Category Archives: Development

Cloud Native PHYSICAL PROVISIONING? Come on! Really?!

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We believe Cloud Native development disciplines are essential regardless of the infrastructure.

imageToday, RackN announce very low entry level support for Digital Rebar Provisioning – the RESTful Cobbler PXE/DHCP replacement.  Having a company actually standing behind this core data center function with support is a big deal; however…

We’re making two BIG claims with Provision: breaking DevOps bottlenecks and cloud native physical provisioning.  We think both points are critical to SRE and Ops success because our current approaches are not keeping pace with developer productivity and hardware complexity.

I’m going to post more about Provision can help address the political struggles of SRE and DevOps that I’ve been watching in our industry.   A hint is in the release, but the Cloud Native comment needs to be addressed.

First, Cloud Native is an architecture, not an infrastructure statement.

There is no requirement that we use VMs or AWS in Cloud Native.  From that perspective, “Cloud” is a useful but deceptive adjective.  Cloud Native is born from applications that had to succeed in hands-off, lower SLA infrastructure with fast delivery cycles on untrusted systems.  These are very hostile environments compared to “legacy” IT.

What makes Digital Rebar Provision Cloud Native?  A lot!

The following is a list of key attributes I consider essential for Cloud Native design.

Micro-services Enabled: The larger Digital Rebar project is a micro-services design.  Provision reflects a stand-alone bundling of two services: DHCP and Provision.  The new Provision service is designed to both stand alone (with embedded UX) and be part of a larger system.

Swagger RESTful API: We designed the APIs first based on years of experience.  We spent a lot of time making sure that the API conformed to spec and that includes maintaining the Swagger spec so integration is easy.

Remote CLI: We build and test our CLI extensively.  In fact, we expect that to be the primary user interface.

Security Designed In: We are serious about security even in challenging environments like PXE where options are limited by 20 year old protocols.  HTTPS is required and user or bearer token authentication is required.  That means that even API calls from machines can be secured.

12 Factor & API Config: There is no file configuration for Provision.  The system starts with command line flags or environment variables.  Deeper configuration is done via API/CLI.  That ensures that the system can be fully managed by remote and configured securely becausee credentials are required for configuration.

Fast Start / Golang:  Provision is a totally self-contained golang app including the UX.  Even so, it’s very small.  You can run it on a laptop from nothing in about 2 minutes including download.

CI/CD Coverage: We committed to deep test coverage for Provision and have consistently increased coverage with every commit.  It ensures quality and prevents regressions.

Documentation In-project Auto-generated: On-boarding is important since we’re talking about small, API-driven units.  A lot of Provisioning documentation is generated directly from the code into the actual project documentation.  Also, the written documentation is in Restructured Text in the project with good indexes and cross-references.  We regenerate the documentation with every commit.

We believe these development disciplines are essential regardless of the infrastructure.  That’s why we made sure the v3 Provision (and ultimately every component of Digital Rebar as we iterate to v3) was built to these standards.

What do you think?  Is this Cloud Native?  What did we miss?

RackN Ends DevOps Gridlock in Data Center [Press Release]

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Today we announced the availability of Digital Rebar Provision, the industry’s first cloud-native physical provisioning utility.  We’ve had this in the Digital Rebar community for a few weeks before offering support and response has been great!

DR ProvisionBy releasing their API-driven provisioning tool as a stand-alone component of the larger Digital Rebar suite, RackN helps DevOps teams break automation bottlenecks in their legacy data centers without disrupting current operations. The stand-alone open utility can be deployed in under 5 minutes and fits into any data center design. RackN also announced a $1,000 starter support and consulting package to further accelerate transition from tools like Cobbler, MaaS or Stacki to the new Golang utility.

“We were seeing SREs suffering from high job turnover,” said Rob Hirschfeld, RackN founder and CEO. “When their integration plans get gridlocked by legacy tooling they quickly either lose patience or political capital. Digital Rebar Provision replaces the legacy tools without process disruption so that everyone can find shared wins early in large SRE initiatives.”

