageBird.
Over the course of the last few years, Microsoft has built up a lot of experience in this area, in large parts thanks to the success of its Teams service. Unsurprisingly, that’s something Microsoft is also playing up in its announcement.
“Azure Communication Services is built natively on top a global, reliable cloud — Azure. Businesses can confidently build and deploy on the same low latency global communication network used by Microsoft Teams to support over 5 billion meeting minutes in a single day,” writes Scott Van Vliet, corporate vice president for Intelligent Communication at the company.
Microsoft also stresses that it offers a set of additional smart services that developers can tap into to build out their communication services, including its translation tools, for example. The company also notes that its services are encrypted to meet HIPPA and GDPR standards.
Like similar services, developers access the various capabilities through a set of new APIs and SDKs.
As for the core services, the capabilities here are pretty much what you’d expect. There’s voice and video calling (and the ability to shift between them). There’s support for chat and, starting in October, users will also be able to send text messages. Microsoft says developers will be able to send these to users anywhere, with Microsoft positioning it as a global service.
Provisioning phone numbers, too, is part of the services and developers will be able to provision those for in-bound and out-bound calls, port existing numbers, request new ones and — most importantly for contact-center users — integrate them with existing on-premises equipment and carrier networks.
“Our goal is to meet businesses where they are and provide solutions to help them be resilient and move their business forward in today’s market,” writes Van Vliet. “We see rich communication experiences – enabled by voice, video, chat, and SMS – continuing to be an integral part in how businesses connect with their customers across devices and platforms.”
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Microsoft brings data services to its Arc multi-cloud management service
Microsoft today launched a major update to its Arc multi-cloud service that allows Azure customers to run and manage workloads across clouds — including those of Microsoft’s competitors — and their on-premises data centers. First announced at Microsoft Ignite in 2019, Arc was always meant to not just help users manage their servers but also allow them to run data services like Azure SQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL, close to where their data sits.
Today, the company is making good on this promise with the preview launch of Azure Arc-enabled data services with support for, as expected, Azure SQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL.
In addition, Microsoft is making the core feature of Arc, Arc-enabled servers, generally available. These are the tools at the core of the service that allow enterprises that use the standard Azure Portal to manage and monitor their Windows and Linux servers across their multi-cloud and edge environments.
Image Credits: Microsoft
“We’ve always known that enterprises are looking to unlock the agility of the cloud — they love the app model, they love the business model — while balancing a need to maintain certain applications and workloads on premises,” Rohan Kumar, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Azure Data said. “A lot of customers actually have a multi-cloud strategy. In some cases, they need to keep the data specifically for regulatory compliance. And in many cases, they want to maximize their existing investments. They’ve spent a lot of CapEx.”
As Kumar stressed, Microsoft wants to meet customers where they are, without forcing them to adopt a container architecture, for example, or replace their specialized engineered appliances to use Arc.
“Hybrid is really [about] providing that flexible choice to our customers, meeting them where they are, and not prescribing a solution,” he said.
He admitted that this approach makes engineering the solution more difficult, but the team decided the baseline should be a container endpoint and nothing more. And for the most part, Microsoft packaged up the tools its own engineers were already using to run Azure services on the company’s own infrastructure to manage these services in a multi-cloud environment.
“In hindsight, it was a little challenging at the beginning, because, you can imagine, when we initially built them, we didn’t imagine that we’ll be packaging them like this. But it’s a very modern design point,” Kumar said. But the result is that supporting customers is now relatively easy because it’s so similar to what the team does in Azure, too.
Kumar noted that one of the selling points for the Azure Data Services is also that the version of Azure SQL is essentially evergreen, allowing them to stop worrying about SQL Server licensing and end-of-life support questions.
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Pure Storage acquires data service platform Portworx for $370M
Pure Storage, the public enterprise data storage company, today announced that it has acquired Portworx, a well-funded startup that provides a cloud-native storage and data-management platform based on Kubernetes, for $370 million in cash. This marks Pure Storage’s largest acquisition to date and shows how important this market for multicloud data services has become.
Current Portworx enterprise customers include the likes of Carrefour, Comcast, GE Digital, Kroger, Lufthansa, and T-Mobile. At the core of the service is its ability to help users migrate their data and create backups. It creates a storage layer that allows developers to then access that data, no matter where it resides.
Pure Storage will use Portworx’s technology to expand its hybrid and multicloud services and provide Kubernetes -based data services across clouds.
Image Credits: Portworx
“I’m tremendously proud of what we’ve built at Portworx: An unparalleled data services platform for customers running mission-critical applications in hybrid and multicloud environments,” said Portworx CEO Murli Thirumale. “The traction and growth we see in our business daily shows that containers and Kubernetes are fundamental to the next-generation application architecture and thus competitiveness. We are excited for the accelerated growth and customer impact we will be able to achieve as a part of Pure.”
