A CI/CD Platform in the Palm of Your Hand - Claudia Beresford, Weaveworks
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 01/05/2023

A CI/CD Platform in the Palm of Your Hand - Claudia Beresford, Weaveworks

In a strange way CI infra is treated as something of an afterthought by many orgs who would call themselves "cloud native". The providers we have to choose from tend to use legacy infrastructure, creating bottlenecks when teams need to incrementally build, test, and release. And for those which promise containerised builds, we then have to worry about the security of privileged docker-in-docker runs. That's our choice: slow spin up times, or a compromise on security. And this is before we even talk about the overhead, both cost and environmental, of maintaining a hot pool of nodes, which is what you would need to provide either solution with any decent degree of usability. Stranger still is that a solution may lie in the Old School: I'm talking bare-metal. Sort of. What's hot and new in this space are MicroVMs. Exactly as it sounds, MicroVMs are teeny VMs, giving the speed and flexibility of containers, with the security of regular VMs. The promise that MicroVMs can be a more performant and cost-effective CI model is catching on, and one such project making exciting progress is Liquid Metal. In this talk Claudia will present a case study of an experimental system combining Kubernetes with on-demand MicroVMs... and she will demo it all live on a Raspberry Pi cluster.