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About spector13

Cloud Evangelist at Dell and open source community manager (in the near past) for OpenStack and Xen.org.

November 17 – Weekly Recap Of All Things Digital Rebar And RackN

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Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things Digital Rebar, RackN, SRE, and DevOps. 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)

Items of the Week

Digital Rebar

 

 

 

 

Terraform Bare Metal – A Leap Forward for SDx

Software Defined Infrastructure (SDx) allows operators to manage data centers in a more consistent and controlled way. It allows teams to define their environment as code and use automation to execute that definition in practice. To deliver this capability for physical (aka bare metal) servers, RackN has created a Digital Rebar provider for Terraform. The provider is a simple addition that take just seconds to enable. Read More

Digital Rebar Online Community Meetup

Our 5th Meetup is Tuesday Nov 21…

Welcome to the fifth (v005) Digital Rebar online meetup!  In today’s meetup we’ll discuss the status of Digital Rebar Provision v3.3.0 features and planning activities along with Understanding the Runner and Jobs system in Stage transitions.  We’ll conclude with opening up the floor for community feedback.

Join the Meetup Group

RackN

 

 

 

 

 

The RackN Beta now contains Digital Rebar Provision v3.2 as well as the Terraform Bare Metal Plug-in currently in final testing for official release from HashiCorp. To join the beta, simply provide your email on our registration page so we can provide the software as well as ensure our engineers are able to engage directly in support during setup and operation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joining this week’s L8ist Sh9y Podcast is Yves Boudreau, VP or Partnerships and Ecosystem Strategy at Ericsson. Rob Hirschfeld and Yves discuss the Ericsson Unified Delivery Network platform and the concept of a global content provider service built on heterogeneous infrastructure. Yves also provides insight into what webscale customers are looking for in the Edge as they give thought around balancing their applications from public cloud services to future edge clouds.  Finally, Rob and Yves talk about the coming fundamental change in how software is created and run “independent” of hardware.”  (Blog with Time/Questions)

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

If you are attending any of these events please reach out to Rob Hirschfeld to setup time to learn more about our solutions or discuss the latest industry trends.

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

 

 

 

Podcast with Yves Boudreau talks Heterogeneity in the Edge

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Joining this week’s L8ist Sh9y Podcast is Yves Boudreau, VP or Partnerships and Ecosystem Strategy at Ericsson. Rob Hirschfeld and Yves discuss the Ericsson Unified Delivery Network platform and the concept of a global content provider service built on heterogeneous infrastructure. Yves also provides insight into what webscale customers are looking for in the Edge as they give thought around balancing their applications from public cloud services to future edge clouds.  Finally, Rob and Yves talk about the coming fundamental change in how software is created and run “independent” of hardware.”  Yves can be contacted via LinkedIn.

Topic                                      Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                                   0.00 – 2.11
Ericsson Unified Delivery Network            2.11 – 3.01
Service Providers Space                              3.01 – 4.05
Operator Customers                                    4.05 – 5.22
Content Provider want global coverage  5.22 – 7.15
Example                                                         7.15 – 8.34
Edge Infrastructure w/ CDN                      8.34 – 9.42
Distributed Heterogeneous Infra               9.42 – 11.30
Baking Cloud Consumption into Edge    11.30 –  11.56
Multi-Tenant Infra at Edge                         11.56 – 14.05
Delivery of the Edge                                   14.05 – 16.16
Amazon Lambda is Expectation              16.06 – 20.36
Containers are Edge EC2?                         20.36 – 25.18
Is Edge Greenfield Work?                          25.18 – 29.12
Fundamental Software Change                29.12 – 31.29
Locked-In “Debt” always Re-appears      31.29 – 35.28
Conclusion                                                    35.28 – END

Podcast Guest: Yves Boudreau

Mr. Boudreau is a 20 year veteran of the Digital, Telecom and Cable TV industries. From modest beginnings of one of the first cable broadband ISPs in Canada to the fast paced technology hub of Silicon Valley, Yves joined ERICSSON in 2011 as Vice President of Technical Sales Support and most recently has accepted a position as the VP of Partnerships and Ecosystem Strategy for the ERICSSON Unified Delivery Network. Previously, Mr. Boudreau has worked in R&D, Systems Engineering & Business Development for companies such as Com21 Inc., ARRIS Group (Cable), Imagine Communication (Video Compression) and Verivue Inc. (CDN). Yves now resides in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife Josée and 3 children. Mr. Boudreau completed his undergraduate studies in Commerce @ Laurentian University and graduate studies in Information Technology Management @ Athabasca University. Yves currently also serves on the Board of Director of the Streaming Video Alliance (www.streamingvideoalliance.org)

