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open-source posts

Asking ChatGPT to explain hyperconverged infrastructure

In my post last year, Moving to SUSE I said I would spend more time explaining what Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) was. The way I would describe HCI is that it’s a way of structuring a data center so that the storage, compute, and networking resources are all bundled into the same boxes, and then software abstracts over it, allowing nodes to use resources of other machines. An example of something that’s not HCI is a SAN, or a Storage-Area Network.

PCI Device passthrough on Harvester

I want to share something that I’ve been working on for the last three months. Release 1.1.0-rc3 now has working PCI passthrough. Any PCI device in your cluster can now be passed through the hypervisor directly to a VM. This allows virtual machines to directly control a device, like a GPU, without any expensive virtualization layer in the way. In the diagram above, the guest (VM) has direct memory access to the host’s memory for the device.

Moving to SUSE

After 3.6 years at Amazon, I’ve decided to move to another company to work on open source software. The company is SUSE, they make a Linux distribution and sell cloud computing services, among other things. At Amazon I worked on AWS Elemental’s Live (video streaming software), a small video encoding device, and the Amazon Scout robotics project. At Scout I built software that controls the robots when autonomy fails, and I worked on safety features and performance optimization of a distributed application that ran on a cluster of servers managed by AWS Fargate.

Book Review: Working in Public

The story of open source software most of us believe is wrong. The production of open source software isn’t like some egalitarian commune, it’s driven mostly by a few individuals. Through analyzing git commit frequency distributions and interviewing prominent open source contributors and maintainers, Nadia Eghbal captures the living history of open source software. In addition, she also analyses the main problems of maintenance that threaten the long term sustainability of open source software.