Monthly Archives: May 2016

Open Source as Reality TV and Burning Data Centers [gcOnDemand podcast notes]

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During the OpenStack summit, Eric Wright (@discoposse) and I talked about a wide range of topics from scoring success of OpenStack early goals to burning down traditional data centers.

Why burn down your data center (and move to public cloud)? Because your ops process are too hard to change. Rob talks about how hybrid provides a path if we can made ops more composable.

Here are my notes from the audio podcast (source):

1:30 Why “zehicle” as a handle? Portmanteau from electrics cars… zero + vehicle

Let’s talk about OpenStack & Cloud…

  • OpenStack History
    • 2:15 Rob’s OpenStack history from Dell and Hyperscale
    • 3:20 Early thoughts of a Cloud API that could be reused
    • 3:40 The practical danger of Vendor lock-in
    • 4:30 How we implemented “no main corporate owner” by choice
  • About the Open in OpenStack
    • 5:20 Rob decomposes what “open” means because there are multiple meanings
    • 6:10 Price of having all open tools for “always open” choice and process
    • 7:10 Observation that OpenStack values having open over delivering product
    • 8:15 Community is great but a trade off. We prioritize it over implementation.
  • Q: 9:10 What if we started later? Would Docker make an impact?
    • Part of challenge for OpenStack was teaching vendors & corporate consumers “how to open source”
  • Q: 10:40 Did we accomplish what we wanted from the first summit?
    • Mixed results – some things we exceeded (like growing community) while some are behind (product adoption & interoperability).
  • 13:30 Interop, Refstack and Defcore Challenges. Rob is disappointed on interop based on implementations.
  • Q: 15:00 Who completes with OpenStack?
    • There are real alternatives. APIs do not matter as much as we thought.
    • 15:50 OpenStack vendor support is powerful
  • Q: 16:20 What makes OpenStack successful?
    • Big tent confuses the ecosystem & push the goal posts out
    • “Big community” is not a good definition of success for the project.
  • 18:10 Reality TV of open source – people like watching train wrecks
  • 18:45 Hybrid is the reality for IT users
  • 20:10 We have a need to define core and focus on composability. Rob has been focused on the link between hybrid and composability.
  • 22:10 Rob’s preference is that OpenStack would be smaller. Big tent is really ecosystem projects and we want that ecosystem to be multi-cloud.

Now, about RackN, bare metal, Crowbar and Digital Rebar….

  • 23:30 (re)Intro
  • 24:30 VC market is not metal friendly even though everything runs on metal!
  • 25:00 Lack of consistency translates into lack of shared ops
  • 25:30 Crowbar was an MVP – the key is to understand what we learned from it
  • 26:00 Digital Rebar started with composability and focus on operations
  • 27:00 What is hybrid now? Not just private to public.
  • 30:00 How do we make infrastructure not matter? Multi-dimensional hybrid.
  • 31:00 Digital Rebar is orchestration for composable infrastructure.
  • Q: 31:40 Do people get it?
    • Yes. Automation is moving to hybrid devops – “ops is ops” and it should not matter if it’s cloud or metal.
  • 32:15 “I don’t want to burn down my data center” – can you bring cloud ops to my private data center?

Notes from OSCON Container Podcast: Dan Berg, Phil Estes and Rob Hirschfeld

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At OSCON, I had the pleasure of doing a IBM Dojo Podcast with some deep experts in the container and data center space: Dan Berg (@DanCBerg) and Phil Estes (@estesp).

ibm-dojo-podcast-show-art-16x9-150x150We dove into a discussion around significant trends in the container space, how open technology relates to containers and looked toward the technology’s future. We also previewed next month’s DockerCon, which is set for June 19-21 in Seattle.

Highlights!  We think containers will be considered MORE SECURE next year and also have some comments about the linguistic shift from Docker to CONTAINERS.”

