Category Archives: Digital Rebar

Podcast: Digital Rebar Tech Discussion on Patch APIs, Swagger, and Integrations

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In this week’s L8ist Sh9y Podcast, we bring on the Digital Rebar team at RackN to discuss several issues they have working on over the past few months:

  • Patch Rest APIs and CLI : Scaling Challenges Require Patch
  • Swagger API History and Changes : No CLI Generation
  • Integrations to Existing Tools up the Stack

Topic                                                   Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                              0.0 – 0.42
Intro to Digital Rebar Project                 0.42 – 1.58
Patch in Rest APIs                                    1.58 – 4.02  (Reference: JsonPatch.com)
Why not use PUT?                                  4.02 – 4.53
CLI use Reference Objects                    4.53 – 6.28
Examples of How Use This                    6.28 – 10.55
Patch Synchronous Question                10.55 – 12.32
Swagger Built into API                            12.32 – 15.44  (Reference: https://swagger.io/)
Operator view of CLI w/out Swagger  15.44 – 18.30
2 Key Points on Swagger Change         18.30 – 20.22
Integration to Other Systems                 20.22 – 28.13   (Grumpy Operators Syndrome)
Learn More About Digital Rebar            28.13 – END      (Digital Rebar Online Meetup Community)

Guest Podcast Attendees

  • Greg Althaus, Co-Founder, CTO RackN
  • Victor Lowther, Sr. Software Engineering, RackN
  • Shane Gibson, Sr. Architect and Community Evangelist, RackN

Digital Rebar is the open, fast and simple data center provisioning and control scaffolding designed with a cloud native architecture. Sponsored by RackN, this community is building an extensible stand-alone DCHP/PXE/IPXE service with minimal overhead offering a quick 5 minutes to provisioning solution.

Community Mission: Embrace the Heterogeneous Nature of Data Center Operations while Eliminating Complexity and Manual Steps.

December 15 – Weekly Recap of Digital Rebar, RackN and Latest Industry News

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Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things Digital Rebar, RackN, Edge Computing, 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 RackN (@rackngo)

Items of the Week

Industry News

Anyone who predicted that 2017 would be the “Year of DevOps” has proved to hit the nail on the head. More enterprises than ever before are ditching their old methodologies, leadership philosophies, and legacy processes in favor of DevOps to achieve speed and agility in today’s constantly evolving technology landscape. In fact, a survey of 700 IT professionals conducted earlier this year found that 50 percent of companies polled were integrating DevOps, or had already done so this year. We are well beyond critical mass.

Automation is on the rise in IT shops, especially in the infrastructure and operations realm. Some automation discussions make it sound like a boogeyman – automation’s coming to get you – but that misses the point. It’s important to understand – and be able to articulate – the why of automation.

One of the fundamental concepts underpinning cloud computing is that the location of the servers and other physical infrastructure running the software and storing the data is entirely irrelevant.

That’s why it borrowed the metaphor of the cloud from old telecoms network diagrams, in which the telephone network (and later the internet) was represented by a cloud, to show that the technologies and locations of this part didn’t matter.

Digital Rebar

The Digital Rebar community solutions are available for download and testing from the community GitHub page. We recommend following our Quick Start instructions and checking out some example videos for using Digital Rebar Provision with Ansible, Terraform and Kubernetes.

RackN

  • Webinar: Immutable Kuberentes with RackN Provisioning

Learn more about the RackN Kubernetes installation integration using community tools like Kubeadm demonstrated at last week’s KubeCon event (Slides) in Austin, TX. Co-Founders Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus of RackN will discuss this fast and simple approach to operating Kubernetes. Of course, we’ll also demonstrate the technology installing Kubernetes following the immutable infrastructure model highlighting the automated provisioning technology built on the open source Digital Rebar project.

We are actively looking for feedback from customers and technologists before general availability of both RackN and the Terraform plug-in. It takes just a few minutes to get started and we offer direct engineering engagement on our community slack channel. Get started now by providing your email on our registration page so we can provide you all the necessary links.

