Today we feature an interview with John Buswell of Spliced Networks. The company announced their first product, AppOS, just today. Learn more about what’s unique about this new Linux server distribution.1. Please explain to us the single killer feature your solution has against Solaris or Red Hat.
John Buswell: If I had to pick a single feature, I think it would probably be ExMI. The
extended management interface. It provides a web interface, and later
SNMP and CLI, that allows application images to extend the OS’s web based management
interface, so it looks like a completely integrated solution.
Companies running Windows now, or new companies looking for an IT
solution, will find ExMI attractive, assuming there is an application
image for what they need. This is where AppOS will win business over
Solaris and Red Hat, although I don’t see too many companies migrating
to Solaris anyway.
With AppOS though its really a complete package, so in the long term,
I think AppOS as a whole could lead to a change in the way server OSes
look, switching towards a router style single image file vs. hundreds
of pacakges. If you look at half the stuff in /bin, and /usr/bin, most
of it you’ve probably never run on most of your production servers, if
you’re honest about it. So it doesn’t really need to be there.
It’ll take some time to catch on, but if/when it does, then Red Hat
and Sun will most likely need to adapt.
2. The application management is done via a web interface. How does this work exactly? Is X installed on the server, or the interface’s web server can be used remotely?
John Buswell: There is no X installed on the server, installing X on servers is
really counter productive, and definately not something I would ever
advocate for a production server. X would just consume valuable
resources, taking them away from what the server is supposed to be
doing. The entire server (appliance) is managed through the web
interface. There is a small light-weight web server that is running on
a seperate physical ethernet interface (management network). You just
point your favourite browser at the management IP, and you have full
control of the system. The web interface manipulates a common
configuration file, which is used by a low-level program to generate
the various configuration files, or change settings in /proc.
3. Please tell us more about the security of the product and how it was architected to be ‘secure by default’.
John Buswell: AppOS uses single filesystem image files, mounted via loopback on a
ramdisk to build the root file system. The image file that is used
uses a filesystem that that is unwritable, such as squashfs. When I
say unwritable, the only way you can write to the filesystem is to
regenerate it. Access to the OS is restricted to the management
network, the only outside way to access the system running AppOS, is
through whatever application image it is running, for example DNS.
These application images are run through a special chroot environment
that is generated by the appliance at runtime, and again, uses the
unwritable filesystem via loopback. If someone were to compromise
bind, they are stuck in the chroot environment, but they cannot write
to the config or the data. So there are very limited in what damage
they can do. This is further compounded by our use of grsecurity,
stack smashing protector, and other standard security features. We’re
currently working on adding extensions to AppOS to enable the user to
select between different security models (say SELinux or grsecurity)
at boot time. Right now, you can do that, but you’d have to switch
images. AppOS includes some parts of OSDL’s Carrier Grade Linux, such
as Resumo, which enables fall back capabilities in Grub (the boot
loader).
4. Please tell us more about the company: how many employees it has currently, how it’s funded, and how did you come up with the idea of APPOS in the first place.
John Buswell: Spliced Networks was founded back in 2002, back then, it was just
myself and Frank Boyd. Since then we’ve expanded the company, with 10
employees, some full time and some part time. The company is currently
funded privately, we’ve gone to great lengths to retain full control
of the company, which is why we haven’t gone seeking outside
investment. We utilize a lot of open source solutions, as well as
common sense in the day to day operations. AppOS didn’t really come
from just one idea, its the end result of several years of putting
much smaller and simplier ideas together. If I had to pick one key
moment that really influenced the development of AppOS, it would have
to be hard disk failures in headless linux servers. In my lab, I have
a half dozen Linux servers that don’t have video cards. When those
systems lose a hard disk, or just need to be fsck’d manually, its a
major pain. Which is probably why there are features in LIMBS that
allow for remote network management during the boot process. 🙂
5. How is the company gonna make money? Is the OS or the applications, or the service that will yield profit?
John Buswell: I don’t really see the company making money from the OS, I’m sure
we’ll make money from certification, benchmarking, support and other
services provided to OEMs and VARs, as well as custom Linux solutions.
