• A deeper understanding of how container based virtualization works.

• Appreciation for the trade-offs between isolation, levels of privilege and scale.

• A real world example of building a cloud based Continuous Delivery platform, will serve as a case in point.

Outline

Mind map outlining the session: https://www.mindmeister.com/530078667/security-containers

Building a cloud based CI tool, comes with a unique set of challenges.

You’re running other people’s code on your infrastructure, thousands of times a day.

The system needs to be designed so that:

• Users are free to do what they want inside their sandbox including running commands as root.
• Users should not be able to do anything outside their sandboxes.
• The system can run thousands of such builds per day per machine.

We will explore the trade-offs between these requirements - since each pulls in a slightly different direction.

Next we will incrementally break-down Snap CI’s solution in detail and explore potential
alternative approaches. Finally we’ll look at how things may change in the future.

Speaker bio

I love programming, unix and craft beer - in no particular order. I’m also one of the primary developers of
Snap CI. A hosted continous delivery platform that offers build pipelines in the cloud.

I’m currently busy building Dev To Prod. A screencast based platform with a focus on DevOps,
continuous delivery and mechanical sympathy.

Links

• RubyConf India 2013 Ruby loves Unix: Applying beautiful Unix idioms to build a ruby prefork server
• Slides
• GitHub
• Twitter

Slides

https://www.mindmeister.com/530078667/security-containers