The first cloud-native physical provisioning utility

Data center provisioning is surprisingly complex because it’s caught between cutting edge hardware and arcane protocols and firmware requirements that are difficult to disrupt.  The heart of the system is a fickle combination of specific DHCP options, a firmware bootstrap environment (known as PXE), a very lightweight file transfer protocol (TFTP) and operating system specific templating tools like preseed and kickstart.  Getting all these pieces to work together with updated APIs without breaking legacy support has been elusive.

By rethinking physical ops in cloud-native terms, RackN has managed to distill out a powerful provisioning tool for DevOps and SRE minded operators who need robust API/CLI, Day 2 Ops, security and control as primary design requirements. By bootstrapping foundational automation with Digital Rebar Provision, DevOps teams lay a foundation for data center operations that improves collaboration between operators and SRE teams: operators enjoy additional control and reuse and SREs get a doorway into building a fully automated process.

A pragmatic path without burning downing the data center

“I’m excited to see RackN providing a pragmatic path from physical boot to provisioning without having to start over and rebuild my data center to get there.” said Dave McCrory, an early cloud and data gravity innovator.  “It’s time for the industry to stop splitting physical and cloud IT processes because snowflaked, manual processes slow everyone down.  I can’t imagine an easier on-ramp than Digital Rebar Provision”

The RackN Digital Rebar is making it easy for Cobbler, Stacki, MaaS and Forman users to evaluate our RESTful, Golang, Template-based PXE Provisioning utility.  Interested users can evaluate the service in minutes on a laptop or engage with RackN for a more comprehensive trail with expert support.  The open Provision service works both independently and as part of Digital Rebar’s full life-cycle hybrid control.

Scontactee specific features at http://rackn.com/provision/drsa.

Want help starting on this journey?  Contact us and we can help.

Why IBM’s hybrid “no-single-way” is a good plan

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I got to spend a few days hearing IBM’s cloud plans at IBM Interconnect including a presentation, dinner and guest blogging.  Read below for links to that content.

As part of their CloudMinds group, we’re encouraged to look at the big picture of the conference and there’s a lot to take in. IBM has serious activity around machine learning, cognitive, serverless, functional languages, block chain, platform and infrastructure as a service. Frankly, that’s a confusing array of technologies.

Does this laundry list of technologies fit into a unified strategy? No, and that’s THE POINT.

Anyone who thinks they can predict a definitive right mix of technologies to solve customer problems is not paying attention to the pace of innovation. IBM is listening to their customers and hearing that needs are expanding not consolidating. In this type of market, limiting choice hurts customers.

That means that a hybrid strategy with overlapping offerings serves their customers interests.

IBM has the luxury and scale of being able to chase multiple technologies to find winners. Of course, there’s a danger of hanging on to losers too long too. So far, it looks like they are doing a good job of riding that sweet spot. Their agility here may be the only way that they can reasonably find a chink in Amazon’s cloud armour.

While the hybrid story is harder to tell, it’s the right one for this market.

Four Posts For Deeper Reading

The posts below cover a broad range of topics! Chris Ferris and I did some serious writing about collaboration and my DevOps/Hybrid post has been getting some attention. It’s all recommended reading so I’ve included some highlights.

#CloudMinds tackle the future of cognitive in Las Vegas huddle

Rob is part of the IBM CloudMinds group that meets occasionally to discuss rising cloud, infrastructure and technology challenges.

“Cognitive cannot and will not exist without trust. Humans will not trust cognitive unless we can show that our cognitive solutions understand them.”

How open communities can hurt, and help, interoperability

“The days of using open software passively from vendors are past, users need to have a voice and opinion about project governance. This post is a joint effort with Rob Hirschfeld, RackN, and Chris Ferris, IBM, based on their IBM Interconnect 2017 “Open Cloud Architecture: Think You Can Out-Innovate the Best of the Rest?” presentation.”

When DevOps and hybrid collide (2017 trend lines)

“We’ve clearly learned that DevOps automation pays back returns in agility and performance. Originally, small-batch, lean thinking was counter-intuitive. Now it’s time to make similar investments in hybrid automation so that we can leverage the most innovation available in IT today.”

