Category Archives: Digital Rebar

October 6 – 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

RackN

RackN Beta Program Launch

Blog Post: Fast, Simple, Open Provisioning – Rethinking Infrastructure w/ Cloud Centric-Automation 

Operating hardware is too hard today. And too expensive.  Let’s fix that.

The problem with physical ops is not that it’s hard, complex or fragile. Okay, it is and those ARE problems, but they are compounded by the lack of shared management software and practices missing from this layer.  When the RackN team set out to solve these physical challenges, we knew the software had to be very focused to replace the current Cobbler and Foreman environments. It also had to be flexible and composable for heterogeneous environments or we’d be right back into snowflake custom DevOps.

We’re talking about a platform that finally addresses full lifecycle control at the hardware layer with open software.  That’s complex stuff automated in a reusable way.

Read More

Podcast

To participate in the beta please email us at beta@rackn.com, add your email on the RackN Beta Program website, or contact us twitter at @rackngo.

Digital Rebar 

Next Week – Digital Rebar Community Meetup #2

October 10 at 11:00am PST

Proposed outline agenda:

  • Welcome and recap from v001 meetup
  • demo: Kubernetes deployment via DRP / packet.net
  • demo: Injecting passwords and SSH keys
  • demo: Content Loading – demo and information
  • Weekly / or every-other-weekly meetups? https://www.meetup.com/digitalrebar/polls/1255504/
  • Release planning and features for v3.2.0

More Information at https://www.meetup.com/digitalrebar/events/243490128/

New Digital Rebar Provision Videos:

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

Fast, Simple, Open Provisioning – Rethinking Infrastructure with Cloud-Centric Automation

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Operating hardware is too hard today. And too expensive.  Let’s fix that.

The problem with physical ops is not that it’s hard, complex or fragile. Okay, it is and those ARE problems, but they are compounded by the lack of shared management software and practices missing from this layer.  When the RackN team set out to solve these physical challenges, we knew the software had to be very focused to replace the current Cobbler and Foreman environments. It also had to be flexible and composable for heterogeneous environments or we’d be right back into snowflake custom DevOps.

We’re talking about a platform that finally addresses full lifecycle control at the hardware layer with open software.  That’s complex stuff automated in a reusable way.

Even worse, being both simple and flexible for ops is a design nightmare.

Yet, we think we’ve found the right balance by combining v3.1 Digital Rebar Provision with an online library of extension packages from RackN.  Keeping Digital Rebar Provision lightweight with minimal bootstrapping and configuration makes it simple to operate.  The RackN user interface (UI) makes the service even easier to use allowing users to pick from a catalog of next steps.

We’re asking for your help to redefine data center economics from these basic starting building blocks and then join our journey from simple automation to full autonomy.

We are pleased to announce the RackN Beta Program today for your opportunity to evaluate our current solution and work together to solve your provisioning challenges. To participate in the beta please email us at beta@rackn.com, add your email on the RackN Beta Program website, or contact us twitter at @rackngo.

For more information on the RackN Beta Program, please listen to this podcast:

September 29 – 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 Community

The Community held its first Online Meetup on Tuesday to select the final name of the Mascot as well as cover the latest information on the Digital Rebar Provision 3.1 release. As for the Mascot, Cloudia is the official name of our bear!

Additional new DRP v.31 Videos available:

Events Updates

HashiConf 2017 

Messy yet Effective Hybrid Portability  Rob Hirschfeld Post on the Event

Last week, I was able to attend the HashiConf 2017 event in my hometown of Austin, Texas.  HashiCorp has a significant following of loyal fans for their platforms and the show reflected their enthusiasm for the HashiCorp clean and functional design aesthetic.  I count the RackN team in that list – we embedded Consul deeply into Digital Rebar v2 and recently announced a cutting edge bare metal Terraform integration(demo video) with Digital Rebar Provision (v3).

Overall, the show was impressively executed.  It was a comfortable size to connect with attendees and most of the attendees were users instead of vendors.  The announcements at the show were also notable.  HashiCorp announced enterprise versions of all their popular platforms including Consul, Vault, Nomad and Terraform.  For their enterprise versions include a cross-cutting service, Sentinel, that provides a policy engine to help enforce corporate governance. READ MORE

RackN 

New Product Page on Rackn.com

Have you been to our newly launched product page? If not, click on over now to see the latest on our Data Center Infrastructure provisioning software solution leveraging Digital Rebar Provision 3.1.

Podcast – Challenges of CIOs and Operators for DevOps

Rob Hirschfeld, Co-Founder/CEO of RackN discusses the challenges of DevOps from the CIO and Operator viewpoint and how it is critical for each group to better understand the issues they each face. Only then can a true DevOps experience be had.

