Airship Update - March 2020

By Alexander Hughes on 20/03/2020

What follows is the Airship Community Update for the month of March 2020, brought to you by the Airship Technical Committee.

SPOTLIGHT ON ....

  • Daylight Saving Time impacts community meetings. If you do not observe Daylight Saving Time, please note that meeting times are now one hour earlier than they were previously. For the current meeting list and their schedules, check the Airship Wiki.

AIRSHIP BLOG

The Airship blog is a great way to keep up with what's going on in the community. The Airship community publishes blog posts regularly, including the recent Airship 2.0 Blog series. These blog posts introduce the changes from Airship 1.0 to Airship 2.0, highlight new features, and detail the evolution of each component. The first six Airship 2.0 Blog posts are already available:

UPDATE 03-August-2020: Airship 2.0 development spans multiple milestones. Upon completing the first major milestone, Alpha, the community took some time to reflect on lessons learned and how they impacted the direction and design of Airship 2.0. We have summarized these lessons learned and how the design has changed over time - including using different technologies and approaches. You can read more about these changes here: Airship 2.0 is Alpha - Lessons Learned. We recommend reviewing these changes before reading blogs marked as "Pre-Alpha."


KUBECON POSTPONED, VIRTUAL MEETUP ANNOUNCEMENT

As KubeCon has been postponed, details here the Airship community will be holding a virtual meet-up instead and will serve much the same purpose as the originally planned KubeCon face-to-face team meeting. We hope that this virtual meeting will lead to increased participation and more valuable conversation.

The goals of the meet-up include:

  • Aligning on Airship use cases and high-level design
  • Finalizing actionable low-level design for upcoming scope
  • Reviewing work in progress
  • A retrospection
  • Open floor discussion

The full agenda can be viewed here, please add anything you would like to discuss.

The meet-up will take place on Zoom Tuesday the 31st of March 1400-2200 UTC (0900-1700 CDT) and sessions will be recorded.

  • Meeting ID: 613 001 653
  • Via Zoom

  • Via Telephone:

    • +1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)
    • +1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose)
    • +1 646 876 9923 US (New York)
    • +1 253 215 8782 US
    • +1 301 715 8592 US
    • +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)
    • If your local number is not listed, find it here

AIRSHIP 2.0 PROGRESS

Airship is a collection of loosely coupled, but interoperable open source tools that declaratively automates cloud provisioning. Airship is designed to make your cloud deployments simple, repeatable, and resilient.

The primary motivation for Airship 2.0 is the continued evolution of the control plane, and by aligning with maturing CNCF projects we can improve Airship by making 2.0:

  • More capable
  • More secure
  • More resilient
  • Easier to operate

To do this, we are moving the purpose-built service logic for lifecycle management developed in Airship 1.0 into native objects living in Kubernetes, building a new intelligent client airshipctl, and a new UI airshipui to interact with those objects. This evolved control plane will reduce the impact of upgrades, improve the operator experience and align with the overall CNCF direction.

By aligning with the CNCF direction

  • Support more use cases
  • Expand operational capabilities
  • Add more supported features

For more details, check out the Airship 2.0 preview video here.

In the February Update, we mentioned that Airship 2.0 progress is tracked in Github Issues.

The progress shown below is for airshipctl, the new Airship 2.0 client.

Last month, airshipctl saw the following activity:

  • 15 authors
  • 81 commits
  • 315 files changed
  • 13,517 additions
  • 1,761 deletions
  • 40 closed issues
  • 46 new issues

This activity brings us closer to Airship 2.0's alpha milestone. Below is the overall status of the alpha milestone:

alpha status march


NEW COMMUNICATION PLATFORM OPTIONS

In the OpenStack Foundation, communication by IRC is commonplace. The airship community maintains the #airshipit channel on Freenode IRC. As the Airship2 project grows, there is an increasing need to collaborate with projects which use Slack as their primary communication platform, such as metal3.io.

To make communication in both Slack and IRC convenient, the Airship community has also set up a Slack channel that mirrors back to IRC, giving community members the option to use just one platform to communicate within Airship and with other communities supporting specific projects.

You can join the new Slack channel here.


SECURITY VULNERABILITY MANAGEMENT

The Airship community is committed to confirming, resolving, and disclosing all reported security vulnerabilities.

The Airship community recently added the following documentation for more information on how detected vulnerabilities are confirmed, resolved, and disclosed. This new documentation describes how a user can report security vulnerabilities in Airship software.

In addition to this new process, we'd like to share the existing tools in place that help Airship proactively scan for vulnerabilities. These tools include:

  • Bandit for Python projects such as Pegleg and Promenade.
  • Gosec for Golang projects such as airshipctl.
  • Clair security scanner for all docker images hosted on Quay.io.

GET INVOLVED

This page lists everything you need to know to get involved and start contributing.


Alexander Hughes, on behalf of the Airship Technical Committee