Open Stack

If the base layers are shared, you won't pay extra for the separate puppet container unless you have another container also installing ruby in an upper layer. With OpenStack, thats unlikely.

the apparent size of a container is not equal to its actual size.

Thanks,
Kevin
________________________________________
From: Jiří Stránský [jistr at redhat.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2018 9:42 AM
To: openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [TripleO][Edge] Reduce base layer of containers for security and size of images (maintenance) sakes

On 28. 11. 18 18:29, Bogdan Dobrelya wrote:
> On 11/28/18 6:02 PM, Jiří Stránský wrote:
>> <snip>
>>
>>>
>>> Reiterating again on previous points:
>>>
>>> -I'd be fine removing systemd. But lets do it properly and not via 'rpm
>>> -ev --nodeps'.
>>> -Puppet and Ruby *are* required for configuration. We can certainly put
>>> them in a separate container outside of the runtime service containers
>>> but doing so would actually cost you much more space/bandwidth for each
>>> service container. As both of these have to get downloaded to each node
>>> anyway in order to generate config files with our current mechanisms
>>> I'm not sure this buys you anything.
>>
>> +1. I was actually under the impression that we concluded yesterday on
>> IRC that this is the only thing that makes sense to seriously consider.
>> But even then it's not a win-win -- we'd gain some security by leaner
>> production images, but pay for it with space+bandwidth by duplicating
>> image content (IOW we can help achieve one of the goals we had in mind
>> by worsening the situation w/r/t the other goal we had in mind.)
>>
>> Personally i'm not sold yet but it's something that i'd consider if we
>> got measurements of how much more space/bandwidth usage this would
>> consume, and if we got some further details/examples about how serious
>> are the security concerns if we leave config mgmt tools in runtime images.
>>
>> IIRC the other options (that were brought forward so far) were already
>> dismissed in yesterday's IRC discussion and on the reviews. Bin/lib bind
>> mounting being too hacky and fragile, and nsenter not really solving the
>> problem (because it allows us to switch to having different bins/libs
>> available, but it does not allow merging the availability of bins/libs
>> from two containers into a single context).
>>
>>>
>>> We are going in circles here I think....
>>
>> +1. I think too much of the discussion focuses on "why it's bad to have
>> config tools in runtime images", but IMO we all sorta agree that it
>> would be better not to have them there, if it came at no cost.
>>
>> I think to move forward, it would be interesting to know: if we do this
>> (i'll borrow Dan's drawing):
>>
>> |base container| --> |service container| --> |service container w/
>> Puppet installed|
>>
>> How much more space and bandwidth would this consume per node (e.g.
>> separately per controller, per compute). This could help with decision
>> making.
>
> As I've already evaluated in the related bug, that is:
>
> puppet-* modules and manifests ~ 16MB
> puppet with dependencies ~61MB
> dependencies of the seemingly largest a dependency, systemd ~190MB
>
> that would be an extra layer size for each of the container images to be
> downloaded/fetched into registries.

Thanks, i tried to do the math of the reduction vs. inflation in sizes
as follows. I think the crucial point here is the layering. If we do
this image layering:

|base| --> |+ service| --> |+ Puppet|

we'd drop ~267 MB from base image, but we'd be installing that to the
topmost level, per-component, right?

In my basic deployment, undercloud seems to have 17 "components" (49
containers), overcloud controller 15 components (48 containers), and
overcloud compute 4 components (7 containers). Accounting for overlaps,
the total number of "components" used seems to be 19. (By "components"
here i mean whatever uses a different ConfigImage than other services. I
just eyeballed it but i think i'm not too far off the correct number.)

So we'd subtract 267 MB from base image and add that to 19 leaf images
used in this deployment. That means difference of +4.8 GB to the current
image sizes. My /var/lib/registry dir on undercloud with all the images
currently has 5.1 GB. We'd almost double that to 9.9 GB.

Going from 5.1 to 9.9 GB seems like a lot of extra traffic for the CDNs
(both external and e.g. internal within OpenStack Infra CI clouds).

And for internal traffic between local registry and overcloud nodes, it
gives +3.7 GB per controller and +800 MB per compute. That may not be so
critical but still feels like a considerable downside.

Another gut feeling is that this way of image layering would take longer
time to build and to run the modify-image Ansible role which we use in
CI, so that could endanger how our CI jobs fit into the time limit. We
could also probably measure this but i'm not sure if it's worth spending
the time.

All in all i'd argue we should be looking at different options still.

>
> Given that we should decouple systemd from all/some of the dependencies
> (an example topic for RDO [0]), that could save a 190MB. But it seems we
> cannot break the love of puppet and systemd as it heavily relies on the
> latter and changing packaging like that would higly likely affect
> baremetal deployments with puppet and systemd co-operating.

Ack :/

>
> Long story short, we cannot shoot both rabbits with a single shot, not
> with puppet :) May be we could with ansible replacing puppet fully...
> So splitting config and runtime images is the only choice yet to address
> the raised security concerns. And let's forget about edge cases for now.
> Tossing around a pair of extra bytes over 40,000 WAN-distributed
> computes ain't gonna be our the biggest problem for sure.
>
> [0] https://review.rdoproject.org/r/#/q/topic:base-container-reduction
>
>>
>>>
>>> Dan
>>>
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Jirka
>>
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