When the company raised its Series C round last year, Thirumale told me that Portworx had expanded its customer base by over 100% and its bookings increased by 376 from 2018 to 2019.
“As forward-thinking enterprises adopt cloud-native strategies to advance their business, we are thrilled to have the Portworx team and their groundbreaking technology joining us at Pure to expand our success in delivering multicloud data services for Kubernetes,” said Charles Giancarlo, chairman and CEO of Pure Storage. “This acquisition marks a significant milestone in expanding our Modern Data Experience to cover traditional and cloud native applications alike.”
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Suse contributes EiriniX to the Cloud Foundry Foundation
Suse today announced that it has contributed EiriniX, a framework for building extensions for Eirini, a technology that brings support for Kubernetes-based container orchestration to the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service project.
About a year ago, Suse also contributed the KubeCF project to the foundation, which itself allows the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime — the core of Cloud Foundry — to run on top of Kubernetes.
Image Credits: Suse
“At Suse we are developing upstream first as much as possible,” said Thomas Di Giacomo, president of Engineering and Innovation at Suse. “So, after experiencing the value of contributing KubeCF to the Foundation earlier this year, we decided it would be beneficial to both the Cloud Foundry community and the EiriniX team to do it again. We have seen an uptick in contributions to and usage of KubeCF since it became a Foundation project, indicating that more organizations are investing developer time into the upstream. Contributing EiriniX to the Foundation is a surefire way to get the broader community involved.”
Suse first demonstrated EiriniX a year ago. The tool implements features like the ability to SSH into a container and debug it, for example, or to use alternative logging solutions for KubeCF.
“There is significant value in contributing this project to the Foundation, as it ensures that other project teams looking for a similar solution to creating Extensions around Eirini will not reinvent the wheel,” said Chip Childers, executive director, Cloud Foundry Foundation. “Now that EiriniX exists within the Foundation, developers can take full advantage of its library of add-ons to Eirini and modify core features of Cloud Foundry. I’m excited to see all of the use cases for this project that have not yet been invented.”
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Mirantis acquires Lens, an IDE for Kubernetes
Mirantis, the company that recently bought Docker’s enterprise business, today announced that it has acquired Lens, a desktop application that the team describes as a Kubernetes-integrated development environment. Mirantis previously acquired the team behind the Finnish startup Kontena, the company that originally developed Lens.
Lens itself was most recently owned by Lakend Labs, though, which describes itself as “a collective of cloud native compute geeks and technologists” that is “committed to preserving and making available the open-source software and products of Kontena.” Lakend open-sourced Lens a few months ago.
Image Credits: Mirantis
“The mission of Mirantis is very simple: We want to be — for the enterprise — the fastest way to [build] modern apps at scale,” Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel told me. “We believe that enterprises are constantly undergoing this cycle of modernizing the way they build applications from one wave to the next — and we want to provide products to the enterprise that help them make that happen.”
Right now, that means a focus on helping enterprises build cloud-native applications at scale and, almost by default, that means providing these companies with all kinds of container infrastructure services.
“But there is another piece of the story that’s always been going through our minds, which is, how do we become more developer-centric and developer-focused, because, as we’ve all seen in the past 10 years, developers have become more and more in charge off what services and infrastructure they’re actually using,” Ionel explained. And that’s where the Kontena and Lens acquisitions fit in. Managing Kubernetes clusters, after all, isn’t trivial — yet now developers are often tasked with managing and monitoring how their applications interact with their company’s infrastructure.
“Lens makes it dramatically easier for developers to work with Kubernetes, to build and deploy their applications on Kubernetes, and it’s just a huge obstacle-remover for people who are turned off by the complexity of Kubernetes to get more value,” he added.
“I’m very excited to see that we found a common vision with Adrian for how to incorporate Lens and how to make life for developers more enjoyable in this cloud-native technology landscape,” Miska Kaipiainen, the former CEO of Kontena and now Mirantis’ director of Engineering, told me.
He describes Lens as an IDE for Kubernetes. While you could obviously replicate Lens’ functionality with existing tools, Kaipiainen argues that it would take 20 different tools to do this. “One of them could be for monitoring, another could be for logs. A third one is for command-line configuration, and so forth and so forth,” he said. “What we have been trying to do with Lens is that we are bringing all these technologies [together] and provide one single, unified, easy to use interface for developers, so they can keep working on their workloads and on their clusters, without ever losing focus and the context of what they are working on.”
Among other things, Lens includes a context-aware terminal, multi-cluster management capabilities that work across clouds and support for the open-source Prometheus monitoring service.
For Mirantis, Lens is a very strategic investment and the company will continue to develop the service. Indeed, Ionel said the Lens team now basically has unlimited resources.
