waifud plans
Signed-off-by: Christine Dodrill <me@christine.website>
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title: waifud Plans
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date: 2021-06-19
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series: waifud
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tags:
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- libvirt
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- golang
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- rust
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---
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# waifud Plans
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So I have this [homelab](/blog/my-homelab-2021-06-08) now, and I want to run
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some virtual machines on it. But I don't want to have to SSH into each machine
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to do this and I have a lot of time to kill this summer. So I'm going to make a
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very obvious move and massively overcomplicate this setup.
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[Canada's health system is usually pretty great, however for some reason I have
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to wait _four months_ between COIVD vaccine shots. What the heck. That basically
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eats up my entire summer. Grrrr](conversation://Cadey/angy)
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waifud is a suite of tools that help you manage your server's waifus. This is an
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example of name-driven development, or where I had a terrible idea about the
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name that was so terrible I had to bring it to its natural conclusion. Thanks to
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comments on Reddit and Hacker News about [my systemd talk
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video](/talks/systemd-the-good-parts-2021-05-16), I was told that I was
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mispronouncing "systemctl" as "system-cuttle" (it came out as "system-cuddle"
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for some reason). If virtual machines are waifus to a server, then a management
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daemon would be called `waifud`, and the command line tool would be called
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`waifuctl` (which is canonically pronounced "waifu-cuddle" and I will accept no
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other pronunciations as valid).
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Essentially my vision for waifud is to be a "middle ground" between running
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virtual machines on one server and something more complicated like
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[OpenStack](https://www.openstack.org). I want to be able to have high level
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descriptions of virtual machines (including cloud-config userdata) and then hand
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them over to waifud to just figure out the logistics of where they should run
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for me.
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Due to how absurdly useful something like this is, I also wanted to be sure that
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it is difficult for companies to use this in production without paying me for
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some kind of license. Not to say that this would be intentionally made useless,
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more that if I have to support people using this in production I would rather be
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paid to do so. I feel it would be better for the project this way. I still have
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not decided on what price the support licenses would be, however I would only
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ask that people using this in a professional capacity (IE: for their dayjob or
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as an integral of a dayjob's production services) acquire a license by
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[contacting me](/contact) once the project hits something closer to stable, or
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at least when I get to the point that I am using it for all of my virtual
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machine fun.
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At a high level, waifud will be made out of a few components:
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- the waifud control server, written in Rust
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- the waifuctl tool, written in Rust
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- the waifud-agentd runner node agent, written in Rust
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- the waifud-metadatad metadata server, written in Go using userspace WireGuard
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to listen on 169.254.169.254:80 to serve metadata to machines that ask for it
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- SQLite to store control server data
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- Redis to store cloud-config metadata
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Right now I have the source code for waifud [available
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here](https://github.com/Xe/waifud). It is released under the terms of the
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permissive [Be Gay, Do Crimes](https://github.com/Xe/waifud/blob/main/LICENSE)
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license, which should sufficiently scare people away for now while I implement
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the service. The biggest thing in the repo right now is
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[`mkvm`](https://github.com/Xe/waifud/tree/main/cmd/mkvm), which is essentially
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the prototype of this project. It downloads a cloud template, injects it into a
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ZFS zvol and then configures libvirt to use that ZFS zvol as the root filesystem
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of the virtual machine.
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This tool works great and I use it very often both personally and in work
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settings, however one of the biggest problems that it has is that it assumes
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that the urls for the upstream cloud templates will change when the contents of
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the file behind the URL changes. This has turned out to be a very very very
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wrong assumption and has caused me a lot of churn in testing. I've been looking
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at using something like [IPFS](https://ipfs.io) to store these images in, but
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I'm still pondering options.
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I would also like to have some kind of web management interface for waifud.
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Historically frontend web development has been one of my biggest weaknesses. I
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would like to use [Alpine.js](https://alpinejs.dev) to make an admin panel.
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At a high level, I want waifuctl to have the following features:
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- list all virtual machines across the cluster
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- create a new virtual machine somewhere
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- create a new virtual machine on a specific node
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- delete a virtual machine
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- fetch a virtual machine's IP address
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- edit the cloud config for a virtual machine
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- resize a virtual machine's memory and CPU count
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- list all templates
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- delete a template
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- add a new template
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The runner machines will communicate with waifud over HTTP with a redis cache
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for cloud-config metadata. Each runner node will have its virtual machine subnet
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shared both with other runner nodes and other machines on the network using
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[Tailscale subnet routes](https://tailscale.com/kb/1019/subnets/). The metadata
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server will hook into each machine's network stack using an on-machine WireGuard
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config and a userspace instance of WireGuard.
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I hope to have something more substantial created by the end of August at
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latest. I'm working on the core of waifud at the moment and will likely do a
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stream or two of me hacking at it when I can.
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