Pawel Suchanecki explained the ins and outs of his project “Securing more infrastructure by easing OS upgrades” for the CloudFest Hackathon.
Transcript (auto generated)
Simon:
What is the title of your project, and what is it all about?
Pawel:
All right. So the full version of the title is Securing More Infrastructure by Easing OS Upgrades.
But I would say we use this working title, Easing OS Upgrades, and it is working better.
It’s shorter. There was another part? What is it all about?
Simon:
Yeah.
Pawel:
That’s what I thought. Well, as you imagine, it is about removing the pain points from migrations in general.
But since we are enterprise Linux-centric, so Alma Linux project is now ABI-compatible with RHEL, so obviously we’re attacking this segment of the market.
And while we would like to make the world a better place for everyone, for other systems distributions as well, we’re focusing on our playground.
So we have a tool called Elevate, which has two first letters capitalised and it is enterprise linux of course what it does it really elevates you in a version of your operating system so it’s a migration in place that doesn’t require that many resources and i know that in the cloud computing times we have many ways to upgrade seamlessly because you start another instance do the configuration there and just switch to a working thing but there are cases where you don’t have this privilege you just need to do this right now under the pressure time pressure and of course you can be less fortunate countries with emerging markets and the the new shiny equipment that is pushed as um.
The road to towards the bleeding edge may not be your choice this is the other aspect of the project because our project actually had three legs the first leg was um and it was alldepending, on number of participants that we can secure that we could get during this event so the biggest thing that we had on the list was CentOS 6 to CentOS 7 upgrade.
But this is a huge thing. So the two alternatives were more towards this community, hosting community.
The first thing was to test how, let’s say, a real-world application, WordPress application behaves with our Elevate migration system.
So it boils down to, will your application work after the upgrade?
We thought it will be easy, but we found actually three bugs in it.
Simon:
That’s how life goes.
Pawel:
Yes, yes. But we are very, very happy about that just because we’re able to identify them to actually expedite a fix for one of them. So one will be fixed very soon.
The other is just a known issue. So we know that with the default config, it can happen, but we’ll add it to known issues and this will be resolved that way.
The last one is actually a missing feature in elevate which is about supporting third-party repos because that was the test with remy repos and i enabled so getting back over the the trackthe second bug was with maria db being upgraded to 10.4 and we missed server package there so So let me interject here.
Simon:
What is the target audience you intend to use the thing you built here?
Pawel:
Well, it is the Enterprise Linux users community.
It is hosting community because these are tightly coupled.
And you may be just in the position that you have an older system, forgotten instance somewhere on the internet in the cloud and you just need to upgrade it right now you don’t have extra sources and then you go with elevate possibly if it works for you because it supports migrations from the major versions so well if you are in between you have to help yourselves but this will just make your downtime shorter minimal downtime that’s the that’s the the goal for Elevate in general.
Simon:
I guess that is, that is pretty much it. Thank you for taking the time.
Pawel:
That was very nice to be here.