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Milestone M1
I just met my newly made up Milestone M1 for the Sky minimal viable system. This milestone provides a primitive demo of a Sky cluster using local Docker containers. This demo is composed of three Docker compose files: The bootstrap node and the kernel members can be started together, but I’ve separated that out for… Continue reading
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There’s No Crying In Distributed Computing
Spent the last bit of time making the Apollo build stable as well as to do a full shakeout of Sky. The iteration between “getting Sky up” and “fixing the blocking Apollo issue” is virtuous but at times a full on pain in the butt. Often it’s hilarious, though. The latest is the build times… Continue reading
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Consensus In Apollo
Solving the problems that can only be solved by consensus in distributed systems is something I love. They’re fascinating problems, exist at high scale and are beautiful to watch in action. (Well, at least to me. But I am a twisted boy, so tastes and colors) The Apollo project has a two consensus mechanisms. The… Continue reading
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Evolving Membership, Constant identity
So how do we keep the cluster “identity” while we’re evolving the membership dynamically? This is an existential problem that comes down to what I’ll refer to as View Evolution, for kicks. By “cluster identity” I abuse a concept to signify the unbroken chain of trust in a cooperating cluster such as Gorgoneion and maintaining… Continue reading
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Gorgoneion
So how do we establish identity? In Apollo/Sky the Identifier abstraction is used as the proxy for identity and thus the problem of establishing identity reduces to “how does one establish Identifiers“. Unsurprisingly, this process is very similar to a certificate signing request, in that key and identifier information are bundled up in a standard… Continue reading
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Identity
Identity is, of course, an extremely complicated subject that has been endlessly blogged, white papered, carved and assigned to the appropriate magic quadrants. I won’t add much to those previous dissertations and discussions; Apollo and thus Sky uses an existing specification called KERI: the Key Event Receipt Infrastructure for Identifiers and Key Management. Frankly, I… Continue reading
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The Oracle At Delphi
The access control model in Sky is implemented by the Apollo Delphinius module. The model provided by the Oracle API in Delphinius is straight forward and, I believe, quite comprehensive and useful. The model contains Subjects, Relationships and Objects. These can also be namespaced, so one can use the Subject “Users” as a group name… Continue reading
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A Few Use Cases
So let’s develop a few use cases for how we’re going to use this beast. Mind, I’m not a product manager, nor do I have any particular skill in such arcane arts. So with that in mind, my base line use case is at the level of process identity so we’ll start there. My belief… Continue reading
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From the Top Down
So what is this Apollo Proof Of Concept that I’m building out? In a nutshell, it’s a large scale distributed system that provides decentralized identity and stored secrets management. More precisely, we can describe this POC as A Multi Tenant Service Providing Identity, Authorization, Authentication and Stored Secrets Management. Let’s call it the Sky Application… Continue reading
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First
So I thought I’d try out this Ghost WordPress thing, given that Substack seems to be platforming some rather unsavory folk. I mean, this platform may well end up doing the same, mind, but for the mean time seems to be blissfully free of such. Anyways, I used to have a technical blog of the… Continue reading
