专访nicolas chaillan：容器技术为航空电子软件的新时代铺平了道路

Delivering an effective way to deploy innovative embedded software with built-in highsecurity and strong manageability July 2023 Interview with Nicolas Chaillan Container technology has forged strong inroads in the aviation andaerospace sector, providing a clear-cut way to securely update software andcompile audit trails for avionics systems. Maintaining isolation betweencontainers — being able to update a single container without affectingother containers or software components — is an important factor in theiradoption, as is portability between platforms. ABOUT NICOLAS CHAILLAN Nicolas Chaillan is thefounder of Ask Sage andthe former U.S. Air Forceand Space Force ChiefSoftware Officer. He isa strong proponent ofDevSecOps practicesand has spurred adop-tion of this developmentmodel throughout the De-partment of Defense. Thecompany he founded, AskSage, applies AI technol-ogy to give governmentteams a secure mecha-nism for gaining data andinformation relevant totheir missions. Containers have been deployed by leading aviation firms. Airbus streamlinessoftware updates on its A350 aircraft with containers. GE Aviation usescontainers for software updates to its jet engines. The Boeing 787 Dreamlineralso relies on container technology to perform software updates. We recently sat down with former U.S. Air Force and Space Force ChiefSoftware Officer Nicolas Chaillan to find out precisely why containertechnology is so important to modern avionics development. Below, we’veconsolidated some of his main points from our wide-ranging discussion. Team Access to Modern Applications Nicolas Chaillan:In 2019, when I started as the chief software officer for theAir Force and the Space Force, we explained to leaders that a container wasnot a shipping container to ship to Afghanistan but a software thing that couldbe used to effectively cut key software modules into pieces and create compo-nents that could be reused across teams. More importantly, each container and each module leverage a lot of opensource software that has to be assessed and updated regularly with the latestcapabilities and security patches. Teams can have access to best-of-breedsoftware and avoid getting locked into monolithic architectures. Container Orchestration I think the key benefit that we see from moving to containers is not just havingcontainers per se — it’s also the orchestration of containers. And that’s why wepick Kubernetes as an open source stack that can be embedded inside of verycomplex platforms. Benefits of Containers for Organizations I think it’s not really an issue, whether or not to use containers. Organizations don’t have a choice. Otherwise, theycannot keep up. You’re going to be causing a massive negative impact to your velocity if you don’t embrace themodern way of building software. By being modular and flexible, containers have the ability to update software multiple times a day, enablingtremendous capabilities for deployment. It works well with jets, and other aircraft. My team and I were the first onesto put Kubernetes on jets and then update software while flying the jet. We also put AI on the jet without changingthe architecture and keeping the legacy hardware. Having the ability to decouple the flight control — that doesn’treally need to change — and bring in new capabilities as a separate set of containers enables you to update thosecontainers rapidly, without impacting the airworthiness of the aircraft. And it’s not only the modularity, and the reuse across teams, and your ability to receive — particularly if you’re a largerorganization. You also see the benefit of security. I think this is a game-changer — especially when moving to zerotrust, which I think everybody should. Wanted: More Tools and Understanding The adoption of containerization, and Kubernetes as a container orchestration stack, is obviously complex becauseof the complete change of thinking and culture. Software is a factor, both in terms of architecture design and theeffort of going to modular architecture. The software is more flexible and nimble, but it is also different in terms of tools and our understanding of everythingthat we know. There’s definitely a massive talent gap. It’s a big issue. People are realizing that they have no choice but to reinventthemselves every year. I argue that first you need to catch up, and then you need to keep up. And it’s funny how we underinvest in ourpeople. It reminds me of this meme where you have a CTO saying, “What if we invest in our people and they leave?”And the CEO says, “Well, what if we don’t invest in them and they stay?” Insights from Simulation and Modeling A digital twin exponentially enhances modeling and simulation. It empowers teams to know exactly how the system isgoing to behave before bending metal. A lot of people look at software agility and forget that you can do a lot with that. You don’t have to always be in a waterfall universe in hardware. You can now easily swap hardwar