Open Source Collaboration: The Power of No & Interoperability

“Users and operators can put significant pressure on project leaders and vendors to ensure that the platforms are interoperable. “

Packet Pushers 333: Orchestration v Automation < YES, this is what we are doing!

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Iix34grhy_400x400 highly recommend catching Packet Pushers 333 “Automation & Orchestration In Networking” by Drew Conry-Murray and guests Pete Lumbis and Michael Damkot.

While the discussion is all about NETWORK DevOps, they do a good job of decrying WHY current state of system orchestration is so sad – in a word: heterogeneity.  It’s not going away because the alternative is lock-in.  They also do a good job of describing the difference between automation and orchestration; however, I think there’s a middle tier  of resource “scheduling” that better describes OpenStack and Kubernetes.

Around 5:00 minutes into the podcast, they effectively describe the composable design of Digital Rebar and the rationale for the way that we’ve abstracted interfaces for automation.  If you guys really do want to cash in by consulting with it (at 10 minutes), just give me a call.

It’s great to hear acknowledgement of both the complexity and need for solving these problems.   Thanks for the great podcast Drew, Pete and Michael!

Oh… and I’m going to be presenting at Interop ITX also.  Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to talk 1×1 with Drew.

Containers, Private Clouds, GIFEE, and the Underlay Problem

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ITRevoluion

Gene Kim (@RealGeneKim) posted an exclusive Q&A with Rob Hirschfeld (@zehicle) today on IT Technology: Rob Hirschfeld on Containers, Private Clouds, GIFEE, and the Remaining “Underlay Problem.” 

Questions from the post:

  • Gene Kim: Tell me about the landscape of docker, OpenStack, Kubernetes, etc. How do they all relate, what’s changed, and who’s winning?
  • GK: I recently saw a tweet that I thought was super funny, saying something along the lines “friends don’t let friends build private clouds” — obviously, given all your involvement in the OpenStack community for so many years, I know you disagree with that statement. What is it that you think everyone should know about private clouds that tell the other side of the story?
  • GK: We talked about how much you loved the book Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems by Betsy Beyer, which I also loved. What resonated with you, and how do you think it relates to how we do Ops work in the next decade?
  • GK: Tell me what about the work you did with Crowbar, and how that informs the work you’re currently doing with Digital Rebar?

Read the full Q&A here.

Weekly Recap of All Things Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

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pexels-photo-273011

Welcome to the first 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.

SRE Items of the Week

Things I Learned Managing Site Reliability for Some of the World’s Busiest Gambling Sites by Ian Miell

INTRO TO POST

For several years I managed the 3rd line site reliability operation for many of the world’s busiest gambling sites, working for a little-known company that built and ran the core backend online software for several businesses that each at peak could take tens of millions of pounds in revenue per hour. I left a couple of years ago, so it’s a good time to reflect on what I learned in the process.

In many ways, what we did was similar to what’s now called an SRE function (I’m going to call us SREs, but the acronym didn’t exist at the time). We were on call, had to respond to incidents, made recommendations for re-engineering, provided robust feedback to developers and customer teams, managed escalations and emergency situations, ran monitoring systems, and so on.

The team I joined was around 5 engineers (all former developers and technical leaders), which grew to around 50 of more mixed experience across multiple locations by the time I left.

I’m going to focus here on process and documentation, since I don’t think they’re talked about usefully enough where I do read about them.
_____

2017 trend lines: When DevOps and hybrid collide by Rob Hirschfeld (@zehicle)
IBM Cloud Computing News

INTRO TO POST

What happens when DevOps methods meet hybrid environments? Following are some emerging trends and my commentary on each.

There are two major casualties as the pace of innovation in IT continues to accelerate: manual processes (non-DevOps) and tightly-coupled software stacks (non-hybrid).

We are changing some things much too quickly for developers and operators to keep up using processes that require human intervention in routine activities like integrated testing or deployment. Furthermore, monolithic platforms—our traditional “duck-and-cover” protection from pace of change—are less attractive for numerous reasons, including slower pace, vendor lock-in and lack of choice.