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 – Challenges of CIOs and Operators for DevOps

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Rob Hirschfeld, Co-Founder/CEO of RackN discusses the challenges of DevOps from the CIO and Operator viewpoint and how it is critical for each group to better understand the issues they each face. Only then can a true DevOps experience be had.

Follow the new RackN Podcast “L8ist Sh9y Podcast”

HashiConf 2017: Messy yet Effective Hybrid Portability

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Last week, I was able to attend the HashiConf 2017 event in my hometown of Austin, Texas.  HashiCorp has a significant following of loyal fans for their platforms and the show reflected their enthusiasm for the HashiCorp clean and functional design aesthetic.  I count the RackN team in that list – we embedded Consul deeply into Digital Rebar v2 and recently announced a cutting edge bare metal Terraform integration (demo video) with Digital Rebar Provision (v3).

Overall, the show was impressively executed.  It was a comfortable size to connect with attendees and most of the attendees were users instead of vendors.  The announcements at the show were also notable.  HashiCorp announced enterprise versions of all their popular platforms including Consul, Vault, Nomad and Terraform.  For their enterprise versions include a cross-cutting service, Sentinel, that provides a policy engine to help enforce corporate governance.

Since all the tools are open source, creating an enterprise version can cause angst in the community.  I felt that they handled the introduction well and the additions were well received.  Typically, governance controls are a good demarcation for Enterprise features.

I was particularly impressed with the breadth and depth of Terraform use discussed at the event.  Terraform is enjoying broad adoption as a cluster builder so it was not surprising to see it featured on many talks.  The primary benefits highlighted were cloud portability and infrastructure as code.  

This was surprising to me because Terraform plans are not actually cloud agnostic – they have to be coded to match the resources exposed by the target.

When I asked people about this the answer was simple: the Terraform format itself provides sufficient abstraction.  The benefit of having a single tool and format for multiple infrastructure created very effective portability.

Except the lack of cloud abstractions also drove a messy pattern that I saw in multiple sessions.  Many companies have written custom (“soon to be open sourced”™) Terraform plan generators in their own custom markup languages.  That’s right – there’s an emerging, snowflaked Terraform generator pattern.  I completely understand the motivation to build this layer; however, it strikes me as an anti-pattern.

Infrastructure portability (aka hybrid) is a both universal goal and frighteningly complex.  Clearly, Terraform is a step in the right direction, but it’s only a step.  At HashiConf, I enjoyed watching companies trying take that next step with varying degrees of success.  Let’s get some popcorn and see how it turns out!

Until then, check out our Digital Rebar Terraform provider.  It will make your physical infrastructure “cloud equivalent” so you can run similar plans between cloud and metal.

For more information on the Digital Rebar Terraform provider, listen to this recent podcast.

September 22 – 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

This week, RackN released a new high-level image highlighting the RackN and Digital Rebar solution and how they operate together to deliver provisioning services. Next week, we will provide further detail into how Digital Rebar operates between RackN Infrastructure Management and the provisioned hardware and VMs.

Digital Rebar Community

Terraform to Metal with Digital Rebar
Data Center Bacon Blog

We’ve built a buttery smooth Terraform provider for Bare Metal that runs equally on, of course, servers, Packet.net servers or VirtualBox VMs. If you like Hashicorp Terraform and want it to own your data center too, then read on.

Deep into the Digital Rebar Provision (DRP) release plan, a customer asked the RackN team to build a Terraform provider for DRP.  They had some very specific requirements that would stress all the new workflows and out-of-band management features in the release: in many ways, this integration is the ultimate proof point for DRP v3.1 because it drives DRP autonomously.

The primary goal was simple: run a data center as a resource pool for Terraform.

Digital Rebar and Terraform Provisioning Podcast

Digital Rebar v3.1 Product Launch
Product Launch Blog

We’ve made open network provisioning radically simpler.  So simple, you can install in 5 minutes and be provisioning in under 30.  That’s a bold claim, but it’s also an essential deliverable for us to bridge the Ops execution gap in a way that does not disrupt your existing tool chains.

The v3 mantra is about starting simple and allowing users to grow automation incrementally.  RackN has been building advanced automation packages and powerful UX management to support that mission.

