Author Archives: Rob H

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About Rob H

A Baltimore transplant to Austin, Rob thinks about ways of building scale infrastructure for the clouds using Agile processes. He sat on the OpenStack Foundation board for four years. He co-founded RackN enable software that creates hyperscale converged infrastructure.

September 1 – Weekly Recap of All Things Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

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Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things SRE. If you have any ideas for this recap or would like to include content please contact us at info@rackn.com or tweet Rob (@zehicle) or RackN (@rackngo)


Image from @DevOpsDaysDFW

10 Essential Skills of a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) by AppDynamics
https://cloud.kapostcontent.net/pub/1418185e-b325-49d3-b65c-de338e45cb6f/ebook-10-essential-skills-of-a-site-reliability-engineer-sre.pdf

Almost overnight, it seems that Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) has become one of the hottest job titles across the IT Industry. So why all the sudden buzz and momentum around the SRE role? READ MORE

DevOps Tool Market Size Applications 2017 to 2022
http://www.tradecalls.org/2017-08-31-devops-tool-market

Global DevOps Tool Market Research Report 2017 to 2022 presents an in-depth assessment of the DevOps Tool Market including enabling technologies, key trends, market drivers, challenges, standardization, regulatory landscape, deployment models, operator case studies, opportunities, future roadmap, value chain, ecosystem player profiles and strategies. The report also presents forecasts for DevOps Tool Market investments from 2017 till 2022.

READ REPORT

Don’t be ageist: In the DevOps era, experience matters by @Jenz514
https://techbeacon.com/dont-be-ageist-devops-era-experience-matters

When it comes to attitudes toward age, DevOps is a lot like IT in general, but possibly more so. Defenders of an IT workforce that skews young have always noted that technology changes quickly, skills must be updated rapidly, business demands evolve fast, and long workdays just don’t appeal to professionals who have families to go home to. All of that may ratchet up even higher in DevOps culture. READ MORE

L8ist Sh9y Podcast : Digital Rebar and Terraform Provisioning
Blog Link http://bit.ly/2xPILHb 

Stephen Spector, HPE Cloud Evangelist talks with Greg Althaus, CTO and Co-Founder of RackN about how the Digital Rebar Provisioning solution provides bare metal server support for the HashiCorp Terraform Solution.

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Subscribe to our new daily DevOps, SRE, & Operations Newsletter
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UPCOMING EVENTS

Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus are preparing for a series of upcoming events where they are speaking or just attending. If you are interested in meeting with them at these events please email info@rackn.com. 

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

 

Podcast – Terraform and Digital Rebar Provision Bare Metal

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In this podcast, Stephen Spector, HPE Cloud Evangelist and Greg Althaus, Co-Founder and CTO RackN, talk about the integration point for Digital Rebar Provisioning with the Terraform solution. The specific focus is on delivering bare metal provisioning to users of Terraform.

About Terraform (LINK)

Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve production infrastructure. It is an open source tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.

More info on Digital Rebar Provisioning

Follow the RackN L8ist Sh9y Podcast

August 25 – Weekly Recap of All Things Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

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Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things SRE. If you have any ideas for this recap or would like to include content please contact us at info@rackn.com or tweet Rob (@zehicle) or RackN (@rackngo)

SRE Items of the Week


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What is “Site Reliability Engineering?” 
https://landing.google.com/sre/interview/ben-treynor.html 

In this interview, Ben Treynor shares his thoughts with Niall Murphy about what Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is, how and why it works so well, and the factors that differentiate SRE from operations teams in industry. READ MORE

Podcast: A Nice Mix of Ansible and Digital Rebar
http://bit.ly/2vkBYEe 

Follow our new L8ist Sh9y Podcast on SoundCloud at https://soundcloud.com/user-410091210.

Digital Rebar Mascot Naming 

Next week the Digital Rebar community will be finalizing the name for our mascot

Several possible names are listed on a recent blog post for your consideration. Please tweet to @DigitalRebar any ideas you have as we will be choosing a name next week via a Twitter poll.

Digital Rebar v3 Provision
http://rebar.digital/

Digital Rebar is the open, fast and simple data center provisioning and control scaffolding designed with a cloud native architecture.

Our extensible stand-alone DHCP/PXE/IPXE service has minimal overhead so it can be installed and provisioning in under 5 minutes on a laptop, RPi or switch. From there, users can add custom or pre-packaged workflows for full life-cycle automation using our API and CLI or a community UX.

A cloud native bare metal approach provides API-driven infrastructure-as-code automation without locking you into a specific hardware platform, operating system or configuration model.

