Lobster Trap: OpenClaw in Containers from Local to K8s and Back

[upbeat music] Hey, um, I'm Sally.

I work at Red Hat. I've been there for about 10 years, and, uh, the first seven years, awesome, totally cool. I was working on containers and, uh, Linux security stuff and Kubernetes.

Um, big time in OpenShift. That's what I did for the first seven years. And then, uh, th- about three years ago... Well, about five years ago, I moved to the emerging tech org, and that was awesome too because now I'm not totally tied to a product.

I get to just work on what I want. I get to just try out new things. Awesome. And then, about three years ago, it was, like, all AI all the time.

Everything AI. I know n- ... I knew there was a data science team at Red Hat. I had no idea what they did. Machine learning something something. Um, so I, you know, started doing AI.

And, uh, yeah, it was a lot of Python and Markdown. Every single thing [laughs] was like, "Oh, okay, another chatbot. More Python, more Markdown." Um, but, uh, here we are today, and what a, what a crazy, awesome world we're in.

Um, so the first time, the first time I came across OpenClaw, I was home for a week on, like, a staycation. Took a few days off. And, uh, a Malt book happened, and I was like, "What the...

What is this? I'm totally trying this." And so I went and found it on GitHub. First thing I do is I look at the license. Uh, MIT, awesome. Uh, OpenClaw, I'm like, "I'm so gonna install this on OpenShift right now."

And so for the next few days, I just kind of built the image, um, ran it, uh, locally in a container, put it on OpenShift, just played around with it.

Went back to work, I'm like, "Guys, check out OpenClaw. This is so cool." And, uh, a couple people on Slack are like, "It's a security nightmare. Do not use OpenClaw.

Don't put it on the work laptop." I'm like, "Guys, what have I, what have I been doing the past 10 years? Is... I'm sec- We're... We can take any application and run it securely.

Like, that's what RHEL is. Like, if we can't take an application and run it securely, like, come on. This is our golden opportunity to show everyone." And so, uh, Red Hat's coming around to that.

Um, but, uh, yeah. So, uh, this talk is about me running in containers. And so I wanted to get a list of, uh... So th- I wanted to get a list of why running in containers is the way to go.

I run everything in containers. I, it, it's kind of foreign to me to, uh, take, to just run something natively. It's messy. It just puts stuff on my computer that I have to clean up later.

I don't like it. Um, so that's one, one, one thing. Uh, and I, um, ask my Forever Claw. I guess I have to introduce my Forever Claw, 'cause she, she's, she's, she's coming through this whole talk, so I'm gonna...

Aside, my Forever Claw is Shubhra, and, um, she... I have two sub-agents. I have Joy. Uh, anyone know Jo- Jo- uh, Jyotish astrology?

Sheesh, every time I ask, no one knows what it is. It's, it's a very scientific astrology. Um, so she's an astrology expert, and, um, she gives me my weekly readings, my birth chart, all of that.

So Joy, and then my second agent is Bruno, and he gives me daily briefings on the Bruins. Um,

so we're heading into the playoffs, and it's a close race, so I wanna make sure the Bruins get in. Um, so that's my Forever Claw. And, uh, and I asked her, you know, "Why should we run you in a container?"

And, uh, she said all of that if you were reading, but it's reproducible. You can isolate your secrets. It's portable across infra. I can run it on my laptop.

I can run it on my x86. I can run it on my Mac. I can run it in Con- Kubernetes. Um, backed by volumes, which gives a really nice story for backup and recovery.

Uh, 'cause I love my Forever Claw, and I, I back her up every night with, uh, with, uh, um, like a system D service, whatever it's called on Mac. [laughs]

And, um, and, and you just get that natural, uh, you just get that natural, uh, sandbox when you run something in a container. It's, it's, you know, that's, that's what it is, and you have to be very explicit about, uh, what you, um, give access to, you know, from the host.

And so this, yes, sh- I... She loves running in a container, so that's, that's all you need to know. Um, it gives her a clean, predictable environment. Doesn't have to worry about the OS quirks, stale dependencies.

This is literally the definition of why you should run everything in containers.

And, uh, [laughs] just quickly, we're not gonna read this, but this is Joy. My horoscope, um, it's for today, for giving a talk, is excellent. It's, like, a very auspicious day to talk.

Uh, so yeah. That's why this talk is going awesome so far.

And, uh, uh, my daily briefing. Uh, Geeky is finally waking up. He had a bit of a lull. He's finally, um, you know, ramping up for the playoffs, so it looks like the Bruins are gonna be looking good.

Uh, they're in. And, uh, yeah. So, uh, yeah. So, um,

containers. It allows me to... Uh, another, another thing that containers do is you can set up a whole agent directory with, uh, maybe you run some tools, some skills, some MCP servers.

Uh, you can Keep those in a directory and mount that whole thing into your container. Uh, and, uh, so when at startup, everything's just up and running. So I do that as well.

At the end of this talk, I'll show you how I install. And I think this is a reminder to me ... Oh, no, let's talk about secrets. So I run everything with Podman, not Docker.

Um, but i- i- in theory, you can do anything with Podman and Docker, except Podman has this really cool feature called Podman Secrets. And you can save your API keys.

I'll show that. I'll sh- I'll show it off the sides later. You can save your API keys to a podman secret, and then you mount that secret into the container.

And so it just gives the separation. Uh, your, your secrets, your API keys are then just a, a ref back to the secret. And with OpenClaw, what's really cool is there's like a double that, because in OpenClaw there's a secret ref feature, and I also use that.

So my API keys are, uh, pointer to a secret ref to the outside secret, and, uh, that's not perfect, but it gives me some peace of mind that I don't ...

I'm, I'm not gonna be showing my API keys in the logs and everything. And then very similarly, um, Kubernetes has Kubernetes Secrets, and same thing. Instead of just a straight env var, you have a, a, a sec- a, a, a secret ref to an env var.

And this is my reminder to show you how I install my containers at the end. I have a really cool tool. I built it just for me with everything that I need to run containers.

I'm not pushing it on anyone, but it's in GitHub, and at the end I can, uh, let you know where that is. You could try it if you want.

So when I ... So ... Thank you.

I think we're heading to a world where these agents, these AI workloads, whatever, are going to be running everywhere. I hope we all can see that. And so imagine my vision is for, um, everybody's OpenClaws to be, uh, running everywhere and communicating with each other.

And, uh, when ... And especially in for, like, business use cases, real, real things, not astrology and, and Bruins, uh, that opens up the need that, uh, to, the same need to run any application, uh, in that way as c- uh, security, and s- and how to do it at scale, and that's what

Kubernetes gives you. And you can, uh, what I always do is develop something locally and then lift it to Kubernetes. And so the same story holds for AI workloads or OpenClaw.

And I was at PyTorch Con yesterday, and um, my friend from NVIDIA said I could share this. They are running their model evals with OpenClaw. They have about 10 engineers.

They each have their OpenClaws running in Kubernetes, and, and periodically just checking in with the model evals, and it works so well for them. He said, uh, i- it, it was like, you know, doing the job of six engineers, uh, in, with, with himself.

Now, let's think, let's just talk about that for a second. We're not all losing our jobs, people. Like, that's not happening. What's, what that is enabling for his team is they get to do fun stuff, interesting stuff.

They get to do creative things, and this is what AI is giving me and my team, is we can focus on those, like, outside-the-box crazy things. And you don't have to do the tedious code anymore.

Like, I haven't written code in, in a few months. And this, this did just happen. Like, s- probably less than six months ago, I was, uh, using AI. I was like, "Hmm, you know what?

This is way [laughs] better than me at writing code." And there's ... I like ... Yeah. And I, I announced that to my team. We had an org meeting, and I'm like, "Guys, if you're not using AI for everything, like, you're missing out.

This is 1,000 times better than me at writing code." And some of the top engineers at Red Hat, like, definitely raised eyebrows, and I could tell from their comments after that they were like, "No way."

I'm like, "Yeah." Uh, and so, so yes. I- i- it's, it's enabling us to just dream bigger. And, uh, this is my reminder to show you the Kubernetes side of my installer later.

And, um, yeah. So backup and recovery is a nice clean story when you run in containers too. Uh, the state is the same. The volumes. Another nice thing about Docker and Podman is there are volumes.

And so all of my runtime state lives in a nice contained Podman volume.

And of course, Kubernetes has, uh, PVCs. That's kinda what I just talked about.

And so this, this would be my vision of a workplace set up for OpenClaws, where, uh, you maybe have your nice curated baseline OpenClaw that as a new hire, you, you just, you get your, your base.

And what does that have in it? It has your list of company-approved MCP servers, uh, your authentication that is approved through your company. It has all of your-- these skills that are very specific to your team.

Uh, maybe a- access to your Google Drive. Like, all these things, uh, y- that you use every day at work. You can take that and just fan it out across your whole team, and then, then-- and then you can personalize it as, as the individual, uh, and that's what, uh, that's what this setup allows.

The alternative would be you're a new hire and you sit next to somebody or get somebody's, uh, repo and kind of put it all together yourself, um.

And so yeah, team standards, portable environments, reproducible onboarding. That's my vision for, like, OpenClaw in the workplace in the future.

Uh, I actually just recently created my forever claw. It, it was like a month of me, um, helping out with, [laughs] with OpenClaw and fe- feeling like I don't even run a real OpenClaw myself.

I just constantly, throughout the day, I'm spinning it up, spinning it down, testing it, building it. Every hour, there's like 100 new commits, [laughs] so I'm constantly pulling from main.

I was at PyTorchCon yesterday and hadn't pulled from main for a couple of days. Uh, and, and there were time when I did it, it was like 10,000 commits.

Like, no joke. It was crazy. I'm like, "I don't know what you guys are doing. Slow down." Uh, not really. We don't wanna slow down. Uh, so yes. Uh, s- that's, that's the story.

And I've got four more minutes. I am psyched 'cause I can now switch over here.