November 10 – Weekly Recap of all things Digital Rebar and RackN

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Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things Digital Rebar, RackN, SRE, and DevOps. 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)

Items of the Week

Digital Rebar

Digital Rebar Releases V3.2 – Stage Workflow

In v3.2, Digital Rebar continues to refine the groundbreaking provisioning workflow introduced in v3.1. Updates to the workflow make it easier to consume by external systems like Terraform. We’ve also improved the consistency and performance of both the content and service.

The release of workflow and the addition of inventory means that Digital Rebar v3 effectively replaces all key functions of v2 with a significantly smaller footprint, minimal learning curve and improved performance. One v2 major feature, multi-node coordination, is not on any roadmap for v3 because we believe those use case are well serviced by upstack integrations like Terraform and Ansible. Full Post

RackN

 

 

 

 

Joining this week’s L8ist Sh9y Podcast is Zach Smith, CEO of Packet and long-time champion of bare metal hardware. Rob Hirschfeld and Zach discuss the trends in bare metal, the impact of AWS changing the way developers view infrastructure, and issues between networking and server groups in IT organizations. (Blog with Topics and Times)

OpenStack Summit Sydney

Rob Hirschfeld and Ihor Dvoretskyi presented “Building Kubernetes based highly Customizable Environments on OpenStack with Kubespray.” Full Post

https://www.slideshare.net/RackN/slideshelf

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

If you are attending any of these events please reach out to Rob Hirschfeld to setup time to learn more about our solutions or discuss the latest industry trends.

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

 

Building Kubernetes based highly customizable environments on OpenStack with Kubespray

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This talk was given on November 8 at the OpenStack Summit Sydney event.

Abstract

Kubespray (formerly Kargo) – is a project under Kubernetes community umbrella. From the technical side, it is a set of tools, that bring the possibility to deploy production-ready Kubernetes cluster easily.

Kubespray supports multiple Linux distributions to host the Kubernetes clusters (including Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS/RHEL and Container Linux by CoreOS), multiple cloud providers to be used as an underlay for the cluster deployment (AWS, DigitalOcean, GCE, Azure and OpenStack), together with the ability to use Bare Metal installations. It may consume Docker and rkt as the container runtimes for the containerized workloads, as well as a wide variety of networking plugins (Flannel, Weave, Calico and Canal); or built-in cloud provider networking instead.

In this talk we will describe the options of using Kubespray for building Kubernetes environments on OpenStack and how can you benefit from it.

What can I expect to learn?

Active Kubernetes community members, Ihor Dvoretskyi and Rob Hirschfeld, will highlight the benefits of running Kubernetes on top of OpenStack, and will describe how Kubespray may simplify the cluster building and management options for these use-cases.

Complete presentation

Slides
https://www.slideshare.net/RackN/slideshelf

Speakers

Ihor Dvoretskyi

Ihor is a Developer Advocate at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), focused on the upstream Kubernetes-related efforts. He acts as a Product Manager at Kubernetes community, leading Product Management Special Interest Group with the goals of growing Kubernetes as a #1 open source container orchestration platform.

Rob Hirschfeld

Rob Hirschfeld has been involved in OpenStack since the earliest days with a focus on ops and building the infrastructure that powers cloud and storage.  He’s also co-Chair of the Kubernetes Cluster Ops SIG and a four term OpenStack board member.

 

Podcast with Zach Smith talking Bare Metal and AWS Training Wheels

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Joining this week’s L8ist Sh9y Podcast is Zach Smith, CEO of Packet and long-time champion of bare metal hardware. Rob Hirschfeld and Zach discuss the trends in bare metal, the impact of AWS changing the way developers view infrastructure, and issues between networking and server groups in IT organizations.