RECENT SRE AND DEVOPS EVENTS

SRECon17 Americas

CloudNativeCon + KubeCon 2017 March 29-30, 2017 in Berlin

IBM Interconnect March in Las Vegas, NV

  • Christopher Ferris, IBM CTO Open Technology and Rob Hirschfeld “Open Cloud Architecture: Think You Can Out-Innovate the Best of the Rest” – SLIDES

DevOps Summit

  • “Best Practices in Operating Hybrid Infrastructure that Spans Clouds and the Data Center” – BLOG / SLIDES

UPCOMING MEETUPS & PODCASTS

Continuous Discussions (#c9d9) Episode 66: Scaling Agile and DevOps in the Enterprise – April 11, 2017 at 10am PT. Rob Hirschfeld a guest in this Electric Cloud podcast.

UPCOMING EVENTS FOR RACKN

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.

DockerCon 2017 : April 17 – 20, 2017 in Austin, TX
DevOpsDays Austin : May 4-5, 2017 in Austin TX
OpenStack Summit : May 8 – 11, 2017 in Boston, MA
Interop ITX : May 15 – 19, 2017 in Las Vegas, NV
Open Source IT Summit – Tuesday, May 16, 9:00 – 5:00pm : Rob Hirschfeld to speak
Gluecon : May 24 – 25, 2017 in Denver, CO

  • Surviving Day 2 in Open Source Hybrid Automation – May 23, 2017 : Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

SRE Weekly (@SREWeekly) – Issue #66

Don’t Balkanize My Installer, Yo!

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kubernetesLast week, RackN announced our enterprise support for Kubernetes using nothing but upstream Ansible from the project itself.  This effort represents years of effort by the RackN founders to keep platforms interoperable via open and shareable operations automation.

That’s why our Digital Rebar approach targets underlay challenges and leverages existing automation tools instead of investing yet another install path.

dcosThis week, we added Install Wizard templates to the DC/OS install automation we build in collaboration with Mesosphere last year.  That makes it even easier to run DC/OS on physical infrastructure.  Like our Kubernetes work, the Digital Rebar automation uses the same community dcos_install.sh that’s used in the community documentation.  The difference is that we’re also driving all the underlay prep and configuration automatically.

If this approach appeals to you, contact RackN and join in the open Day 2 revolution.

Interested in seeing the DC/OS install in action?  Here’s a demo video:

 

How scared do we need to be for Ops collaboration & investment?

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Note: Yesterday RackN posted Are you impatient enough to be an SRE?  and then the CIA wikileaks news hit… perhaps the right question is “Are you scared enough to automate deeply yet?” 

Cia leak (1)As an industry, the CIA hacking release yesterday should be driving discussions about how to make our IT infrastructure more robust and fluid. It is not simply enough to harden because both the attack and the platforms are evolving to quickly.

We must be delivering solutions with continuous delivery and immutability assumptions baked in.

A more fluid IT that assumes constant updates and rebuilding from sources (immutable) is not just a security posture but a proven business benefit. For me, that means actually building from the hardware up where we patch and scrub systems regularly to shorten the half-life of all attach surfaces. It also means enabling existing security built into our systems that are generally ignored because of configuration complexity. These are hard but solvable automation challenges.

The problem is too big to fix individually: we need to collaborate in the open.

I’ve been really thinking deeply about how we accelerate SRE and DevOps collaboration across organizations and in open communities. The lack of common infrastructure foundations costs companies significant overhead and speed as teams across the globe reimplement automation in divergent ways. It also drags down software platforms that must adapt to each data center as a unique snowflake.

That’s why hybrid automation within AND between companies is an imperative. It enables collaboration.

Making automation portable able to handle the differences between infrastructure and environments is harder; however, it also enables sharing and reuse that creates allows us to improve collectively instead of individually.

That’s been a vision driving us at RackN with the open hybrid Digital Rebar project.  Curious?  Here’s RackN post that inspired this one:

From RackN’s Are you impatient enough to be an SRE?