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Chris Steffen, Technical Security Director at Cryptzone joins Rob Hirschfeld and myself to cover the latest topics in cloud, edge and data security. Chris is a well-respected cloud security expert with practical experience securing large infrastructures as well as an excellent speaker and influencer on all things security,

Key Highlights:

  • Current State of Cloud Security
  • Where & What is On-Premises?
  • Hardware Security and Lack of Industry Use
  • Coming of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation from European Union) and Impact on US and Global Industry

UPCOMING EVENTS – None until 2018

Webinar: Immutable Kubernetes with RackN Provisioning

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Watch this webinar to learn more about the RackN Kubernetes installation integration using community tools like Kubeadm demonstrated at this week’s KubeCon event (Slides) in Austin, TX. Co-Founders Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus of RackN will discuss this fast and simple approach to operating Kubernetes. Of course, we’ll also demonstrate the technology installing Kubernetes following the immutable infrastructure model highlighting the automated provisioning technology built on the open source Digital Rebar project.

After this webinar, you’ll be prepared to attempt this install strategy on your own.

Why attend this webinar?
* Benefits of the Immutable Infrastructure provisioning model
* Solve installation issues with Kubernetes using community Kubeadm tooling
* Overview of the RackN + Digital Rebar automated provisioning solution

Speakers:
Rob Hirschfeld : CEO/Co-Founder, RackN
Greg Althaus : CTO/Co-Founder, RackN

Day & Time:

Dec 14, 2017 1:30 PM CST

Watch the Webinar on YouTube

December 1 – Weekly Recap of Digital Rebar, RackN, and Industry News

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Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things Digital Rebar, RackN, Edge Computing, 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 RackN (@rackngo)

Items of the Week

Industry News

Edge computing, in the context of IoT, is the idea that you can actually do some of the computational work required by a system close to the endpoints instead of in a cloud or a data center. The intent is to minimize latency, which, according to Renaud, means that it’s going to be a hot trend in certain kinds of industrial IoT application.

Solution providers that have been hit hard by a data center hardware retreat are finding sales and profit growth by living on the edge—the network edge, that is.

DevOps — a term used to refer to the integration of software developers and operations teams — continues to spread like wildfire throughout the open networking ecosystem. The main idea behind DevOps is that by breaking down barriers between these two departments, market applications can be delivered faster with lower costs and better quality. Nevertheless, for all the advantages attached to DevOps, it is still a budding concept since it is primarily concerned with re-aligning the workforce with a variety of tools. The following, therefore, is a list of DevOps trends to keep an eye out for.

Digital Rebar

Our architectural plans for Digital Rebar are beyond big – they are for massive distributed scale. Not up, but out. We are designing for the case where we have common automation content packages distributed over 100,000 stand-alone sites (think 5G cell towers) that are not synchronously managed. In that case, there will be version drift between the endpoints and content. For example, we may need to patch an installation script quickly over a whole fleet but want to upgrade the endpoints more slowly.

Prior Meetup on November 21st Notes

RackN

Yesterday, AWS confirmed that it actually uses physical servers to run its cloud infrastructure and, gasp, no one was surprised.  The actual news about the i3.metal instances by AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr shows that bare metal is being treated as just another AMI managed instance type (see also Geekwire, Techcrunch, Venture Beat).  For AWS users, there’s no drama here because it’s an incremental add to processes they are already know well.

We are actively looking for feedback from customers and technologists before general availability of both RackN and the Terraform plug-in. It takes just a few minutes to get started and we offer direct engineering engagement on our community slack channel. Get started now by providing your email on our registration pagey so we can provide you all the necessary links.

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Podcast Guest: Krishnan Subramanian, Rishidot Research

Founder and Chief Research Advisor, Infrastructure, Application Platforms and DevOps

UPCOMING EVENTS

  • KubeCon + CloudNativeCon : Dec 6 – 8 in Austin, TX

Event plans for the RackN and Digital Rebar team include 2 sessions and the RackN booth. We look forward to seeing you in Austin.