The big profits will come from combining the OS with strong
application images. The first big test of that idea, will come next
month when we release our SN-2100 series DNS appliance. The appliance
provides all of the capabilities of competing commerical DNS
appliances such as those from Blue Cat Networks and Infoblox. These
companies charge quite a bit for these appliances, between AppOS and
our build system, we can cost effectively offer the same solutions to
customers for a lot less. I think our biggest advantage will be that
we are selling kits that allow customers to upgrade their existing
servers to appliances that match our SN-2100 series DNS appliance.
Many companies like DNS appliances, but they cannot justify the costs,
we’ve reduced the costs signficantly, and allow them to continue to
use their existing servers, with the same cost saving benefits of the
appliance. Now, if we do this in a couple of more areas, I think we
have the potential to win big.
6. I see a port for 64bit platforms and for the embedded systems. What stage the PowerPC port is in?
John Buswell: The PowerPC port is still in early stages. AppOS is based upon the
principle of an open appliance, built from commodity hardware that you
can upgrade and redeploy. PowerPC is still pretty much Apple or IBM
equipment, there are a couple of independent vendors, but not that
many. We did conduct tests of several different appliance images using
a modified Ubuntu PPC Live CD and an iMac G5. A comparable Opteron
system was yielding much better performance results when we threw
simulated production traffic at them in our lab. I’m sure it was more
a result of the PPC solution being under optimized, but if you look at
a price/performance comparison, the AMD stuff is always going to win.
7. Back in the day you were involved with iMacLinux, Nortel and MandrakeSoft. What kind of experience these projects have given you?
John Buswell: MandrakeSoft was a great experience, I got a chance to work with Jean
Loup Gailly, who was CTO of MandrakeSoft when I worked there, along
with some great developers. I’m really glad to see things are taking
off for them, with the recent merger, and their continued growth.
iMacLinux was an interesting deal, it came out of nothing, more a
result of me getting tired of sending the same email out back in 1998
on getting LinuxPPC to work on the original iMac. iMacLinux we did
manage to survive a couple of slashdottings, and we learned really
fast that people like to take information a lot faster than they like
to contribute it. I would like to bring iMacLinux back, however, it
looks like a couple of sites have emerged to replace it, which is
great. iMacLinux really isn’t something thats profitable, however it
did help a lot of people out, so it was a good deal.
Nortel is a great company, with a lot of very very smart people. The
most important thing I have learned from working at Nortel, has
probably been what to expect from larger customers, like Fortune
500s, Financial Institutions and so on. Sustaining engineering is a
faced paced environment, you’re working on many business critical
issues, often requiring quick resolution. You definately learn to
think on your feet, and fast. The nice thing about sustaining
engineering, is that its always interesting. You’re always working on
multiple issues, often covering completely different features of the
product. You never get bored, and typically never have the time to get
bored.
8. What do you expect to come out of the launch?
John Buswell: Well, we’ve had LIMBS working in production for over a year now,
and we felt it was about time, that we got some feedback on the
concept and shared it with the rest of the world. We’re hoping that
it’ll start some people thinking, and hopefully lead to some
innovative changes in the server world. A lot of Linux companies have
been focusing on the Desktop a little too much. Obviously, we’re
hoping to grow our partner program dramatically, and sell some more
AppOS based appliances over the coming weeks.
“Note: Internet Explorer does not render CSS properly. If you encounter problems viewing this site with Internet Explorer, please click here.”
Yeah baby.. spank Gates
If your system is easy to administer, you’re doing something wrong.
Hmm,i was planning to setup a similar (freelance)firm with revising/auditing/updating from stock or on request of firmware for routers/firewalls… Most of them are way behind with firmware updates where even the latest firmwares still have about 50 % of unpatched flaws,bugs..
I’m pretty sure this is just vaporware. This guy pretends to be involved in like infinity-billion projects that go nowhere… TuxPPC, Opaque Linux Distribution, FYP Bootloader, CLI UI to Linux Networking features… all of which are 100% vaporware.
Check his old website on google’s cache:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:NESQy3PGk6gJ:www.skynet.ie/~paga…..
Look at the company’s website… not very professional; looks more like a sham… Interesting picture of the CTO: a T-shirt (college pic)… Everything else is basically just an empty shell of what “will be here”… Even for a start-up, something just doesn’t look right.
