Category Archives: Digital Rebar

DRP v3.11 PROVISIONS WITHOUT REBOOTING

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Some features are worth SHOUTING about, so it’s with great pride that I get to announce DRP v3.11.

The latest Digital Rebar release (v3.11) does the impossible: PROVISION WITHOUT REBOOTING.  Combined with image-based deploy and our unique multi-boot workflows, this capability makes server operations 10x faster than traditional net install processes.

But it’s not enough to have a tiny golang utility that can drive any hardware and install any operating system (we added MacOS netboot to this release).   RackN has been adding enterprise integrations to core platforms like Ansible Tower, Terraform, Active Directory, Remedy, Run Book and Logstash.

Oh!  And checkout our open zero-touch, HA Kubernetes installer (KRIB) based on kubeadm.  We just added advanced Helm features for automatic Istio and Rook Ceph examples.

To see more: https://github.com/digitalrebar/provision/releases/tag/v3.11.0

Success means putting People and Process above Tech

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“I don’t care about the tech – what I really want to hear is how this product fits in our processes and helps our people get more done.”

That was the message my co-founder and I heard from an executive at a major bank last week.  For us, it was both a deja vu and a major relief because we’d just presented at the Cablelabs Summer Showcase about the importance of aligning people, process and technology together. The executive was pleased about how RackN had achieved that balance.

It wasn’t always that way: focusing on usability and simplicity first over features is scary.  

One of the most humbling startup lessons is that making great technology is not about the technology. Showing a 10x (or 100x!) improvement in provisioning speed misses the real problem for IT operators. Happily, we had some great early users who got excited about the vision for simple tooling that we built around Digital Rebar Provision v3.  Equally important was a deeply experienced team who insisted in building great tests, docs and support tooling from day 0.

We are thrilled to watch as new users are able to learn, adopt and grow their use of our open technology with minimal help from RackN.  Even without the 10x performance components RackN has added, they have been able to achieve significant time and automation improvements in their existing operational processes.  That means simpler processes, less IT complexity and more time for solving important problems.

The bank executive wanted the people and process benefits: our job with technology was to enable that first and then get out of the way.  It’s a much harder job than “make it faster” but, ultimately, much more rewarding.

If you’re interested in seeing how we’ve found that balance for bare metal automation, please check out our self-service trial at https://portal.RackN.io or contact us directly at info@rackn.com.

Week in Review: L8istSh9y Podcast Finds a New Home

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Welcome to the RackN and Digital Rebar Weekly Review. You will find the latest news related to Edge, DevOps, SRE and other relevant topics.

L8ist Sh9y Podcast Goes Solo in New Blog

For active followers of the L8istSh9y podcast we are pleased to announce a new “home” at https://medium.com/@l8istsh9y. We will continue to publish a blog weekly here at RackN but will expand content on our new site. Be sure to follow us on Medium.

Digital Rebar Online Community Meetup

We are skipping the July 3rd Meetup due to a US holiday. We will resume on July 17th.

Summer Vacation 

As we slow down for the summer, we will be moving the Week in Review post from weekly to monthly. RackN will continue to post the L8istSh9y podcast on Mondays and an industry thought leadership post on Wednesdays.

News

RackN

  • RackN Trial – 30-day access to RackN technology with support and training from RackN team – Register Today
  • NEW YouTube Videos
    • Digital Rebar Provision v3.8 Workflows – Listen (17 min 51 sec)
    • Terraform Digital Rebar Provider with Workflows – Listen (11 min 49 sec)

Digital Rebar Community

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Social Media

Week in Review – Ansible Integration and Community Welcome Guide Released

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Welcome to the RackN and Digital Rebar Weekly Review. You will find the latest news related to Edge, DevOps, SRE and other relevant topics.

Infrastructure Provisioning for Ansible with Digital Rebar Provision

Digital Rebar Provision (DRP) is the perfect technology partner for Ansible customers looking to automate their infrastructure setup before applying their orchestration tool of choice. DRP automatically generates a complete inventory of provisioned infrastructure which is a must have for Ansible to complete its orchestration. In addition, DRP is able to deploy Kubernetes clusters using Ansible and Kubespray as part of its standard Workflow automated process.

READ MORE

Digital Rebar Community Welcome Guide Released

This document contains information about the open source Digital Rebar community building Digital Rebar Provision. It is especially useful for new users, developers or other interested parties in understanding the community, its methodologies, communication channels, and community standards.

Read Welcome Guide

News

RackN

  • RackN Trial – 30-day access to RackN technology with support and training from RackN team – Register Today
  • NEW YouTube Videos
    • Digital Rebar Inventory Stage (RackN Task-Library) – Listen (17 min 06 sec)
    • Digital Rebar Provision v3.8 Workflows – Listen (17 min 51 sec)
    • Terraform Digital Rebar Provider with Workflows – Listen (11 min 49 sec)
  • Summer Events
    • Still Working on Plan ~ Stay Tuned

Digital Rebar Community

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Social Media

Infrastructure Provisioning for Ansible with Digital Rebar Provision

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Digital Rebar Provision (DRP) is the perfect technology partner for Ansible customers looking to automate their infrastructure setup before applying their orchestration tool of choice. DRP automatically generates a complete inventory of provisioned infrastructure which is a must have for Ansible to complete its orchestration. In addition, DRP is able to deploy Kubernetes clusters using Ansible and Kubespray as part of its standard Workflow automated process.