The RackN team is 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

 

 

 

 

 

 

100,000 of Anything is Hard – Scaling Concerns for Digital Rebar Architecture

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Our architectural plans for Digital Rebar are beyond big – they are for massive distributed scale. Not up, but out. We are designing for the case where we have common automation content packages distributed over 100,000 stand-alone sites (think 5G cell towers) that are not synchronously managed. In that case, there will be version drift between the endpoints and content. For example, we may need to patch an installation script quickly over a whole fleet but want to upgrade the endpoints more slowly.

It’s a hard problem and it’s why we’ve focused on composable systems and fine-grain versioning.

It’s also part of the RackN move into a biweekly release cadence for Digital Rebar. That means that we are iterating from tip development to stable every two weeks. It’s fast because we don’t want operators deploying the development “tip” to access features or bug fixes.

This works for several reasons. First, much of the Digital Rebar value is delivered as content instead of in the scaffolding. Each content package has it’s own version cycle and is not tied to Digital Rebar versions. Second, many Digital Rebar features are relatively small, incremental additions. Faster releases allows content creators and operators to access that buttery goodness more quickly without trying to manage the less stable development tip.

Critical enablers for this release pace are feature flags. Starting in v3.2, Digital Rebar introduced the system level tags that are set when new features are added. These flags allow content developers to introspect the system in a multi-version way to see which behaviors are available in each endpoint. This is much more consistent and granular than version matching.

We are not designing a single endpoint system: we are planning for content that spans 1,000s of endpoints.

Feature flags are part of our 100,000 endpoint architecture thinking. In large scale systems, there can be significant version drift within a fleet deployment. We have to expect that automation designers want to enable advanced features before they are universally deployed in the fleet. That means that the system needs a way to easily advertise specific capabilities internally. Automation can then be written with different behaviors depending on the environment. For example, changing exit codes could have broken existing scripts except that scripts used flags to determine which codes were appropriate for the system. These are NOT API issues that work well with semantic versioning (semver), they are deeper system behaviors.

This matters even if you only have a single endpoint because it also enables sharing in the Digital Rebar community.

Without these changes, composable automation designed for the Digital Rebar community would quickly become very brittle and hard to maintain. Our goal is to ensure a decoupling of endpoint and content. This same benefit allows the community to share packages and large scale sites to coordinate upgrades. I don’t think that we’re done yet. This is a hard problem and we’re still evolving all the intricacies of updating and delivering composable automation.

It’s the type of complex, operational thinking that excites the RackN engineering team. I hope it excites you too because we’d love to get your thinking on how to make it even better!

 

Putting a little ooooh! in orchestration

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The RackN team is proud of saying that we left the Orchestration out when we migrated from Digital Rebar v2 to v3. That would mean more if anyone actually agreed on what orchestration means… In this our case, I think we can be pretty specific: Digital Rebar v3 does not manage work across multiple nodes. At this point, we’re emphatic about it because cross machine actions add a lot of complexity and require application awareness that quickly blossoms into operational woe, torture and frustration (aka WTF).

That’s why Digital Rebar focused on doing a simple yet powerful job doing multi-boot workflow on a single machine.

In the latest releases (v3.2+), we’ve delivered an easy to understand stage and task running system that is simple to extend, transparent in operation and extremely fast. There’s no special language (DSL) to learn or database to master. And if you need those things, then we encourage you to use the excellent options from Chef, Puppet, SaltStack, Ansible and others. This is because our primary design focus is planning work over multiple boots and operating system environments instead of between machines. Digital Rebar shines when you need 3+ reboots to automatically scrub, burn-in, inventory, install and then post-configure a machine.

But we may have crossed an orchestration line with our new cluster token capability.

