Recently, I have been working on a new project. As the title indicates,
this is an operator. Specifically, this is an operator for managing Samba.
If you are not familiar with operators, the idea is basically software
that runs in Kubernetes that in turn manages Kubernetes resources, typically
taking custom resource (CR) types as input. Samba, is of course, the well
known Open Source implementation of SMB protocols and the software to
serve, manage, interoperate with SMB, Active Directory, and other Windows
oriented things.
The project was started by Michael Adam, a Samba team member, and I started
helping out around October last year. It was slow going at first, but we've
picked up steam recently and is becoming one of my biggest areas of focus.
I hope to write more about this subject, so I am not planning to be very
comprehensive in this post. I do want to make few links and make a few
remarks on what I have been doing in these projects.
First, we've got three code repos that make up most of the unique
code and files:
The Samba Operator repo contains the code for the operator itself. This is a Go
language operator. It defines Custom Resources, via Kubernetes Custom Resource
Definitions (CRDs), implements the "business logic" of interpreting those
resources and turning them into Pods and other things that produce Shares for
people to use. I want to come back to the subject of the design behind the CRs
and the recent work we've put into that area in a subsequent post.
The Samba Container repo contains files that help build "generic" samba
containers - basically OCI/Docker-style images containing various samba
components. Currently, it produces images for a client (smbclient), a server
(file-server: smbd, winbind, etc.), and work is in progress to add a Samba AD
image. These are meant to work with the operator but are not specific to it.
These can work locally with podman or docker or in any other compatible
container system.
Because the file server has many interactions with the system it runs on, and
there are various tools to configure aspects of both smbd and winbind, I
started the sambacc project to try to create a layer that eases the user-facing
steps needed to get the samba subsystems working in the container environment.
It is a Python library and a command line tool. The CLI is somewhat
unimaginatively called "samba-container". The sambacc package is meant to act
as a "glue" layer between samba and the container environment. It also aims to
provide a single, declarative, configuration that is (relatively) easy for both
humans and code to work with.
I started sambacc late last year and after a few weeks of intense development,
and some subsequent discussion with Michael Adam, we made the server image
built by Samba Container based on sambacc. Currently, sambacc can configure
samba (via smb.conf style parameters in the internal registry), it can set up
users and groups (locally to the running container), it helps bring up the smbd
and winbdind processes, and it has support for assisting with AD domain join.
Development on sambacc itself has slowed down a bit in the past few weeks as it
is largely meeting my needs for enabling development on the operator itself.
However, there's still lots and lots to do in all of these areas. I expect to
do a bit of "see-sawing" as certain areas of the code mature and then I move
onto other topics and find a need that would be better served by changes or
additions in sambacc rather than the operator code itself. For example, I
expect to soon add subcommands to samba-container to help create liveness and
readiness checks for Kubernetes pods.
I'll close this out by suggesting anyone interested in these topics feel free
to join in the conversation by making use of the github repos and post issues
or use the discussions feature, or whatever floats your boat. :-) I hope this
was a useful summary of the three main areas that make up our recent efforts -
with a little emphasis on sambacc, because its very new, probably a bit less
self explanatory and a project I started. :-)
