A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Mirantis Engineering
What does it take to create world-class cloud products, leveraging open source innovation to build cohesive, value-added solutions for customers? We wanted to take you behind the scenes of Mirantis product innovation, by giving you a rare view into the daily life of our Mirantis Secure Registry team.
In case you’re not familiar with Mirantis Secure Registry (MSR), it’s an enterprise-ready, container registry solution that enables organizations to build their own secure software supply chain, protecting container images from bad actors and malicious code. It’s an integral part of our Mirantis Container Cloud and Mirantis Kubernetes Engine solutions, and enables enterprises to safely store and manage their Docker images on-premises or in virtual private clouds, with security scanning and image signing capabilities to verify the provenance and content of applications.
Meet the Team Behind Mirantis Secure Registry
Below, you will hear from Brad Fewster, Sr. Engineering Manager and head of the MSR team. We invite you to watch the video to meet Brad and the team, learn about the day-to-day responsibilities of each team member, and get a complete tour of the current Mirantis Secure Registry UI.
MSR is developed using agile scrum, a lightweight process framework that helps the team iterate quickly and cohesively. In the video, you can see a recording of an actual daily scrum meeting of the MSR team, including the Jira board, and hear updates from individual team members. These roles can vary from sprint to sprint, giving each developer an opportunity to work on aspects of the product that not only draw on their expertise but also stimulate their personal interest.
Later in the video, Brad gives you a tour of the Mirantis Secure Registry UI, which can be used to browse images and audit repository events. Starting at the repository level, Brad shows all the features and functionalities available within MSR for regulating and maintaining container images. These include tags, Helm charts, Webhooks, promotion and enforcement policies, mirroring options, repository-specific settings, and a complete activity log to track what is happening within each repository.
Moving on to the general system level, you will see overarching system settings that can be set by your MSR Admin to ensure each image runs in its intended environment. This is where you would choose your storage type, select a cloud provider, and implement security permissions so that only authorized users can pull specific images from a given repository.
Next is the organizational level, which is referring to a collection of repositories that helps segregate images based on their purpose. By grouping these together, you can then go back in at the repository level and set specific permissions for users within your organization.
Finally, Brad reviews MSR’s robust list of supported APIs, showing how all pertinent documentation required for customization and expansion using the APIs is available directly within the MSR UI.
Engineering Team Cohesion: See it Right in the Code Reviews
When working in open source innovation, how can you tell that an engineering team is cohesive and collaborative, with a spirit of mutual growth? Well, for the MSR team, you can tell it’s an amazing group of engineers that truly works well together by just looking at the GitHub code reviews. In the video below, Brad Fewster investigates a recent code review made in GitHub for the MSR product. Brad summarizes the code changes in the pull request and shares comments made by various reviewers, as well as replies by the code contributor.
The code review is for porting a previous implementation of MSR’s catalog API to the new 12-factor version. Five team members with different areas of expertise vetted the code changes, posting a variety of questions regarding topics such as the semantic correctness of variable nomenclature, the best way to perform unbounded queries, full satisfaction of the API specification, etc. Through both the reviewers’ comments and the code contributor’s justifications for technical decisions, you can see the team’s commitment to quality code, including an emphasis on consistent user experience.
You can also see the truly collaborative ethos of the team. At the end of the review, the code contributor thanked the reviewers and explained how he provided detailed replies so that everyone could understand the changes and learn from both his mistakes and intentional decisions.
Brad ends the video with a great comment: “The team is incredibly cohesive using these technologies, and it’s amazing to have this kind of togetherness in delivering such an amazing product.”
Try Mirantis Secure Registry Today
Would you like to experience the fine work of the MSR team yourself? Download Mirantis Secure Registry today in just a few easy steps and you will have the leading container image registry up-and-running. For more information on deploying MSR, see our Docs Portal.
If we’ve piqued your interest in joining the Mirantis Secure Registry team, or other teams within Mirantis, please check out our careers page.
