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Add 2017Q2 CloudABI-based network communication entry from ed

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Benjamin Kaduk 2017-07-24 23:00:19 +00:00
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Notes: svn2git 2020-12-08 03:00:23 +00:00 
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en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2017-04-2017-06.xml
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@ -1510,4 +1510,75 @@
<task>Setup the automatic QA infrastructure.</task>
</help>
</project>
<project cat='proj'>
<title>Capability-Based Network Communication for Capsicum/CloudABI</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>
<given>Ed</given>
<common>Schouten</common>
</name>
<email>ed@nuxi.nl</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="https://github.com/NuxiNL/arpc">ARPC: GRPC-Like RPC Library That Wupports File Descriptor Passing</url>
<url href="https://github.com/NuxiNL/flower">Flower: A Label-Based Network Backplane</url>
</links>
<body>
<p>One of the weaknesses of Capsicum and CloudABI is that it is
not easy to develop applications that need to make outgoing
network connections, since system calls like
<tt>connect()</tt> and <tt>sendto()</tt> are disabled. Though
we can sometimes work around this by ensuring that the
sandboxed process already possesses socket file descriptors on
startup, this doesn't allow the destination process to be
restarted, moved to a different network address, be load
balanced, etc.</p>
<p>Coming up with a solution for this is quite important for me,
as I am currently working on making CloudABI work on top of
Kubernetes, Google's open source cluster management suite.
The idea is that Kubernetes will schedule CloudABI processes
instead of Docker containers. All of these CloudABI processes
will have their dependencies on other services in the cluster
injected explicitly, making internal communication very
secure. All of this is intended to work on &os; as well, of
course!</p>
<p>To solve this problem, I've been working on a daemon called
Flower (read: flow-er) that allows software to register
services and connect to them. Servers are identified by a set
of labels with values (e.g., <tt>{datacenter: 'frankfurt',
service: 'mysql'}</tt>). Clients can connect these servers by
providing the corresponding label(s). Flower's security model is
capability-based, just like Capsicum. The ability to bind and
connect can be limited by permanently constraining labels to
certain values.</p>
<p>Flower has been designed not to act as a proxy. It does
not copy any data. It merely forwards existing socket file
descriptors or creates UNIX socket pairs and hands these out
to its clients and servers. To realize this, processes
communicate with Flower using an RPC library called ARPC.
ARPC is a very simple clone of Google's GRPC, with the special
feature that messages (Protobufs) can have file descriptors
attached.</p>
</body>
<sponsor>Nuxi, the Netherlands</sponsor>
<help>
<task>Finish implementing the Flower code.</task>
<task>Integrate Flower with the Kubernetes/CloudABI runtime.</task>
<task>Release the Kubernetes/CloudABI runtime as open source
software.</task>
</help>
</project>
</report>