Key v3.1 Features:

  • Layered Storage System
  • Content Packaging System
  • Plug-In System
  • Stages, Tasks & Jobs
  • Websocket API for Event Subscription
  • Embedded UI

Digital Rebar Provision 3.1 Launch Podcast

First Online Meetup: Sept 26, 2017 at 11:00am PST
Join Meetup Group Here : Meetup Announcement Blog

Topics for Meetup:

  • Welcome
  • Introduction to Digital Rebar Provision (DRP) and RackN
  • Naming the Digital Rebar mascot [1]
  • Discussion on DRP version 3.1 features
  • Feature and roadmap planning for DRP version 3.2
  • Use Github Projects or Trello Board
  • Demo of DRP workload deployment
  • Getting in touch with the Digital Rebar community and RackN
  • Questions and answers period

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

First Digital Rebar Online Meetup Next Week

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Welcome to the first Digital Rebar online meetup!  In our inaugural meetup we’ll provide an introduction to  Digital Rebar Provision, name our mascot, discuss current and future features, and do a short demo of the product. The meetup is Sept 26, 2017 at 11:00am PST. Please join the community at https://www.meetup.com/digitalrebar/ and register for the event.

Online Link – https://zoom.us/j/3403934274  

We will cover the following topics:

  • Welcome !!
  • Introduction to Digital Rebar Provision (DRP) and RackN
  • Naming the Digital Rebar mascot [1]
  • Discussion on DRP version 3.1 features
  • Feature and roadmap planning for DRP version 3.2
  • Use Github Projects or Trello Board
  • Demo of DRP workload deployment
  • Getting in touch with the Digital Rebar community and RackN
  • Questions and answers period

NOTES:

Please note we’ll be using Zoom.us for our meeting; so please check in a few minutes early and make sure you have the Zoom client installed and working for you.

[1]
Name the mascot: https://twitter.com/digitalrebar/status/907724637487935488
Digital Rebar Provision:  http://rebar.digital/
RackN: https://www.rackn.com/

Digital Rebar v3.1 Release Annoucement

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We’ve made open network provisioning radically simpler.  So simple, you can install in 5 minutes and be provisioning in under 30.  That’s a bold claim, but it’s also an essential deliverable for us to bridge the Ops execution gap in a way that does not disrupt your existing tool chains.

We’ve got a remarkable list of feature additions between Digital Rebar Provision (DRP) v3.0 and v3.1 that take it from basic provision into a powerful distributed infrastructure automation tool.

But first, we need to put v3.1 into a broader perspective: the new features are built from hard learned DevOps lessons.  The v2 combination of integrated provisioning and orchestration meant we needed a lot of overhead like Docker, Compose, PostgreSQL, Consul and RAILS.  That was needed for complex “one-click” cluster builds; however it’s overkill for users of Ansible, Terraform and immutable infrastructure flows.  

The v3 mantra is about starting simple and allowing users to grow automation incrementally.  RackN has been building advanced automation packages and powerful UX management to support that mission.

So what’s in the release?  The v3.0 release focused on getting core Provision infrastructure APIs, process and patterns working as a stand alone service. The v3.1 release targeted major architectural needs to streamline content management, event notification and add out-of-band actions.  

Key v3.1 Features

  • New Mascot and Logo!  We have a cloud native bare metal bear.  DRP fans should ask about stickers and t-shirts. Name coming soon! 
  • Layered Storage System. DRP storage model allows for layered storage tiers to support the content model and a read only base layer. These features allow operators to distribute content in a number of different ways and make field upgrades and multi-site synchronization possible.
  • Content packaging system.  DRP contents API allows operators to manage packages of other models via a single API call.  Content bundles are read-only and versioned so that field upgrades and patches can be distributed.
  • Plug-in system.  DRP allows API extensions and event listeners that are in the same process space as the DRP server.  This enables IPMI extensions and slack notifiers.
  • Stages, Tasks & Jobs.  DRP has a simple work queue system in which tasks are stored and tracked on machines during stages in their boot sequences.  This feature combines server and DRP client actions to create fast, simple and flexible workflows that don’t require agents or SSH access.
  • Websocket API for event subscription.  DRP clients can subscribe to system events using a long term websocket interface.  Subscriptions include filters so that operators can select very narrow notification scopes.
  • Removal of the minimal embedded UI (moving to community hosted UX).   DRP decoupled the user interface from the service API.  This allows features to be added to the UX without having to replace the Service.  This also allows community members to create their own UX.  RackN has agreed to support community users at no cost on a limited version of our commercial UX.

All of these features enable DRP to perform 100% of the hardware provision workflows that our customers need to run a fully autonomous, CI/CD enabled data center.  RackN has been showing examples of Ansible, Kubernetes, and Terraform to Metal integration as a reference implementations.

Getting the physical layer right is critical to closing your infrastructure execution gaps.  DRP v3.1 goes beyond getting it right – it makes it fast, simple and open.  Take a test drive of the open source code or give RackN a call to see our advanced automation demos.

