Category Archives: Digital Rebar

September 8 – Weekly Recap of All Things Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

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Welcome to the weekly 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 or tweet Rob (@zehicle) or RackN (@rackngo)

SRE Items of the Week

Nora Jones on Establishing, Growing, and Maturing a Chaos Engineering Practice
https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/nora-jones-chaos-engineering

Nora Jones, a senior software engineer on Netflix’ Chaos Team, talks with Wesley Reisz about what Chaos Engineering means today. She covers what it takes to build a practice, how to establish a strategy, defines cost of impact, and covers key technical considerations when leveraging chaos engineering. Read more and listen to podcast

SRE Jobs

I ran a job search on LinkedIn to find the # of available SRE positions currently open; there are 854 positions available as of this morning. Dice.com listed 30,665 positions based on a search. In comparison, DevOps only had 2,975 positions on Dice.com.

Podcast on Ansible, Kubernetes, Kubespray and Digital Rebar

Stephen Spector, HPE Cloud Evangelist talks with Rob Hirschfeld, Co-Founder and CEO RackN about the installation process for Kubernetes using Kubespray, Ansible, and Digital Rebar Provisioning. Additional commentary on the overviews of Kubernetes, Containers, and Installation in this podcast.

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Subscribe to our new daily DevOps, SRE, & Operations Newsletter https://paper.li/e-1498071701#/
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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.

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

Podcast – Install Kubernetes with Ansible, Kubespray and Digital Rebar Provision

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Stephen Spector, HPE Cloud Evangelist talks with Rob Hirschfeld, Co-Founder and CEO RackN about the installation process for Kubernetes using Kubespray, Ansible, and Digital Rebar Provisioning. Additional commentary on the overviews of Kubernetes, Containers, and Installation in this podcast.

More info on Digital Rebar Provisioning

Follow the RackN L8ist Sh9y Podcast

 

September 1 – Weekly Recap of All Things Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

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Welcome to the weekly 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 or tweet Rob (@zehicle) or RackN (@rackngo)


Image from @DevOpsDaysDFW

10 Essential Skills of a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) by AppDynamics
https://cloud.kapostcontent.net/pub/1418185e-b325-49d3-b65c-de338e45cb6f/ebook-10-essential-skills-of-a-site-reliability-engineer-sre.pdf

Almost overnight, it seems that Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) has become one of the hottest job titles across the IT Industry. So why all the sudden buzz and momentum around the SRE role? READ MORE

DevOps Tool Market Size Applications 2017 to 2022
http://www.tradecalls.org/2017-08-31-devops-tool-market

Global DevOps Tool Market Research Report 2017 to 2022 presents an in-depth assessment of the DevOps Tool Market including enabling technologies, key trends, market drivers, challenges, standardization, regulatory landscape, deployment models, operator case studies, opportunities, future roadmap, value chain, ecosystem player profiles and strategies. The report also presents forecasts for DevOps Tool Market investments from 2017 till 2022.

READ REPORT

Don’t be ageist: In the DevOps era, experience matters by @Jenz514
https://techbeacon.com/dont-be-ageist-devops-era-experience-matters

When it comes to attitudes toward age, DevOps is a lot like IT in general, but possibly more so. Defenders of an IT workforce that skews young have always noted that technology changes quickly, skills must be updated rapidly, business demands evolve fast, and long workdays just don’t appeal to professionals who have families to go home to. All of that may ratchet up even higher in DevOps culture. READ MORE

L8ist Sh9y Podcast : Digital Rebar and Terraform Provisioning
Blog Link http://bit.ly/2xPILHb 

Stephen Spector, HPE Cloud Evangelist talks with Greg Althaus, CTO and Co-Founder of RackN about how the Digital Rebar Provisioning solution provides bare metal server support for the HashiCorp Terraform Solution.

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Subscribe to our new daily DevOps, SRE, & Operations Newsletter
_____________

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. 

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

 

Podcast – Terraform and Digital Rebar Provision Bare Metal

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In this podcast, Stephen Spector, HPE Cloud Evangelist and Greg Althaus, Co-Founder and CTO RackN, talk about the integration point for Digital Rebar Provisioning with the Terraform solution. The specific focus is on delivering bare metal provisioning to users of Terraform.

About Terraform (LINK)

Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve production infrastructure. It is an open source tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.