Starting in the v3.4 release, automation authors will be able to use a shared profile to coordinate work between multiple machines. This is not a Digital Rebar feature per se – it’s a data pattern that leverages Digital Rebar locking, profiles and parameters to share information between machines. This allows scripts to elect leaders, create authoritative information (like tokens) and synchronize actions. The basic mechanism is simple: we create a shared machine profile that includes a token that allows editing the profile. Normally, machines can only edit themselves so we have to explicitly enable editing profiles with a special use token. With this capability, all the machines assigned to the profile can update the profile (and only that profile). The profile becomes an atomic, secure shared configuration space.

For example, when building a Kubernetes cluster using Kubeadm, the installation script needs to take different actions depending on which node is first. The first node needs to initialize the cluster master, generate a token and share its IP address. The subsequent nodes must wait until the master is initialized and then join using the token. The installation pattern is basically a first-in leader election while all others wait for the leader. There’s no need for more complex sequencing because the real install “orchestration” is done after the join when Kubernetes starts to configure the nodes.

Our experience is that recent cloud native systems are all capable of this type of shotgun start where all the nodes start in parallel with the minimal bootstrap coordination that Digital Rebar can provide.

Individually, the incremental features needed to enable cluster building were small additions to Digital Rebar. Together, they provide a simple yet powerful management underlay. At RackN, we believe that simple beats complex everyday and we’re fighting hard to make sure operations stays that way.

Data Center’s Last Mile: Zero Touch Metal Automation

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The embedded video is an excellent RackN and Digital Rebar overview created by Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus, co-founders of RackN on the critical issue facing data center operations teams. Their open-source based offering completes the integration challenge existing between platforms/orchestration tools and control/provision technology.

By integrating with the platform and orchestration solutions, RackN is able to replace the control and provisioning tools without adding complexity or replacing established technology.

Watch the complete video below as Rob Hirschfeld provides the background of how RackN arrived at the current offering and the benefits for data center operators to support bare metal provisioning as well as immutable infrastructure. (Slides)

The demonstration video referenced in this overview:

The white paper referenced in this overview:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Have more questions? Contact us at sales@rackn.com or via social media on Twitter at @rackngo to learn more.

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

 

 

 

Terraform Bare Metal – A Leap forward for SDx

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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. (Video Demonstrations at End of Blog)

The Terraform Bare Metal provider allows plans to provision and recover servers using a node resource.

The operation of this provider is simple and relies on standard workflow stages in Digital Rebar. Adding the Terraform Content Package installs a new stage that adds Terraform parameters. Including this stage in the global workflow will automatically register machines as available for Terraform. The integration uses two parameters to manage the server pool: Terraform Managed and Terraform Assigned.

When the Terraform provider asks for a node resource, it queries the Digital Rebar API for machines that are managed (true) and not assigned (false) plus whatever additional filters were required in the plan. The provider then uses the API to set assigned true and the requested Stage (e.g. centos-install) and polls until the node enters the Complete stage. The destroy action reverses the action to release the node. Digital Rebar uses the stage changes as a trigger to restart the machine workflow.

Using a Terraform plan with Digital Rebar, operators can manage complex data centers layouts from a single command line.

For users, all of the above steps are completely hidden. Operators can monitor the request using the Digital Rebar UX to ensure the plan is executing. In addition, plan metadata can set user or identification values to the machines when they are reserved to help track allocations. In this way, administrators can easily track and account for machines reserved via Terraform.

For full out-of-band control, users should add the RackN IPMI plugin. This adds the ability to force power states during plan execution. The provider does not require out-of-band management to function. RackN also maintains Packet.net and VirtualBox plugins with the same API as the IPMI plugin. This allows developers to easily test plans against virtual or cloud resources.

RackN customers are making big plans to use this simple and powerful integration to manage their own SDx roadmap. We’re excited to hear about new ways to improve data center operations, especially new edge ideas. Let us know what you are thinking!

Demonstration of Terraform Bare Metal Provisioning with Digital Rebar Provision V3.2

Setting up the Environment to run Digital Rebar Provision V3.2 for Terraform

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