Topic                                                            Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                                       0.0 – 0.43
History of Packet                                               0.43 – 1:38
Why Public Cloud Bare Metal                         1.38 – 2.10
Price Points Metal vs VM                                 2.10 – 3.08
Intro Compute to Non-Data Center People 3.08 – 4:27
RackN early Customer                                      4.27 – 5.41
Managing non-Enterprise Hardware             5.41 – 7.45
Cloud has forever changed IT Ops                 7.45 – 10.20
Making Hardware Easier                                 10.20 – 12.35
Continuous Integration (CI)                            12.35 – 14.37
Customer Story w/ Terraform                        14.47 – 16.08
SRE, DevOps and Engineering Thinking     16.08 – 16:49
Most extreme Metal Pipelines                        16.49 – 18.02
Coolest New Hardware in Use                        18.02 – 19.28
How order metal and add to data center     19.28 – 22.47
RackN and the Switch                                       22.47 – 24.39
Edge Computing Break Enterprise IT           24.39 – 25.16
DevOps Highlights for Today                          25.16 – 27.01
Post Provision Control in Open Source          27.01 – 30.03
Data Centers in early 2000’s                            30.03 – 31.27
Nov 1 in NYC: Cloud Native in DataCenter   31.27 –  END

Podcast Guest: Zach Smith, CEO Packet

Zachary has spent his last 16 years building, running and fixing public cloud infrastructure platforms.  As the CEO of Packet, Zachary is responsible for the company’s strategic product roadmap and is most passionate about helping customers and partners take advantage of fundamental compute and avoid vendor lockin.  Prior to founding Packet, Zachary was an early member of the management team at Voxel, a NY-based cloud hosting company sold to Internap in 2011, that built software to automate all aspects of hosting datacenters.  He lives in New York City with his wife and 2 young children. Twitter @zsmithnyc

Nov 3 – Weekly Recap of All Things Digital Rebar and RackN

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Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things Digital Rebar, RackN, SRE, and DevOps. 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)

Items of the Week

Digital Rebar

Join us Tuesday November 7th at 11am PST for our next Digital Rebar Online Community Meetup #4.

Long-time community member going back to the original Project Crowbar days Will Dennis talks with Rob Hirschfeld in in this week’s Podcast about the value of Digital Rebar technology as an operator for a complex lab environment.

Stay in Touch with the Community:

RackN

We released our 2nd White Paper this week: The New Economics for Data Center Infrastructure: RackN Automation Improves Speed and Agility by Reducing Cost and Risk.

Executive Summary

RackN’s mission is to fix the current lack of fast, simple and standard ways to manage fundamental data center infrastructure activities. These include updating server firmware, operating systems and integrating provisioning into application life-cycles. RackN on-premises software integrates easily with existing processes while providing a clear path from home-grown scripting to common best-practices. RackN customers achieve a 10x performance improvement by automating provisioning and orchestration. Like any building activity, a solid foundation makes the entire stack more robust and secure.

Podcast with Bernard Golden

We spoke to Bernard Golden about his recent blog post Edge Computing and the Death of Cloud: Nonsense.

For those of you who prefer to access Podcasts via YouTube, all L8ist Sh9y podcasts are now available at this Playlist.

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

If you are attending any of these events please reach out to Rob Hirschfeld to setup time to learn more about our solutions or discuss the latest industry trends.

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

Podcast with Bernard Golden talking Edge Computing and the Container Hotel

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Joining this week’s L8ist Sh9y Podcast is Bernard Golden, a long-time tech innovator and visionary and one of the ten most influential people in cloud computing according to Wired.com. Bernard and Rob Hirschfeld discuss the latest blog from Bernard and the impact of Edge Computing and the reality of implementing this concept. We are also introduced to the Container Hotel.

Topic                                                                              Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                                                               0.0 – 0.39
Edge Computing Blog                                                             0.39 – 3:35    (Bernard Blog)
Other Non-Control Loop Use Cases                                     3.35 –  7:10
Environmental Computing / IOT                                           7:10 – 9:05
Fallacy of Vendor-based Solutions                                       9:05 – 13:25
How Manage Edge Hardware                                                13:25 – 16:00
Container Hotel                                                                         16:00 – 16:50
No One Cares about Hardware                                              16:50 – 23:40
Cloud Extensions – Not Mini Clouds                                     23:40 – 27:05
Like Cloud but Own Data-Center Can’t Do What I Want   27:05 – 29:55
Wrap-Up                                                                                     29:55 – END

Podcast Guest: Bernard Golden

Bernard Golden is a long-time tech innovator and visionary. Wired.com named him one of the ten most influential people in cloud computing, and his blog has been listed in over a dozen “best of” lists. He is the author/co-author of five books, including Amazon Web Services for Dummies, the best selling cloud computing book ever.

From 2012 to 2015 Bernard served as an executive at two cloud computing software startups: Enstratius (acquired by Dell, 2013) and ActiveState Software (cloud product line acquired by HPE, 2015).