Together, DRP and Ansible enhance the automation, repeatability, and transparency for DevOps teams.

Learn more about DRP and Ansible in the demonstration video and podcasts below.

Demonstration Video of Kubespray with Digital Rebar Provision:

Learn more about Digital Rebar Provision and Ansible in this podcast:

Learn more about Digital Rebar Provision, Ansible and Kubernetes installation with Kubespray in this podcast:

Week in Review: Move Away from Virtualization Overheard with Bare Metal

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Welcome to the RackN and Digital Rebar Weekly Review. You will find the latest news related to Edge, DevOps, SRE and other relevant topics.

Had Enough Virtualization Overheard? Time to Think Bare Metal

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 Provision (DRP) plugin for users of HashiCorp’s Terraform.

More on RackN Terraform Opportunity

Observability into Bare Metal Provisioning with RackN

(Posted 5/15 on Honeycomb.io Blog)

At RackN, a core design principle is that operations should be easy to track and troubleshoot. We work hard to automate provisioning with observable processes because insight into complex interactions within a modern data center is critical for success. So, it’s not helpful if we require complex technologies to understand where issues arise from disconnected processes. RackN and the open source Digital Rebar community require a simple, best in class solution to provide a better way to observe provisioning operations within our system without adding complexity and overhead.

Full Post on Honeycomb.io

News

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Digital Rebar Community

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

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Week in Review: Plugin Model for Digital Rebar Provision Example

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Welcome to the RackN and Digital Rebar Weekly Review. You will find the latest news related to Edge, DevOps, SRE and other relevant topics.

Enhancing Digital Rebar Potential with Plugins – Honeycomb Example

The open source Digital Rebar Provision (DRP) solution provides a basic set of features that are enhanced with plugins offering additional services to customers. These plugins are provided by the Digital Rebar community, customers, partners, and RackN delivering significant value over and above the base provisioning capability of DRP.

RackN and Honeycomb developed a unique plugin during SRECon Americas a few weeks back allowing DRP events to be visible within the Honeycomb tool. Offering partners like Honeycomb an opportunity to integrate with DRP provides partners with a methodology to offer their services to the Digital Rebar community. For the community, having a simple plugin capability allows for use of pre-existing infrastructure tools.

Full Post

Immutable Deployments Hands-On Lab from Interop ITX

Greg Althaus presented a hands-on lab to 50 attendees to use Digital Rebar Provision and the RackN Portal to provision a pre-built Linux image for rapid node availability.

News

RackN

Digital Rebar Community

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Social Media

Enhancing Digital Rebar Potential with Plugins – Honeycomb Example

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The open source Digital Rebar Provision (DRP) solution provides a basic set of features that are enhanced with plugins offering additional services to customers. These plugins are provided by the Digital Rebar community, customers, partners, and RackN delivering significant value over and above the base provisioning capability of DRP.

RackN and Honeycomb developed a unique plugin during SRECon Americas a few weeks back allowing DRP events to be visible within the Honeycomb tool. Offering partners like Honeycomb an opportunity to integrate with DRP provides partners with a methodology to offer their services to the Digital Rebar community. For the community, having a simple plugin capability allows for use of pre-existing infrastructure tools.

In this video example, we install the Honeycomb Plugin into a Digital Rebar Provision endpoint and activate the plugin to record and transfer events to the Honeycomb system. This demonstration also shows the process to add the plugin from the catalog and install it.

We encourage all partners interested in developing a plugin to contact RackN for discussions on joint development.  For operators, register for a new account on the RackN Portal to deploy a DRP endpoint and begin a modern cloud-native approach to provisioning.

For more information:

Week in Review: Digital Rebar Provision v3.8.0 Release

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Welcome to the RackN and Digital Rebar Weekly Review. You will find the latest news related to Edge, DevOps, SRE and other relevant topics.

Digital Rebar Provision Announces v3.8.0 – Workflows

Workflows are a first-class element of the system now. They have their own API endpoint and machine object field. They simplify all the MATH that used to be in the change-stage/map.

Key Features in the Release:

  • Workflows
    • Create Workflow object that replaces change-stage/map method for changing stages on machines
    • Maintain backwards compatibility with the change-stage/map system.
    • Update Machine object to have workflow as first-class field
    • Update Validations to properly control workflow states.
    • Allow events to be publish but not propagated. This allows for local log file logging of events without loops.
    • Add Windows-based drpcli to drp
    • More…

News

RackN

Digital Rebar Community 

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Social Media

 

Immutable Image Deployment from Digital Rebar Mastered Golden Image

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Shane Gibson, Sr. Architect and Community Evangelist, RackN created a new Digital Rebar Provision (DRP) video highlighting immutable provisioning from a “golden image” as well as the ability to create that “golden image” from within Digital Rebar Provision.

Highlights:

  • Immutable Image Deployment Solution to 20 Target Bare Metal Machines
  • Creation of a “Golden Image” in Digital Rebar Provision
  • Detailed Overview of the RackN Portal UX to Support this Demo

More information on the Digital Rebar community and Digital Rebar Provision: