Last week, I made my second apperance on the Brian Gracely & Aaron Delp’s excellent podcast, The Cloudcast.   A lot has changed since my first appearance in 2011 but we’re still struggling to create consistent operations around these new platforms.  Then it was OpenStack, today it is container orchestration.

I loved this closing comment from Brian, “[the Cloudcast] loves people who are down in the dirt… you are living it and it’s going into the product.”

Total time, 38 minutes

• 02:15: Interview Starts
• 03:15: RackN path to Digital Rebar.  History of team going back to Crowbar
• 06:05: Why we moved to containers for Digital Rebar (blog details here)
• 07:20: The process to transform from monolith to services
• 07:50: As backgrouind, what is Digital Rebar?  Configuration & Services in Sequence.
• 09:30: How/Why to use Consul for services
• 10:30: Why Immutability is Hard  (technial use of the word “cheese”)
• 12:20: Challenge of restarting & state in Microservices
• 14:30: Need for Iterative design process to improve as you learn the pattern.
• 15:10: “If you are not using containers for at least packaging, your are crazy”
• 15:40: We choose not to talk about OpenStack!
• 16:15: Fidelity Gap and cloud portability
• 17:10: Rob does funny voice about idea that with containers “devs don’t have to do ops”
• 18:00: Why adding some overhead for deveopers is a good investment.
• 18:40: Rob throws OpenStack under the bus for Devstack and “it worked in Devstack” mentality
• 21:20: Containers do not solve all problems, in some ways they make things harder (especially on networking)/
• 21:55: “we are about to put a serious hurt on networking management”
• 21:50: Networking configuration is hard to build in a consisent way.   You have to automated it – there is no other choice.
• 24:20: Hybrid Cloud priorities with RackN
• 25:00: We “declared default” on trying to create a mono-cloud and accepted that infrastructure is hybrid.
• 25:40: Openness comes from having multiple providers.  Composable ops allows you to cope with heterogeneous APIs
• 28:55: Businesses want choice and control about infrastructure.  Do not want to deployments to hardcode to platforms or tooling.
• 29:30: “I have not met anyone who is just using one cloud, tool or platform”
• 30:30: Brian asks Rob to pick winners and trends.  “we like to let people pick and choose.”
• 31:00: Container orchestration with networking and storage are going to be huge.
• 31:30: Rob compares Kubernetes, Docker, Mesos, Rancher and Cloudsoft.
• 32:20: The importance of adjacencies.  Things you need to make the core stuff work.
• 34:20: “Watch out for the adjacencies because they will slow you down.”
• 36:10: “We love guests who live in the dirt” and “built the technology that they wanted to get their jobs”