After leaving ActiveState, Bernard began researching and consulting across a number of new technologies, including machine learning, drones, genomics, and 3D printing. One, however, stood out as the next innovation platform that will transform our society: blockchain.

RackN Automation Improves Speed and Agility by Reducing Cost and Risk

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Today, we released our second white paper, The New Economics for Data Center Infrastructure: RackN Automation Improves Speed and Agility by Reducing Cost and Risk. This blog highlights that white paper and provides links for additional information.

Executive Summary

RackN’s mission is to fix the current lack of fast, simple and standard ways to manage fundamental data center infrastructure activities. These include updating server firmware, operating systems and integrating provisioning into application life-cycles. RackN on-premises software integrates easily with existing processes while providing a clear path from home-grown scripting to common best-practices. RackN customers achieve a 10x performance improvement by automating provisioning and orchestration. Like any building activity, a solid foundation makes the entire stack more robust and secure.

Introduction

We believe that scale commodity and edge infrastructure can be fully automated without creating a matching dedicated support staff.

At RackN, our mission is to redefine physical infrastructure automation to make it highly repeatable and widely consumable in the same way that cloud has changed infrastructure.

Simplicity of use, more than any other benefit, is the key operational requirement to achieve our mission. Data centers are necessarily complex, evolving and heterogeneous; consequently, the foundation of all efforts must be simple, fast and flexible. These benefits translate directly into open and reusable best practices because operators can easily understand and share automation. Finding this balance represents a significant engineering investment by the RackN team.

Read the Complete White Paper:  LINK

Get Started with Digital Rebar Provision and RackN today:

Podcast with Will Dennis talking Crowbar to Digital Rebar and BarClamps

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Joining this week’s L8ist Sh9y Podcast is Will Dennis long-time member of the Crowbar community who continues to engage in helping drive Digital Rebar forward. Will is an excellent resource who takes us through the history from Crowbar to Digital Rebar Provision in a way that highlights how the project has changed and why the community scaled back from V2 to the new V3.1.

Topic                                                            Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                                   0.0 – 1:12
What drew you to Crowbar?                       1:12 – 4:29
Secret Language                                          3:05 – 3:39
Ansible Add-On                                            4:29 – 5:08
Crowbar v2                                                     5:08 – 6:03
Heterogeneous Infra                                    6:03 – 8:25
v3 – What had to go?                                   8:25 – 11:12
Building Infra White Paper                         11:12 – 12:07
Cobbler Must Die                                         12:07 – 12:34
UNIX Concept                                              12:34 – 13:00
Cobbler Community                                   13:00 – 16:53
DR – Service in a Workflow                       16:53 – 18:42
HashiCorp & Linux Tool Model                 18:42 – 19:28
Upgrades                                                      19:28 – 20:09
Immutability                                                 20:09 – 26:35
Compromise for Immutable                     26:35 – 32:09
Perfect Fit for Digital Rebar                      32:09 – 33:20
3 Requests for DR Project                         33:20 – END

Podcast Guest: Will Dennis

Will Dennis is currently employed as a Senior Systems Administrator at NEC Laboratories America, and has over 25 years of experience in managing, installing, and troubleshooting enterprise computing systems, networks, and software. A lifelong learner, Will enjoys keeping current with both tech and culture in the field of Information Technology. Will can be found online on Twitter as @willarddennis, and thru LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/willdennis/

October 13 – Weekly Recap of All Things Digital Rebar and RackN

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Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things Digital Rebar, RackN, SRE, and DevOps. 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)

Items of the Week

Digital Rebar

Digital Rebar Online Community Meetup #2

Community Content Video

Stay in Touch with the Community

RackN

Making Server Deployments 10x Faster – the ROI on Immutable Infrastructure

Rob Hirschfeld discusses the benefits of Immutable Infrastructure or Image-based provisioning around three concepts:

  • Simplicity
  • Repeatability
  • Speed

Read the post here

Fast, Simple, and Open: 10x ROI of Building Infrastructure in Layers

Read our new white paper on why RackN created a new data center provisioning software solution to automate  and simplify data center operations.

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Read the paper here

Coming Soon!

Next week we are releasing a new Podcast with Mark Thiele, Chief Strategy and Chief Information Officer at Apcera.

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

If you are attending any of these events please reach out to Rob Hirschfeld to setup time to learn more about our solutions or discuss the latest industry trends.

OTHER NEWSLETTERS