A CI/CD Platform in the Palm of Your Hand

The presentation discusses the use of MicroVMs and the Liquid Metal project for a more performant and cost-effective CI model.

• MicroVMs are smaller VMs that are tailored for a specific need, resulting in almost the same speed as containers with the security of regular VMs.
• The Liquid Metal project is a set of tools to declaratively provision Kubernetes clusters on lightweight MicroVMs.
• The project is comprised of four components: Flintlock, Firecracker, Ignite, and Cortex.
• The use of MicroVMs and the Liquid Metal project can reduce overall cost, improve build times, and provide a more secure environment.
• The presenter demoed the Liquid Metal project on a Raspberry Pi cluster.
• The presenter faced network issues during the demo, but was able to resolve them with the help of AV staff.

The presenter faced network issues during the demo due to a Wi-Fi extender not working. However, the issue was resolved with the help of AV staff who provided an Ethernet cable. The presenter used a private network to control NAT traffic and DHCP IP pool, and to ensure the Liquid Metal cluster had a specific API IP.

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.