Panelists

Justin Dorfman | Tzury Bar Yochay

Guest

Snow Pettersen

Envoy Proxy Senior Maintainer

Show Notes

Hello and welcome to Committing to Cloud Native Podcast! It’s the podcast by Reblaze where we talk about the confluence of Cloud Native and Open Source. Today, our special guest is Snow Pettersen, who is an Envoy Proxy Senior Maintainer working at Lyft on the Resilience team. Snow has done Cloud Native at Square, Netflix, Lyft, and he tells us how it’s changed over the years and a particular challenge he had recently. He also shares with us about problems with the release and rollout with sidecars in Envoy. Speaking of Envoy, Snow explains exactly what it is and what it does. We also learn the architecture of Envoy, the new contrib folder proposal, extensions coming out, and the “golden rules” to follow when reviewing a code. Go ahead and download this episode now to hear more and thank you for joining us today!

[00:02:06 ] Snow has done Cloud Native at Square, Netflix, and Lyft. Find out how it’s changed over the years. He also tells us about a recent challenge he had.

[00:03:47 ] We learn from Snow that the biggest headache he’s seeing with people using Envoy has been the release and rollout problem with sidecars.

[00:06:47 ] Tzury wonders how Snow would explain Envoy to someone. He also tells us how it switches to the new set of configurations while processing and Envoy’s scalability on a single machine.

[00:13:16 ] Snow goes more in depth about the architecture of Envoy and the new contrib folder proposal.

[00:20:24 ] Find out how many people are actually maintaining, monitoring, and moderating the process.

[00:24:02 ] Justin asks what Snow anticipates on extensions that will be coming out that can’t make it to core and what is it that people want that they can’t get right now.

[00:26:43 ] Tzury wonders what the most obscure, unexpected use of Envoy was in production that Snow came across.

[00:28:17 ] Over the years that Snow has been at Envoy, he tells us how much of his time he spends writing new code versus reviewing others versus answering emails and file or responding to issues on GitHub. Justin shares some stats from Snow’s GitHub profile.

[00:29:54 ] Snow shares the “golden rules” when you review a code.

[00:33:04 ] Find out where you can follow Snow online, and he gives a shout-out to the entire Envoy community!

Links

Curiefense

Curiefense Twitter

Curiefense Blog

Cloud Native Community Groups-Curifense

community@curiefense.io

Reblaze

Justin Dorfman Twitter

jdorfman@curiefense.io

podcast@curiefense.io

Richard Littauer Twitter

Tzury Bar Yochay Twitter

Snow Pettersen Twitter

Snow Pettersen GitHub

Lyft

Envoy

Episode #17: “99.99999% Uptime with Anna Berenberg”

Credits

• Executive Produced by Tzury Bar Yochay


• Produced by Justin Dorfman


• Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound


• Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound


• Transcript by Layten Pryce

Transcript

[00:00 ] Snow Petterson:There was a period of time around this time when I started being a maintainer and a bit before when I was writing a lot of code, just because again, I think it aligned very well with what my company needed at the time. Now, over time I've just gotten review ownership over more and more codes and being brought into more and more like, hey, you know how this works, so can you chime in? So I've definitely like drifted away more towards the side of communication. It's always nice to get some code written every now and then, but there's so much other stuff that happens that I always have to be careful about making myself the blocker for the code landing.

[00:42 ] Intro: Hello, and welcome to Committing to Cloud Native, the podcast where we talk about the interface between open source and cloud native. We're super excited about our guest today, can't wait to introduce him. Our panelists today are Justin Dorfman and Tzury Bar Yochay, and they're going to have an awesome conversation. I really enjoyed listening to it and I really hope you enjoy this conversation.

[01:06 ] Justin: Today we have Snow Peterson joining us from Lyft. He's on the Envoy Proxy Project as well, senior maintainer. Tzury, you're here, what's up? I thought you almost had a COVID, but you're good.

[01:18 ] Tzury: Hey JD. Hey Snow. How are you guys? I'm all good. I'm fine. Thank God.

[01:22 ] Justin: Okay. Thank God and Snow, how are you? Are you doing good?

[01:26 ] Snow Petterson:I'm doing great. yes. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

[01:30 ] Justin: I really appreciate you coming back because for the audience that doesn't know the backstory, Snow was on like a month or two ago and the audio was so bad that we had to pull the plug. So we rescheduled and Snow, thank God said yes and that's where we're at. And we just want to basically go over what we talked about, but this time with a new recording platform and new equipment. So thank you again, Snow for really taking the time to do that.

[02:04 ] Snow Petterson:Yes, no problem at all.

[02:06 ] Justin: So cloud-native, you've done it at Square, you've done that Netflix, you've done it at Lyft. How has it changed over the years?

[02:13 ] Snow Petterson:It's definitely matured a lot. I think a lot of the stuff we were doing early on at Square, particularly in the Envoy spaces, which is how I ended up in this whole space. It was rough around the edges and it took quite a while to ramp up on things and things didn't always work the way you wanted and I think now things have definitely matured. I guess it's been four or five years at this point. So more problems are solved, things are easier to do, but still a lot of challenges.

[02:42 ] Justin: What's a major challenge that you've recently experienced, whether it's at Lyft or just maintaining the project?

[02:49 ] Snow Petterson:I think one of the interesting [Inaudible 02:51 ] there's been this push towards like a [Inaudible 02:58 ]approach where a lot systems are relying more and more on these open source projects that run next to their services and Kubernetes and assessments as well and this has been like a trend in cloud-native where more and more problems have been sold via site cars, which on its own has cost like a bunch of new problems around like management of these site cars. And I think a lot of people who jumped on the site car bandwagon early on are now running into issues with managing all of these site cars with companies having 5, 10, 15 site cars running and their pods resulting in a whole set of new difficulties that people didn't realize would be this bad once when they were preaching about the value of site cars.

[03:48 ] Justin: Is it like a performance issue or is it more of a security? What's the biggest headache that you're seeing with people using Envoy and site car to loading?

[03:57 ] Snow Petterson:It's a release and rollout problem, that's a huge one where it's tricky to have a good release policy for site cars because you're kind of torn between two sides. One which you want to get new code out quickly and safely, but it's hard to do quickly if you have to roll your entire fleet, there's a lot of work to do this safely because