Data Center Bacon: Terraform to Metal with Digital Rebar

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TL;DR: We’ve built a buttery smooth Terraform provider for Bare Metal that runs equally on, of course, servers, Packet.net servers or VirtualBox VMs.  If you like Hashicorp Terraform and want it to own your data center too, then read on.

Deep into the Digital Rebar Provision (DRP) release plan, a customer asked the RackN team to build a Terraform provider for DRP.  They had some very specific requirements that would stress all the new workflows and out-of-band management features in the release: in many ways, this integration is the ultimate proof point for DRP v3.1 because it drives DRP autonomously.

The primary goal was simple: run a data center as a resource pool for Terraform.

Here our CTO, Greg Althaus, giving a short demo of the integration.

Of course, it is not that simple.  Operators need to be able to provide plans to pick correct nodes from resources pools.  Also, the customer request was to deploy both Linux and Windows images based on Packet.  That meant that the system needed both direct-to-disk image writing and cloud-init style post-configuration.  The result is deployments that are blazingly fast (sub 5 minutes) and highly portable.

An additional challenge in building the Terraform Provider is that no one wants to practice building plans against actual servers.  They are way too slow.  We need to be able to build and test the Terraform provider and plans quickly on a laptop or cloud infrastructure like Packet.net.  Our solution was to build parallel out-of-band IPMI type plugins for all three platforms so that the Terraform provider could interact with Digital Rebar Provision consistently regardless of the backing infrastructure.

We were able to build a full fidelity CI/CD pipeline for plans without committing dedicated infrastructure at the dev or test phases.  That is a significant breakthrough.

Terraform is kicking aaS for cluster deployments on cloud and we’re getting some very enthusiastic responses when we describe both the depth and simplicity of integration with Digital Rebar Provision.  We’re actively collecting feedback and testing both new DRP features and Terraform integration so it’s not available for open consumption; however, we very much want to find operators interested in field trials.

Please contact us if Terraform on Metal is interesting.  We’d be happy to show you how it works and discuss our next steps.

Further Listening?  Our Latest Shiny (L8stSh9y) podcast with Greg Althaus and Stephen Spector covers the work.

Edge Infrastructure is Not Just Thousands of Mini Clouds

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I left the OpenStack OpenDev Edge Infrastructure conference with a lot of concerns relating to how to manage geographically distributed infrastructure at scale.  We’ve been asking similar questions at RackN as we work to build composable automation that can be shared and reused.  The critical need is to dramatically reduce site-specific customization in a way that still accommodates required variation – this is something we’ve made surprising advances on in Digital Rebar v3.1.

These are very serious issues for companies like AT&T with 1000s of local exchanges, Walmart with 10,000s of in-store server farms or Verizon with 10,000s of coffee shop Wifi zones.  These workloads are not moving into centralized data centers.  In fact, with machine learning and IoT, we are expecting to see more and more distributed computing needs.

Running each site as a mini-cloud is clearly not the right answer.

While we do need the infrastructure to be easily API addressable, adding cloud without fixing the underlying infrastructure management moves us in the wrong direction.  For example, AT&T‘s initial 100+ OpenStack deployments were not field up-gradable and lead to their efforts to deploy OpenStack on Kubernetes; however, that may have simply moved the upgrade problem to a different platform because Kubernetes does not address the physical layer either!

There are multiple challenges here.  First, any scale infrastructure problem must be solved at the physical layer first.  Second, we must have tooling that brings repeatable, automation processes to that layer.  It’s not sufficient to have deep control of a single site: we must be able to reliably distribute automation over thousands of sites with limited operational support and bandwidth.  These requirements are outside the scope of cloud focused tools.

Containers and platforms like Kubernetes have a significant part to play in this story.  I was surprised that they were present only in a minor way at the summit.  The portability and light footprint of these platforms make them a natural fit for edge infrastructure.  I believe that lack of focus comes from the audience believing (incorrectly) that edge applications are not ready for container management.

With hardware layer control (which is required for edge), there is no need for a virtualization layer to provide infrastructure management.  In fact, “cloud” only adds complexity and cost for edge infrastructure when the workloads are containerized.  Our current cloud platforms are not designed to run in small environments and not designed to be managed in a repeatable way at thousands of data centers.  This is a deep architectural gap and not easily patched.

OpenStack sponsoring the edge infrastructure event got the right people in the room but also got in the way of discussing how we should be solving these operational.  How should we be solving them?  In the next post, we’ll talk about management models that we should be borrowing for the edge…

Read 1st Post of 3 from OpenStack OpenDev: OpenStack on Edge? 4 Ways Edge is Distinct from Cloud