Cloud Foundry Advisory Board Call, Feb 2022: Jammy Jellyfish Upgrade

by Carlo GutierrezFebruary 17, 2022

Skipping Focal Fossa enables the community to extend support for Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish. An alpha release of the stemcell was already published.

The Cloud Foundry Community Advisory Board (CAB) meeting for February focused on the decision to skip Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) stemcell and upgrade the operating system of Cloud Foundry with Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). The call was moderated by Ram Iyengar from the CF Foundation.

Table of Contents

Jumping ahead to Jammy Jellyfish

The idea to pass over Ubuntu Focal Fossa and instead use the upcoming Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish as the new Cloud Foundry Linux OS was proposed back in October, 2021. During the call, Ram explained that this move to Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish will be better in the long term.

Ram Iyengar

“After the typical life cycle of a Canonical release, the community gets together and engages in a migration. The migration is nontrivial both in terms of effort and expense, so, fortunately, it only has to be done once in a while. As a community, the stewards of the project have decided that instead of moving from the Bionic LTS to the Focal [Fossa] LTS, we are instead going to take a jump into the next one. This is going to be from 18.04 to 22.04, and we are skipping 20.04. The reason is we can just extend support and keep working with [Jammy Jellyfish] for longer, getting operational convenience.”
—Ram Iyengar, Cloud Foundry Foundation

According to Ram, alpha and prealpha versions of Jammy Jellyfish are already available, so members of the community are working on making a stemcell. Additionally, work on the Cloud Foundry Linux file system and buildpacks is being done in parallel.

Jammy Jellyfish stemcells

Ruben Koster of VMware noted that there was a collaborated effort between SAP and VMware during the summer of 2021 to get a head start on a Jammy Jellyfish stemcell. The team was able to establish tests and a Concourse pipeline prior to Canonical publishing development builds of Jammy Jellyfish. By starting early, the team could adapt to changes coming from Canonical and was able to create an alpha stemcell.

Ruben Koster

“The nice thing with this approach is that we are keeping up. They break something, and, with a pipeline, we can just fix one thing instead of having to do it all at once. By keeping up with [Canonical], we were confident enough to publish an alpha release. We are ahead of schedule…by publishing early, we are gifting a head start to the other teams, as well.”
—Ruben Koster, VMware

While building the alpha release of the stemcell, Ruben shared that the team ran into some issues particularly with the versions of various packages, such as GCC, OpenSLL, and Ruby. “Because of the OpenSSL bump, there are some Ruby issues,” he explained. “Ruby 2.6, 2.7, and even 3.0, do not work with OpenSSL 3, so you need to bump to Ruby 3.1. For example, with Cloud Controller and those types of things need to bump their Ruby version, and this is also true for BOSH Director and all the CPIs.”

Community concerns

With the alpha stemcell requiring the versions of various packages to be bumped up, the key concern from the community was whether or not new packages will be required, and if some packages will be removed, because they can no longer be supported on Jammy Jellyfish. Ramon Makkelie from Stark & Wayne answered that all the compiler packages need to be bumped up, and, so far, the team has yet to come across any issues that will require a package to be dropped.

Ramon Makkelie

“Everything related to compiling has major bumps. We’ve done a package segregation, where a lot of things have been put into small packages for better updating in the future. The stemcell is also a little bit bigger. The biggest bumps are the GCC, OpenSSL, Ruby, and systemd. We haven’t seen issues with the others yet, but we also have not yet fully tested [the stemcell] with a lot of software.”
—Ramon Makkelie, Stark & Wayne

Norm Abramovitz

Norm Abramovitz from Stark & Wayne suggested that Jammy Jellyfish may also impact buildpacks, as packages will need to be upgraded. This may cause changes to interfaces, because the bumps are major.

With a feature freeze on Jammy Jellyfish on the horizon, Ruben added that the team is planning on a beta release for the stemcell once Jammy Jellyfish goes into general availability.

The next CAB call is tentatively scheduled on March 16, 2022, at 11 a.m. ET / 8 a.m. PT. Anyone interested in participating can join the Cloud Foundry’s CAB Slack channel.