For physical infrastructure provisioning, Digital Rebar replaces Cobbler, Foreman, MaaS or similar with the added bonus of being able to include simple control workflows for RAID, IPMI and BIOS configuration. We also provide event driven actions via websockets API and a simple plug-in model. By design, Digital Rebar is not opinionated about scripting tools so you can mix and match Chef, Puppet, Ansible, SaltStack and even Bash.

Next version: release of v3.1 is anticipated on 9/4/2017.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus are preparing for a series of upcoming events where they are speaking or just attending. If you are interested in meeting with them at these events please email info@rackn.com.

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

Podcast – A Nice Mix of Ansible and Digital Rebar

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Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and Co-Founder, RackN talks with Stephen Spector, HPE Cloud Evangelist about the recent uptake in Ansible news as well as how Digital Rebar Provision assists Ansible users.

Listen to the 9 minute podcast here:

As this is the launch of L8ist Sh9y Podcast from RackN we encourage you to visit our site at https://soundcloud.com/user-410091210 or subscribe to the RSS Feed. We will also be publishing on iTunes as well shortly.

August 18 – Weekly Recap of All Things Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

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Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things SRE. If you have any ideas for this recap or would like to include content please contact us at info@rackn.com or tweet Rob (@zehicle) or RackN (@rackngo)

SRE Items of the Week

Beyond Google SRE: What is Site Reliability Engineering like at Medium?
https://blog.netsil.com/beyond-google-sre-what-is-site-reliability-engineering-like-at-medium-71c65bd35f4e


We had the opportunity to sit down with Nathaniel Felsen, DevOps Engineer at Medium and the author of “Effective DevOps with AWS”. We are happy to share some practical insights from Nathaniel’s extensive experience as a seasoned DevOps and SRE practitioner.

While we hear a lot about these experiences from Google, Netflix, etc., we wanted to gather perspectives on DevOps and SRE life with other easily relatable companies. From tech-stack challenges to organization structure, Nathaniel provides a wide range of practical insights that we hope will be valuable in improving DevOps practices at your organization. READ MORE

GitHub seeks to spur innovation with Kubernetes migration
http://www.zdnet.com/article/github-seeks-to-spur-innovation-with-kubernetes-migration/

GitHub on Wednesday is sharing the details of the massive technical endeavor its engineers went through to migrate the infrastructure that powers github.com and api.github.com — some of its most critical workloads — from a set of manually-configured physical servers to Kubernetes clusters that run application containers.

GitHub is confident the move will allow for faster innovation on the online code sharing and development platform. READ MORE

SRE Thinking: Reframing Dev + Ops
http://bit.ly/2w2I53F

Last month, Eric Wright and I were able to complete a discussion the inspired my guest post for CapitalOne “How Platforms and SREs Change the DevOps Contract.” While our conversation ranged widely over the challenges of building and integration of IT processes, the key message is simple: we need to make investments in operations. READ MORE

Coal or Diamonds? Configuration Management is Under Pressure
http://bit.ly/2uTvADN

Cloud Native thinking is thankfully changing the way we approach traditional IT infrastructure.  These profound changes in how we build applications with 12-factor design and containers has deep implications on how we manage configuration and the tools we use to do it.  These are not cloud only impacts – the changes impact every corner of IT data centers. READ MORE

Subscribe to our new daily DevOps, SRE, & Operations Newsletter https://paper.li/e-1498071701#/

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UPCOMING EVENTS

Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus are preparing for a series of upcoming events where they are speaking or just attending. If you are interested in meeting with them at these events please email info@rackn.com.

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

Coal or Diamonds? Configuration Management is Under Pressure

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Cloud Native thinking is thankfully changing the way we approach traditional IT infrastructure.  These profound changes in how we build applications with 12-factor design and containers has deep implications on how we manage configuration and the tools we use to do it.  These are not cloud only impacts – the changes impact every corner of IT data centers.

“You still have to do configuration management but… we’re getting to a point we can do a lot less” (8:30)

Configuration Management is both necessary and very hard. I’ve written and spoken about the developer rebellion against Infrastructure (and will again at DOD Dallas!).  The TL;DR on that lightning talk is “infrastructure sucks.”

In this podcast, Eric and I have time to stretch out and really discuss what’s going on with in both broad and specific terms.  At the 15 minute mark, we start talking about how “radical simplicity” is coming to provisioning and deployment automation.  We break down how the business needs for repeatable and robust automation are driving IT to rethinking huge swaths of their infrastructures.  That transitions into making a whole data center into a CI/CD pipeline.

Podcast: Episode 15: The Death of Configuration Management with Rob Hirschfeld 

“If we have radically better control of the physical infrastructure, then I don’t need anything else to install Kubernetes.” (22:00)

Like always, Eric and I are not shy about taking on IT hot topics.  Dig deep, enjoy and let us know what YOU think about these topics.  We want to hear from you.

SRE Thinking : Reframing Dev + Ops

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Last month, Eric Wright and I were able to complete a discussion the inspired my guest post for CapitalOne “How Platforms and SREs Change the DevOps Contract.” While our conversation ranged widely over the challenges of building and integration of IT processes, the key message is simple: we need to make investments in operations.

This podcast explains why I’ve been using Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) as a proxy for this DevOps inspired rethinking of operations.

I hope you’ll take the time to listen to this deep conversation about very real IT issues. Eric and I are not shy about expressing our opinions, but we’re also anti-shaming. The simple reality is that building infrastructure is hard and we all make difficult choices. My hope is that we can start sharing the fixes and helping each other out.

Podcast Episode 50 – SRE Revisited plus the Challenges of Ops and more with Rob Hirschfeld (@zehicle) 

Do these topics inspire you? Creating data center automation for SREs is our mission at RackN. We believe that well run infrastructure requires building APIs from the ground up and keeping them simple. I hope that you’ll take 5 minutes to try our latest offering, Digital Rebar Provision and join us on the quest drive excellence in operations.

 

August 11 – Weekly Recap of All Things Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

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Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things SRE. If you have any ideas for this recap or would like to include content please contact us at info@rackn.com or tweet Rob (@zehicle) or RackN (@rackngo)

SRE Items of the Week

Report: DevOps is still considered a new phenomenon
http://sdtimes.com/report-devops-still-considered-new-phenomenon  

While companies have grasped that DevOps leads to an increase in innovation, DevOps adoption and implementation still remains a challenge for many. Logz.io, an AI-powered log analytics company, released its DevOps Pulse 2017 survey in time for today’s SysAdmin Day, highlighting some of the challenges and benefits to DevOps.

The DevOps Pulse report this year was based on data from a survey of 700 companies, with an additional section on DevOps culture because, according to Logz.io, it’s one topic that wasn’t researched enough. READ MORE

Immutable Infrastructure Deployment Challenges for DevOps
http://bit.ly/2vFAWq1

Rob Hirschfeld and Gareth Rushgrove (@garethr) discuss the issues.

DevOps vs SRE vs Cloud Native Talk at DevOps Summit
http://news.sys-con.com/node/4134816 

In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN, will explore this trend and discuss concrete ways to cope with the coming changes. He’ll look at the reasons why SRE is attractive and get specific about ways that teams can bootstrap their efforts and keep their DevOps Fu strong.

Meet the Digital Rebar Mascot
http://bit.ly/2fvnrT7

The Digital Rebar project is pleased to announce our new mascot; however, she doesn’t have a name. We are looking for ideas and you can reach us at @digitalrebar, @zehicle, or comment on this blog. READ MORE
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UPCOMING EVENTS

Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus are preparing for a series of upcoming events where they are speaking or just attending. If you are interested in meeting with them at these events please email info@rackn.com.

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

Meet the Digital Rebar Mascot

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The Digital Rebar project is pleased to announce our new mascot; however, she doesn’t have a name. We are looking for ideas and you can reach us at @digitalrebar, @zehicle, or comment on this blog.

Current ideas:

  • Digital Rebear
  • Rebear
  • Rebare
  • Baremetal
  • Bootstrap (the bear)
  • Skids ~ work boots
  • Beamer ~ tie-off point that is portable and affixes to a steel beam
  • Grand Pappy ~ (cable) lager multi-conductor feeder cable
  • Lumberg ~ guy that walks around with a cup of coffee all day and does nothing
  • Hue Phi (for UEFI)

If you need help finding a “bear” name, try this interesting name generator based on animal type: http://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/pet-bear-names.php. I also found a site with construction worker slang: http://www.theunionbootpro.com/slang/.

We look forward to hearing your ideas and are quickly working on stickers and other assorted gear with the new mascot.

Immutable Deployment Challenges for DevOps

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Last week, Gareth Rushgrove (@garethr) and I hashed out our viewpoints on the intersection of DevOps and Immutable Infrastructure.  We recorded the call because we want to expand the discussion to include a broader audience and we’d love to hear your opinions!

The gist of the call is that DevOps processes are moving faster and faster as teams embrace the create-destroy-repeat pattern of cloud automation.  This pattern favors immutable images driven by cloudinit style bootstrapping.  This changes our configuration management practice because configuration is front loaded.  It also means that we destroy rather than patch.

We both felt that this immutable pattern will become dominate overtime.

However, there was significant nuance in our position about this change and the challenges that it will pose to operators.  If you care about how immutable infrastructure is going to impact your DevOps plans then you’ll enjoy listening to our short discussion.

If you’re still hungry for the how’s and why’s of Immutable infrastructure, I suggest listening to the excellent panel discussion RackN hosted last May.