Not all vaporwave.
tuxppc looks like it was around for a few years.
http://www.imaclinux.net“>archive.org” archive.o…” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.imaclinux.net”>archive.o….
the company’s website looks more professional than some established businesses
we will just have to wait and see
Their AppOS whitepaper [found here: http://www.splicednetworks.com/solutions/appos.pdf] contains no information about AppOS. However, it does contain the following:
This document is protected by copyright and distributed under licenses
restricting its use, copying, distribution and decompilation. No part
of this document may be reproduced in any form by any means without
prior written permission from Spliced Networks LLC.
Now isn’t that ironic. What’s the difference between software and the written word?
another Cobalt ?
Is Sarah the same girl you met via that chatroom years ago? I’m still married to the same girl I met via TenForward, and we have a geekling too.
Some nice ideas there with AppOS, particularly the remote management of the install/repair. You might want to have more professional picture(s) of yourself on the website though, looks unprofessional.
Hope it works out.
Damien
On the spliced network site management section
His impressive resume brings over 11 years of professional engineering experience to Spliced Networks
while on his old college website ( http://www.skynet.ie/~pagan ) he says he gradudated in the 2000. Does AppOS enable time travel as well? Coool.
All I can really get on the site is
AppOS™ is not vaporware, locally we have it running on 10 servers, some x86, some x86_64. We want to ship AppOS™ OE with a more complete web interface
Wow, my WankOS is not vapourware, I have it running on four machines, a toaster, a kettle and my cybernetic turtle.
Eugenia please check that these companies actually have something to offer before posting interviews.
I have worked with him in the past on the tuxppc.org family of websites. He isn’t “vapourware” he is very talented and wish him the best on this.
Mike
I have read the scant amount of detail that I can find on the website about this supposed non vaporware product.
It looks quite simply like something that could be implemented with grub and a few tweaks. All your doing is booting an image of the OS thats mounted read only – big deal. You create custom images and choose which one to boot. How this is news or innovative is beyond me.
Funnier thing is that there is a statement on the website in the AppOS pages –
We chose to take the forums offline, and restrict svn access until things calmed down after the press release.
Now google doesn’t know about these forums at all. Are these vapour as well? http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=AppOS+forum&btnG=Search&meta=
however we feel that AppOS™ would benefit more people if these features were released under the GPL. We’ll make plenty of money from services, support and applications. If not we can always beg like some vendors.
Is it going to be gpled then? when do we see the source. The last comment is very professional – yep, I want to deal with a company with an attitude like that.
All we know for certain is that the someone is able to make a relatively pretty website and a lot of noise by mailing the right people.
Sorry this strikes me a vaporware. Unoriginal vaporware at that.
This looks to me like someone trying to get attention to get some vc funding, nothing else. Or someone trying to boost their fragile ego.
I have a half dozen Linux servers that don’t have video cards. When those systems lose a hard disk, or just need to be fsck’d manually, its a major pain. Which is probably why there are features in LIMBS that allow for remote network management during the boot process.
In the real world we have these things called “consoles” that we plug into ports and use things called “terminal servers” to get output from headless machines.
And then some companies sell machines with things called “system controllers” on them.
The idea is a good one, and I hope they are truly able to field a product.
I do, however, have serious reservations about those behind a website who CAN’T SPELL “SEPARATE”:
From http://www.splicednetworks.com/AppOS/:
“…They are seperate from current Open Source projects…”
There have been no replies to any of the comments made here from anyone in spliced networks. I really do belive that this is vaporware and that is the reason for the silence.
First off a disclosure, I know John from around college, albeit not very well, and I wish him the best of luck in this venture. Competition is good. Now my question.
If you don’t see anyone migrating to Solaris (presumably you are referring to Solaris 10 on amd64 and x86 here) why did you feel the need to mention it? Generally people only mention other companies products in press releases and interviews when they are trying to compete with them.
And you have managed to get AppOS listed as a “Solaris killer” on linuxinsider [1] (the line attributed to you in the article is “could spell the end of server operating systems as we know them today, and would likely put an end to Solaris.”, although the journalist [ I use the word journalist as a very generous description here ] then regurgitated the remainder of the e-mail on the site as the vast bulk of the article). This really sounds to me like you are trying to generate attention for AppOS on the back of Solaris. All fair, thats competion and marketing, but it must mean that you see Solaris as a competitor.
[1] http://www.linuxbusinessweek.com/story/49114.htm