Looking ahead, Kaipiainen said the team is looking at adding extensions to Lens through an API within the next couple of months. “Through this extension API, we are actually able to collaborate and work more closely with other technology vendors within the cloud technology landscape so they can start plugging directly into the Lens UI and visualize the data coming from their components, so that will make it very powerful.”
Ionel also added that the company is working on adding more features for larger software teams to Lens, which is currently a single-user product. A lot of users are already using Lens in the context of very large development teams, after all.
While the core Lens tools will remain free and open source, Mirantis will likely charge for some new features that require a centralized service for managing them. What exactly that will look like remains to be seen, though.
If you want to give Lens a try, you can download the Windows, macOS and Linux binaries here.
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Microsoft launches Open Service Mesh
Microsoft today announced the launch of a new open-source service mesh based on the Envoy proxy. The Open Service Mesh is meant to be a reference implementation of the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) spec, a standard interface for service meshes on Kubernetes that has the backing of most of the players in this ecosystem.
The company plans to donate Open Service Mesh to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to ensure that it is community-led and has open governance.
“SMI is really resonating with folks and so we really thought that there was room in the ecosystem for a reference implementation of SMI where the mesh technology was first and foremost implementing those SMI APIs and making it the best possible SMI experience for customers,” Microsoft director of partner management for Azure Compute (and CNCF board member) Gabe Monroy told me.
Image Credits: Microsoft
He also added that, because SMI provides the lowest common denominator API design, Open Service Mesh gives users the ability to “bail out” to raw Envoy if they need some more advanced features. This “no cliffs” design, Monroy noted, is core to the philosophy behind Open Service Mesh.
As for its feature set, SMI handles all of the standard service mesh features you’d expect, including securing communications between services using mTLS, managing access control policies, service monitoring and more.
Image Credits: Microsoft
There are plenty of other service mesh technologies in the market today, though. So why would Microsoft launch this?
“What our customers have been telling us is that solutions that are out there today, Istio being a good example, are extremely complex,” he said. “It’s not just me saying this. We see the data in the AKS support queue of customers who are trying to use this stuff — and they’re struggling right here. This is just hard technology to use, hard technology to build at scale. And so the solutions that were out there all had something that wasn’t quite right and we really felt like something lighter weight and something with more of an SMI focus was what was going to hit the sweet spot for the customers that are dabbling in this technology today.”
Monroy also noted that Open Service Mesh can sit alongside other solutions like Linkerd, for example.
A lot of pundits expected Google to also donate its Istio service mesh to the CNCF. That move didn’t materialize. “It’s funny. A lot of people are very focused on the governance aspect of this,” he said. “I think when people over-focus on that, you lose sight of how are customers doing with this technology. And the truth is that customers are not having a great time with Istio in the wild today. I think even folks who are deep in that community will acknowledge that and that’s really the reason why we’re not interested in contributing to that ecosystem at the moment.”
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Google Cloud launches Confidential VMs
At its virtual Cloud Next ’20 event, Google Cloud today announced Confidential VMs, a new type of virtual machine that makes use of the company’s work around confidential computing to ensure that data isn’t just encrypted at rest but also while it is in memory.
“We already employ a variety of isolation and sandboxing techniques as part of our cloud infrastructure to help make our multi-tenant architecture secure,” the company notes in today’s announcement. “Confidential VMs take this to the next level by offering memory encryption so that you can further isolate your workloads in the cloud. Confidential VMs can help all our customers protect sensitive data, but we think it will be especially interesting to those in regulated industries.”
In the backend, Confidential VMs make use of AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization feature, available in its second-generation EPYC CPUs. With that, the data will stay encrypted when used and the encryption keys to make this happen are automatically generated in hardware and can’t be exported — and with that, even Google doesn’t have access to the keys either.
Image Credits: Google
Developers who want to shift their existing VMs to a Confidential VM can do so with just a few clicks. Google notes that it built Confidential VMs on top of its Shielded VMs, which already provide protection against rootkits and other exploits.
“With built-in secure encrypted virtualization, 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors provide an innovative hardware-based security feature that helps secure data in a virtualized environment,” said Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president, Data Center Ecosystem, AMD. “For the new Google Compute Engine Confidential VMs in the N2D series, we worked with Google to help customers both secure their data and achieve performance of their workloads.”
That last part is obviously important, given that the extra encryption and decryption steps do incur at least a minor performance penalty. Google says it worked with AMD and developed new open-source drivers to ensure that “the performance metrics of Confidential VMs are close to those of non-confidential VMs.” At least according to the benchmarks Google itself has disclosed so far, both startup times and memory read and throughput performance are virtually the same for regular VMs and Confidential VMs.
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