“Like the hardware that runs it, the foundation automation layer must be commoditized. That means that Operators should be able to buy infrastructure (physical and cloud) from any vendor and run it in a consistent way.  Instead of days or weeks to get infrastructure running, it should take hours and be fully automated from power-on.  We should be able to rehearse on cloud and transfer that automation directly to (and from) physical without modification.  That practice and pace should be the norm instead of the exception.”

Are you impatient enough to be an SRE?

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sre-seriesOur focus on SRE series continues… At RackN, we see a coming infrastructure explosion in both complexity and scale. Unless our industry radically rethinks operational processes, current backlogs will escalate and stability, security and sharing will suffer.

SRE minded teams are very impatient about eliminating manual, routine and non-differentiated work.

I’ve been talking to a lot of people about SRE lately in the context of helping Ops get out of the way while coping with increasing load and complexity.  Why are they so impatient? Because they know that ops demand is constantly increasing, there’s no “good enough” when it comes to finding ways to automate tasks and move up stack. Without consistent improvement in automation, teams will get buried (my post about Ops Debt).

The core SRE mantra needs to be “Own Ops, don’t be owned by Ops.”

Yet, outsourcing ops responsibility to a service is equally problematic for an SRE.  They cannot give up responsibility for the integrated system.  In fact, that’s one of the basic reasons why Google’s SRE teams went from just “web site reliability” to full system thinking.  Every aspect of the infrastructure stack needs to be considered when looking at system performance and reliability.  For example, something deep like SSD drive write behavior or GPU BIOS could make a critical difference.  SREs need to be able to root cause issues and black box infrastructure (a.k.a. Cloud) can get in the way.

SRE teams must balance owning the full stack versus focusing on what makes their job unique.

That’s why we have been rethinking about how SRE teams approach infrastructure.  Instead of trying to turn infrastructure into a black box services; we’ve designed the Digital Rebar composable Ops platform that embraces and contains heterogeneity with a high degree of transparency and control.  This is critical because SREs cannot afford to keep reinventing automation at the bottom of the stack.  We must be able to share and leverage best-practices on infrastructure provisioning and platform deployment.  

Like the hardware that runs it, the foundation automation layer must be commoditized.

That means that Operators should be able to buy infrastructure (physical and cloud) from any vendor and run it in a consistent way.  Instead of days or weeks to get infrastructure running, it should take hours and be fully automated from power-on.  We should be able to rehearse on cloud and transfer that automation directly to (and from) physical without modification.  That practice and pace should be the norm instead of the exception.

That’s what we are building at RackN.  Our primary goal is to reuse automation whenever possible.  That was our top design priority for Digital Rebar and it drives our customer engagement models.  If you’d like to hear more, download our SRE white paper.

More information:

What does it take to Operate Open Platforms? Answers in Datanauts 72

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Did I just let OpenStack ops off the hook….?  Kubernetes production challenges…?  

ix34grhy_400x400I had a lot of fun in this Datanauts wide ranging discussion with unicorn herders Chris Wahl and Ethan Banks.  I like the three section format because it gives us a chance to deep dive into distinct topics and includes some out-of-band analysis by the hosts; however, that means you need to keep listening through the commercial breaks to hear the full podcast.

Three parts?  Yes, Chris and Ethan like to save the best questions for last.

In Part 1, we went deep into the industry operational and business challenges uncovered by the OpenStack project. Particularly, Chris and I go into “platform underlay” issues which I laid out in my “please stop the turtles” post. This was part of the build-up to my SRE series.

In Part 2, we explore my operations-focused view of the latest developments in container schedulers with a focus on Kubernetes. Part of the operational discussion goes into architecture “conceits” (or compromises) that allow developers to get the most from cloud native design patterns. I also make a pitch for using proven tools to run the underlay.

In Part 3, we go deep into DevOps automation topics of configuration and orchestration. We talk about the design principles that help drive “day 2” automation and why getting in-place upgrades should be an industry priority.  Of course, we do cover some Digital Rebar design too.

Take a listen and let me know what you think!

On Twitter, we’ve already started a discussion about how much developers should care about infrastructure. My opinion (posted here) is that one DevOps idea where developers “own” infrastructure caused a partial rebellion towards containers.