More info on Digital Rebar Provisioning

Follow the RackN L8ist Sh9y Podcast

August 25 – Weekly Recap of All Things Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

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Welcome to the weekly 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 or tweet Rob (@zehicle) or RackN (@rackngo)

SRE Items of the Week


Image from 

What is “Site Reliability Engineering?” 
https://landing.google.com/sre/interview/ben-treynor.html 

In this interview, Ben Treynor shares his thoughts with Niall Murphy about what Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is, how and why it works so well, and the factors that differentiate SRE from operations teams in industry. READ MORE

Podcast: A Nice Mix of Ansible and Digital Rebar
http://bit.ly/2vkBYEe 

Follow our new L8ist Sh9y Podcast on SoundCloud at https://soundcloud.com/user-410091210.

Digital Rebar Mascot Naming 

Next week the Digital Rebar community will be finalizing the name for our mascot

Several possible names are listed on a recent blog post for your consideration. Please tweet to @DigitalRebar any ideas you have as we will be choosing a name next week via a Twitter poll.

Digital Rebar v3 Provision
http://rebar.digital/

Digital Rebar is the open, fast and simple data center provisioning and control scaffolding designed with a cloud native architecture.

Our extensible stand-alone DHCP/PXE/IPXE service has minimal overhead so it can be installed and provisioning in under 5 minutes on a laptop, RPi or switch. From there, users can add custom or pre-packaged workflows for full life-cycle automation using our API and CLI or a community UX.

A cloud native bare metal approach provides API-driven infrastructure-as-code automation without locking you into a specific hardware platform, operating system or configuration model.

For physical infrastructure provisioning, Digital Rebar replaces Cobbler, Foreman, MaaS or similar with the added bonus of being able to include simple control workflows for RAID, IPMI and BIOS configuration. We also provide event driven actions via websockets API and a simple plug-in model. By design, Digital Rebar is not opinionated about scripting tools so you can mix and match Chef, Puppet, Ansible, SaltStack and even Bash.

Next version: release of v3.1 is anticipated on 9/4/2017.

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.

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

Podcast – A Nice Mix of Ansible and Digital Rebar

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Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and Co-Founder, RackN talks with Stephen Spector, HPE Cloud Evangelist about the recent uptake in Ansible news as well as how Digital Rebar Provision assists Ansible users.

Listen to the 9 minute podcast here:

As this is the launch of L8ist Sh9y Podcast from RackN we encourage you to visit our site at https://soundcloud.com/user-410091210 or subscribe to the RSS Feed. We will also be publishing on iTunes as well shortly.

August 11 – Weekly Recap of All Things Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

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Welcome to the weekly 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 or tweet Rob (@zehicle) or RackN (@rackngo)

SRE Items of the Week

Report: DevOps is still considered a new phenomenon
http://sdtimes.com/report-devops-still-considered-new-phenomenon  

While companies have grasped that DevOps leads to an increase in innovation, DevOps adoption and implementation still remains a challenge for many. Logz.io, an AI-powered log analytics company, released its DevOps Pulse 2017 survey in time for today’s SysAdmin Day, highlighting some of the challenges and benefits to DevOps.

The DevOps Pulse report this year was based on data from a survey of 700 companies, with an additional section on DevOps culture because, according to Logz.io, it’s one topic that wasn’t researched enough. READ MORE

Immutable Infrastructure Deployment Challenges for DevOps
http://bit.ly/2vFAWq1

Rob Hirschfeld and Gareth Rushgrove (@garethr) discuss the issues.

DevOps vs SRE vs Cloud Native Talk at DevOps Summit
http://news.sys-con.com/node/4134816 

In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN, will explore this trend and discuss concrete ways to cope with the coming changes. He’ll look at the reasons why SRE is attractive and get specific about ways that teams can bootstrap their efforts and keep their DevOps Fu strong.

Meet the Digital Rebar Mascot
http://bit.ly/2fvnrT7

The Digital Rebar project is pleased to announce our new mascot; however, she doesn’t have a name. We are looking for ideas and you can reach us at @digitalrebar, @zehicle, or comment on this blog. READ MORE
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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.

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

Meet the Digital Rebar Mascot

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The Digital Rebar project is pleased to announce our new mascot; however, she doesn’t have a name. We are looking for ideas and you can reach us at @digitalrebar, @zehicle, or comment on this blog.