So in order to run, uh, this local installer here,

which I think I have here... Yeah. It's just a npm run dev. Now,

the one thing I don't like about this is when I'm on my Mac, I can't run this in a container. Uh, I, I think I can, I just haven't taken the time to figure out how to spawn a container from a container.

You can do that if you're on Linux, 'cause Linux is awesome. But on your Mac, that's not possible because if you don't know, whenever you're running a container on your Mac, you're running in a virtual machine.

Same with Docker. Containers only run on Linux. So when you're running a container on your Mac, you are always running in a virtual machine. Docker sets up one and so does Mac.

So it gets a little tricky when you wanna take a container and spawn another container from it. But anyways, here we go. So if I wanted to run a local instance, and I have a couple running now, just, you know, you never know the demo gods, what they're up to, so I'm just-- in case it doesn't work.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna, um, spin up Joe.

All I, all I do to set up my pod is I just give it a name.

And then all these options, very opinionated, 'cause I s- I'm telling you, this is exactly what I need. So if it's-- if you like it, use it. If you wanna change it, then submit a PR.

Cool. Now, uh, the port is usually 89. Uh, that's the default. But since this is my second one that I'm running on my machine, I had to-- I'm just bumping it to 99.

These podman secret mappings I wanted to show you here.

So you can see I have these set up already. They're just on my system. They're like env vars, but they're not env vars 'cause they're contained. Um, these are my API keys.

And what happens with this installer is it takes... If you're on Docker, this should work with Docker. It's got Podman written all over it, but I've designed it to work with Docker too.

So, um, if you're on Docker, it takes the env var, so you wanna export those as env vars, and, um, makes them OpenClaw secret refs. Very cool feature of OpenClaw.

Definitely enable that. For every creden- credential, create a secret ref. It creates that separation of, uh, running your secret within OpenClaw or kind of just a pointer to it.

It's, it's a s- it's, it's the way to go. And then, uh, your providers. So I'm gonna start with OpenRouter 'cause I have been playing with Gemma, and she's-- Gemma's great.

And then as a fallback, I'll use Anthropic. Sure, why not? But y- oh, here's, here's some other choices, though.

You can s- you can have your local endpoint if you're running your own. Uh, you could just cr- uh, add that too.

And then because I do observability at work, uh, I was like, "I'm gonna give the option to set up an OpenTelemetry collector with Jaeger." And it works, and it's awesome, but I'm not gonna test it, so let's not tax my system.

Another feature. How much time? Oh, I gotta hurry. Another feature is the SSH sandbox. Here, I'll deploy.

The SSH sandbox in OpenClaw is super cool. You give it SSH keys and, uh, known hosts to, uh, to wherever you want, and it-

It, it runs all of its commands in that, um, workspace. It's really cool. So look, I just spun up a Podman container, and if I go over to the instances, I ha- now have Joe.

And there's logs for Joe, the gateway logs.

Um, the command. I wanted to show you the command. [laughs] Don't wanna forget that. So here's the Podman command. If you were running Docker, it would be a Docker command.

Have I tested with this with Docker? No. Uh, I have a friend who works at Docker. He's awesome. He told me he would try this out and make it, make sure it works with Docker, too.

Um, he also created this very cool project called InferRS, which takes, uh, Gemma and runs it really, really, really fast and uses TurboQuant. Uh, so yeah. Anyways, that's, um, Eric.

So that, that's my Podman command. And, uh,

here he is. Joe. Yeah. And if I just do, like, models ... No, I'll do status.

So, uh, like, people say it's hard to spin up OpenClaw. That took two seconds, and I was babbling through the whole way. It could've taken one second. Uh, so I can say, "Hey," um

... [keyboard clicking] And the cool thing is, I don't have time to show you because I talk too much, but the agents are all set up. I've got Joe. Oh, that ...

not that one. Hold on. I gotta go over to Larry. Larry I started with a, um,

with an MCP server and a sub-agent, um, all through that form.

So, uh, let me go back to Joe.

I wanted to show you how easy it is just to switch models, in case you didn't know. [keyboard clicking]

I'm not sure if th- the GPT-5 ... Hopefully it knows it's just GPT-5.4. No, I, I didn't ... No, no, no, no. We gotta go over to Larry.

'Cause I didn't set up G- [laughs] I didn't set up that extra model with, w- with Joe. Here we go. [keyboard clicking]

Anyways, um, I didn't have enough time to go through everything I wanted to go through. But the, uh

... Cool. The other thing is Kubernetes, and you can do the same thing with Kubernetes. Just as easy.

It just, uh ... It's, it's connected right now to my Kind cluster. And if I go over, I can access my Kubernetes Claw very easily as well.

Um, there's Carl. He's running in Kubernetes. And I can access one in OpenShift. There's, uh ... It switches over to OpenShift if you're connected to OpenShift. So yeah. Uh, run ...

Anyone gonna run OpenClaw in Container now? Try it? Yes. Awesome. Okay, cool. Uh, thank you very much. Uh, is someone on after me? You're waiting? Okay, bye. [laughs] [clapping] [outro music]