Introduction to project ORAS

Key Takeaways

[Music] hey everyone uh we have another episode of open at Microsoft today I'm tody and I'm sitting today with sa uh we are both on the Azure containers team and we will talk about AAS so s what is oras all right so oras as it stands is oci registry of storage and let's talk about the registry first I think it's important to understand uh how contain ERS kind of like move so and we are talking about container registry right right container registry just to make sure yes that's good to clarify so um so you you kind of build a container and then you need to store it somewhere and that would be the registry um the interesting aspect is that the registry implements uh what is called as the distribution specification and it's not just about containers it's uh a generic content addressable store uh and what that is is you can identify um content in that registry through a digest and it is um pretty much immutable in many ways are you saying that I can store other stuff not only images in the Registries yes and that's why it's called the distribution spec it's not just image uh storage spec or something like that so um what what we learned along the way is that you have containers that you run in production right so you need to deploy them somehow and deployments uh one example of how you can uh talk about a deployment is through a Helm chart so okay when you yeah go can I the so can I store the helm chart also in the registry exactly so you can have your container image and you can Define your deployment of Helm chart and store that along with your image is what we kind of like slowly discovered that will make it more useful right so can you like tell me a little bit about the history of oras how did it start uh so so maybe if you look back at uh the history you can I would like to first of all thank uh two people one is Josh dolitzky and the other Shu Zang uh Josh is a to member on oci and shu is member of the ACR team they had a lot of collaboration and they came up with oras but before oras happened uh Josh was working on chart Museum which is about storing Helm charts and I remember that yeah and so you want to store a Helm chart and so uh from Azure side we kind of like implemented storing Helm charts in ACR that those were two different apis right so one was for chart storage and the other one was the kind of the uh registry or distribution V2 that came out of Docker right exactly so now we have to manage two apis right and then we figured out that the registry API is actually pretty uh uh what do you say pretty ubiquitous in many ways like you can use it to store multiple content types so why not kind of like unify the apis so that's where we start with the AAS project and Josh and Shu kind of like started writing this up and showing the experience we were pretty excited because you could store anything almost in the registry going forward and that's when the change happened between Helm 2 and Helm 3 and so Helm 3 was supporting the oci um yes so Helm 2 would uh was was a Helm was was the traditional helmm chart the way I remember it as uh Helm 3 started supporting oci registry as storage so they introduced commands that enable storing it directly into the registry and the auras uh libraries were used inside Helm um just kind of like walking the timeline I think it's important to look at how we drove the rest of uh container ecosystem to use uh the registry to store other artifacts so if you kind of look back you can see that uh there's also an oci working group that got created which help helped I was going to ask you about the oci involvement also so the idea was that uh the oci group understood that we are storing more than just images and why don't we kind of formalize it right and um the aura's uh uh what do you say uh specification uh or the aura's model of storing an artifact became a specification that was donated as a part of the working group to oci and that's one of the proposals that was there in the oi working group and so today if you look back we are helping Define how artifacts or non-container images will be stored in the registry can we actually can you show me how it works so sure short demo storing like simple text file or because you said we can store everything right all right all right let's let's let's get to the demo I I think you're really really interested in the demo yeah I am so um jumping back here first of all uh maybe I should give some context here uh I'm running a local registry which is which will help me kind of like uh use oras as a CLI so let's go ahead and create a simple artifact and in this case maybe I'll give some context which is um here I'm going to create a simple text file and the idea is that that text file is your artifact it's not a container image right so let's kind of see what's in the text file it's nothing but a simple hello world now let's go ahead and push um this artifact to my local registry and I'm going to specify an artifact type of application example the artifact type is what we call as an ion type and why why is the artifact type important so why right so what we understood is that the image has uh we understand the image as a container image or a Docker image or an oci image um uh that is useful for uh container run times this artifact is useful for different kinds of CIS and tools so we we need to kind of like let let the registry know that what type is it so that you can then query that and work with that specific data type rather than just everything is a container image uh secure supply chain is very popular right now in the in the industry are you saying that I can store artifacts that are related to the secure supply chain absolutely and I think interestingly oras artifacts were used before this whole secure supply chain industry kind of like uh started kicking in so M we we quickly realize that people want to store signatures people want to store s bombs they want to store Source or any any other kind of thing along with the image uh and so that's where we find the value of artifacts going forward because you have a storage that is that spans the same API across clouds right you go to ECR ACR dockerhub you have a registry and that will be supported by all Registries right right and so making this a specification hopefully we will have other providers Implement storing artifacts um along with images going forward because you don't have to invent yet another API for this let's see how we going to push the text file to the all right so in this in this I've just pushed the text file and you can see that there is a digest for this text file right so let's kind of look at we use your CLI to verify that this image has been pushed and you can see that there is a repository called hello uh and then this uh repository should have a t that we've just pushed which should be hello latest right and so you can see that we can use a CLI to query for repositories query for tags um and underlying it's using the distribution API so this should work across any registry not just my local registry yeah yeah that that's actually very cool how how do I pull it back all right so I'm going to jump into just looking at what the Manifest is here so that I can kind of describe oh the that's the the artifact uses manifest s were to actually the image manifest right so the image manifest is nothing but a Json blob that describes what the image is and in our case it would be what the artifact is uh so just kind of paying attention to uh here you can see that I have uh the example application that uh I have just uploaded and then that's what you push when you push that's the that's the artifact type exactly and now you can see that there is a title uh which is the hello text which we just pushed as well that's the name of the file that you actually pushed and and the layer is going to be the tar layer for that specific uh text file so you can see that um any content can be uploaded to the registry uh using the schema right uh and now back to answer your question let's see how we can pull this right I think that's what you are asking so I'm going to remove the text file from my logo file system and then go ahead and use auras to pull the image uh which is sorry I should I should have said pull the artifact not pull the image right so here I'm pulling the artifact hello latest and just like an image pull it goes ahead and pulls the content back down and I can see that uh my text file is now local so I think that that summarizes the pull and the push part that's pretty cool so uh now I can push actually anything to the registry right I can push ISO images for VMS I can push you said s bombs text files C pictures all other stuff all are all the specification was WR with cat pictures if you want to know so we we use cat pictures as a way to not offend anybody but get get the community excited as as as an example in oi well that's that's very interesting so um maybe we can actually SK have another episode where we can talk a little bit deeper because I'm very interested in the uh supply chain for software uh because that's one area I work on so maybe next time we can talk about how we can actually use AAS to submit or push Supply definitely definitely and I'm excited to show you how what more we can do with the CLI and the and the libraries going forward okay thank you and I hope that you found this helpful and we'll see you next time