Current ideas:

  • Digital Rebear
  • Rebear
  • Rebare
  • Baremetal
  • Bootstrap (the bear)
  • Skids ~ work boots
  • Beamer ~ tie-off point that is portable and affixes to a steel beam
  • Grand Pappy ~ (cable) lager multi-conductor feeder cable
  • Lumberg ~ guy that walks around with a cup of coffee all day and does nothing
  • Hue Phi (for UEFI)

If you need help finding a “bear” name, try this interesting name generator based on animal type: http://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/pet-bear-names.php. I also found a site with construction worker slang: http://www.theunionbootpro.com/slang/.

We look forward to hearing your ideas and are quickly working on stickers and other assorted gear with the new mascot.

July 14 – Weekly Recap of All Things Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

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Welcome to the weekly 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 or tweet Rob (@zehicle) or RackN (@rackngo)

SRE Items of the Week

Teradata Acquires San Diego-based Start-up StackIQ to Strengthen Teradata Everywhere and IntelliCloud Capabilities
http://prn.to/2vicpUb

SAN DIEGO, July 13, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Teradata (NYSE:  TDC), the leading data and analytics company, today announced the acquisition of StackIQ, developers of one of the industry’s fastest bare metal software provisioning platforms which has managed the deployment of cloud and analytics software at millions of servers in data centers around the globe. The deal will leverage StackIQ’s expertise in open source software and large cluster provisioning to simplify and automate the deployment of Teradata Everywhere. Offering customers the speed and flexibility to deploy Teradata solutions across hybrid cloud environments, allows them to innovate quickly and build new analytical applications for their business.

How Platforms and SREs Change the DevOps Contract on  CapitalOne DevExchange
http://bit.ly/2uVXekf

capitalone
DevOps struggles under a “fully shared responsibility” contract for Developers and Operations that drives a futile search for elusive “full-stack engineers.” It’s time to revisit how to Dev and Ops are going to collaborate because these jobs often have different priorities. READ MORE

RackN Introduction Video
Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and Co-Founder introduces RackN in 48 seconds

Kubernauts Worldwide Meetup
This video is from our first Kubernauts Worldwide Meetup covering the new features in Kubernetes 1.7 presented by Ihor Dvoretskyi, Kubernetes Pain Points and Upgrade presented by Rob Hirschfeld and about Kubernauts Training presented by Des Drury. Arash Kaffamanesh moderated the online meetup and provided a short overview about what Kubernauts are about.

Rob starts at 38 minute 50 seconds

Video Series w/ Packet.net
Three videos showing how to use Packet.net custom IPXE option with Digital Rebar IPXE provisioning

http://bit.ly/2t54J65      (Video 1 of 3)
http://bit.ly/2tO5WCy   (Video 2 of 3)
http://bit.ly/2vi5dXZ     (Video 3 of 3)

Let’s DevOps IRL: My SRE Postings on RackN by Rob Hirschfeld
http://bit.ly/2tzCvnj  

I’m investing in these Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) discussions because I believe operations (and by extension DevOps) is facing a significant challenge in keeping up with development tooling.   The links below have been getting a lot of interest on twitter and driving some good discussion. READ MORE

newsletter

Subscribe to our new daily DevOps, SRE, & Operations Newsletter https://paper.li/e-1498071701#/
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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.

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

 

Ops integration will be scary, proceed with haste!

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TL;DR: Your own tool silos (and the teams supporting them) are blocking your progress.

As CEO of RackN, I talk to a lot of operations teams who have big aspirations for automation that are faltering due to internal resistance.  Generally, we’re talking to the SREs on the team.  Sadly, those SREs are often stymied by narrowly scoped teams and house-of-cards technical debt.

Last week, I examined some of my DevOps scar tissue and tweeted:  “consider, ops integration will be scary – you have to give up control of individual actions and silos.  it’s hard to give up control”

Screenshot_2017-06-24-10-08-12

The tweet seemed to strike a nerve with others because change and control are so often at war.  It was based on a recurring theme that the RackN team sees from ops organizations: antibodies towards integrated solutions in favor of DIY projects combining disparate tools.  

It makes sense to me that operators want a sense of control and ownership; however, those same motivations are counter to the automation imperative that should be driving them forward.  Patching together a solution today is adding technical debt that becomes insurmountable when used in production.

This challenge is why so much DevOps content is targeted at organization culture instead of tools.  While this is clearly the root, I also think that our tools are not designed to work together as a system.  The fact that teams prefer it that was is as key part of the problem.

Let’s do ourselves a favor – let’s take the time to solve operations issues at the system level like we’ve been trying to do with Digital Rebar.  We’ll all move faster together.