Here are my notes from the recording with time stamps if you want to skip ahead:

  • 00:35 – What are the trends in Containers?
    • Rob: We are still figuring out how to make them work in terms of networking & storage
    • Dan: There are still a lot of stateful work moving into containers that need storage
    • Phil: We need to use open standards to help customers navigate options
  • 2:45 – Are the changes keeping people from moving forward?
    • Phil: Not if you start with the right guidelines and architecture
    • Dan: It’s OK to pick one and keep going because you need to build expertise
    • Rob: RackN experience changed Digital Rebar to microservices was an iterative experience
  • 5:00 Dan likes that there is so much experimentation that’s forcing us to talk about how applications are engineered
  • 5:45  Rob points out that we got 5 minutes in without saying “Docker”
    • There are a lot of orchestration choices but there’s confusion between Docker and the container ecosystem.
  • 7:00 We’re at OSCON, how far has the technology come in being open?
    • Phil thinks that open container initiative (OCI) is helping bring a lot of players to the field.
    • Dan likes that IBM is experimenting in community and drive interactions between projects.
    • Rob is not sure that we need to get everyone on the same page: open source allows people to pursue their own path.
  • 10:50 We have to figure out how to compensate companies & individuals for their work
    • Dan: if you’ve got any worthwhile product, you’ve got some open source component of it.  There are various ways to profit around that.
  • 13:00 What are we going to be talking about this time next year?
    • Rob (joking) we’ll say containers are old and microkernels are great!
    • Rob wants to be talking about operations but knows that it’s never interesting
    • Phil moving containers way from root access into more secure operations
    • Dan believes that we’ll start to consider containers as more secure than what we have today.  <- Rob strongly agrees!
  • 17:20 What is the impact of Containers on Ops?  Aka DevOps
    • Dan said “Impact is HUGE!”  > Developers are going to get Ops & Capabilities for free
    • Rob brings up impact of Containers on DevOps – the discussion has really gone underground
  • 19:30 Role of Service Registration (Consul & Etcd)
    • Life cycle management of Containers has really changed (Dan)
    • Rob brings up the importance of Service Registration in container management
  • 20:30 2016.Dockercon Docket- what are you expecting?
    • Phil is speaking there on the contribute track & OCI.
    • Rob is doing the hallway track and looking to talk about the “underlay” ops and the competitive space around Docker and Container.
    • Dan will be talking to customers and watching how the community is evolving and experimenting
    • Rob & Dan will be at Open Cloud Technology Summit, June 22 in Seattle

 

5 Key Aspects of High Fidelity DevOps [repost from DevOps.com]

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For all our cloud enthusiasm, I feel like ops automation is suffering as we increase choice and complexity.  Why is this happening?  It’s about loss of fidelity.

Nearly a year ago, I was inspired by a mention of “Fidelity Gaps” during a Cloud Foundry After Dark session.  With additional advice from DevOps leader Gene Kim, this narrative about the why and how of DevOps Fidelity emerged.

As much as we talk about how we should have shared goals spanning Dev and Ops, it’s not nearly as easy as it sounds. To fuel a DevOps culture, we have to build robust tooling, also.

That means investing up front in five key areas: abstraction, composability, automation, orchestration, and idempotency.

Together, these concepts allow sharing work at every level of the pipeline. Unfortunately, it’s tempting to optimize work at one level and miss the true system bottlenecks.

Creating production-like fidelity for developers is essential: We need it for scale, security and upgrades. It’s not just about sharing effort; it’s about empathy and collaboration.

But even with growing acceptance of DevOps as a cultural movement, I believe deployment disparities are a big unsolved problem. When developers have vastly different working environments from operators, it creates a “fidelity gap” that makes it difficult for the teams to collaborate.

Before we talk about the costs and solutions, let me first share a story from back when I was a bright-eyed OpenStack enthusiast…

Read the Full Article on DevOps.com including my section about Why OpenStack Devstack harms the project and five specific ways to improve DevOps fidelity.