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Here’s a company name you haven’t used to hear in conjunction with open source software release cycles, but will increasingly do: Equinix.
When the colocation giant acquired Packet, a bare metal cloud provider, last year, the crown jewel was Packet’s infrastructure automation technology, which made the server provisioning experience bare metal similar to that of provisioning VMs in a public cloud. The platform, called Tinkerbell, is open source and Equinix says it uses it to provision thousands of servers per day for its bare metal-as-a-service business, now called Equinix Metal.
The company released the software under the “permissive” Apache 2.0 license last May, which allowed it to be included in proprietary commercial projects. In November, the software was placed under the aegis of the Linux Foundation as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project.
According to Mark Coleman, director of developer relations at Equinix Metal, there has been a growing interest among corporate users in Tinkerbell since the project became part of the CNCF.
“Before entering the CNCF, we had a lot of people kicking the tires, but I felt like they were home lab people,” he said. . “They were looking for a way to run a small number of servers at home or maybe at small businesses. Since we joined the sandbox, the type of conversations we have is much, much bigger. You can. see it in the development stats, about all the different companies that are contributing to this now, you’ve got VMware in there, Alibaba Cloud, and all kinds of big companies starting to look at this more seriously.
“I think it’s because of your membership in the CNCF … If you’re going to install someone else’s tool in such a critical area of your stack, you want to know that there is a open governance and that you can sit down at the table to make changes to the roadmap. “
There is currently no commercial “enterprise” version of Tinkerbell, although this remains a possibility in the future. If that happens, however, it probably won’t come from Equinix.
“There are no plans at the moment for any commercial aspect to this,” Coleman said. “It’s already extremely valuable to us and to the community anyway.”
This week, Equinix announced new features and capabilities from Tinkerbell. The announcement was more of a progress report than a new version. While all of the new features are functional, none of them have undergone enough combat testing to be considered production ready. Equinix pitched them as something akin to a beta, or proof of concept, to pique the interest of developers.
Some of the new features are quite ambitious.
Hook, for example, is a new in-memory operating system installation environment intended to eventually replace OSIE (Operating System Installation Environment), one of the five microservices that make up Tinkerbell. According to Coleman, Hook will reduce the time it takes to deploy other operating systems other than the ten or so that Tinkerbell is configured to support right away.
“Hook helps us do a lot of things,” he says, “but one of the things he’s helped us do is add new operating systems more easily.”
He said this can cut the time it takes to add an unsupported operating system from weeks to hours, and that Equinix plans to use it by default in Q2.
“It’s a pluggable alternative, so you can use OSIE or Hook,” he added. “Hook is much faster, but it hasn’t been subjected to the same type of load as OSIE yet. We are currently testing internally, and we expect it to perform well under load.”
Another novelty is Action Hub, to share “actions”, or steps in the procurement process, taking advantage of CNCF Artifact Hub, a CNCF project that allows projects to create hubs to share different types of software. This allows users to share and reuse common workflows.
“What we’ve wanted to do for a while is allow other people to consume our stocks much like Docker Hub,” Coleman said. “You can use anyone else’s work, you can download it, you can inherit it, you can edit it, and then you can increase your version again if you want. with the Action Hub. ”
Tinkerbell also offers interim cluster API support – Kubernetes-style API for cluster creation, configuration, and management.
“In this release, we just released the proof of concept for the Custom API for Kubernetes,” he said. “What you can now do with Tinkerbell is say, ‘Here is a whole bunch of servers that I manage and I would like to install a Kubernetes cluster on them.’ The cluster API implementation will talk to Tinkerbell to bring all of these servers to a certain state and then install Kubernetes there. “
“But it’s a real proof of concept now,” he added. “We’ve added a bit of interface for people to test it out, and then we’ll figure out exactly how that fits into the paradigm a bit later, but there seems to be a lot of interest in going beyond the just provisioning and going all the way to the full running stack, whatever that may be. “
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