Category Archives: Events

Cloud Native Surfing at IBM Think 2018

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Rob Hirschfeld speaks with Kevin Allen, Content Lead, IBM [@KevJosephAllen] about next week’s IBM Think 2018 conference (Mach 19-22) in Las Vegas. Contact us if you are interested in setting up a meeting with Rob next week at the event.

Highlights:

What is RackN working on? Physical Infrastructure Automation to manage metal in the data center as you would a VM in the cloud.

Trends in Infrastructure and Cloud space?  Getting involved in immutable infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and focus on zero-touch management. We have also been talking about Edge Computing and how it will be managed vs cloud.

Cloud Native movement is developers on surfboards and see a huge wave in the distance, where are we now? We are still at the point in open source that the technology is powerful and people are still learning how they work. Layers are forming on top of these container tools and customers are moving up the stack to understand more and more. The tide is coming in and the waves are getting bigger with lots and lots of wavelets still growing out at sea.

Enterprise user base is looking for more integration from projects, doesn’t have to be in 1 project but multiple projects connecting with each other.

Hybrid Cloud conversation has changed? Hybrid Cloud is the way people do business. The focus has moved to Hybrid IT with infrastructure being located at various locations allowing customers to take advantage of best of breed based on needs. The market is hybrid and customers need to integrate data flows between these services. Tools are lacking in this marketplace to manage this.

Looking forward to Think 2018? Interested in new AI and machine learning but key focus for the event is talking to real users and seeing real applications. Focus on actual deployments of this technology is more important that what is coming.

Advice for Event? Comfortable shoes. Allow time for unexpected things to happen – attend new talks based on speakers or topics you don’t know much about.

Immutable Infrastructure Delivery on Metal : See RackN at Data Center World

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The RackN team is heading to San Antonio, TX next week for Data Center World, March 12 – 15. Our co-founder/CEO Rob Hirschfeld is giving a talk on immutable infrastructure for bare metal in the data center (see session information below).

We are interested in meeting and talking with fellow technologists. Contact us this week so we can setup times to meet at the event. If you are able to attend Rob’s session be sure to let him know you saw it here on the RackN blog.

RackN Session

March 12 at 2:10pm
Room 206AM
Session IT7
Tracks: Cloud Services, Direct Access

Operate your Data Center like a Public Cloud with Immutable Infrastructure

The pressure on IT departments to deliver services to internal customers is considerably higher today as public cloud vendors are able to operate on a massive scale, forcing CIOs to challenge their own staff to raise the bar in data center operation. Of course, enterprise IT departments don’t have the large staff of an AWS or Azure; however, the fundamental process running those public clouds is now available for consumption in the enterprise. This process is called “immutable infrastructure” and allows servers to be deployed 100% ready to run without any need for remote configuration of access. It’s called immutable because the servers are deployed from images produced by CI/CD process and destroyed after use instead of being reconfigured. It’s a container and cloud pattern that has finally made it to physical. In this talk, we’ll cover the specific process and its advantages over traditional server configuration.

We’re talking Immutable Containers at Container World

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RackN is attending next week’s Container World in Santa Clara, CA and looks forward to talking not just Containers, but image-based provisioning, immutable infrastructure, DevOps, and other topics. Rob Hirschfeld and Shane Gibson are attending and speaking on Wednesday in two sessions (see below).

We are interested in meeting and talking with fellow technologists. Contact us this week so we can setup times to meet at the event.

Rob and Shane are also presenting next Wed the 28th at the Downtown San Jose DevOps Meetup at 6:30pm. The topic is Building Immutable Kubernetes Clusters.

Sessions

Keeping up with patches has never been more critical.  For hardware, that’s… hard.  What if servers were deployed 100% ready to run without any need for remote configuration or access?  What if we were able to roll a complete rebuild of an entire application stack from the BIOS up in minutes?  Those are key concepts behind a cloud and container deployment pattern called “immutable infrastructure.”  It’s called immutable because the servers are deployed from container images produced by CI/CD process and destroyed after use instead of being reconfigured.  It’s a container and cloud pattern that has finally made it to physical.

In this talk, we’ll cover the specific process and its advantages over traditional server configuration. Then we’ll dive deeply into open tools and processes that make it possible to drive immutable containers into your own infrastructure. The talk will include live demos and will discuss process and field challenges that attendees will likely face when they start implementation at home.  We’ll also cover the significant security, time and cost benefits of this approach to make pitching the idea effective.

Join us for a spirited discussion engineering containers for security, touching on such topics as:

  • The security implications/value of containers on VM or Bare Metal, and is one model significantly more secure than another
  • What are the implications for one vs. the other relative to application portability?
  • Role of immutable infrastructure in managing services and software deployments in the context of security.
  • Is there an automation strategy that makes the portability question moot, or is it still an issue?
  • Security via policy and automation and how do we achieve that automation?
  • How it impacts to portability? Is it better than, or an alternative to automation?

December 8 – 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

Maybe we’re just too lazy to put in the work to become DevOps-minded, though, to the industry’s credit, the desire to “get DevOps” is real. Roughly 10 years after DevOps was coined as a thing, enterprises are madly scrambling to embrace it, as survey data uncovers. The problem is that too often we think it’s about hiring a few “DevOps engineers” and setting them free to… DevOp… or whatever.

Many industrial applications have been developed to utilize IoT devices and the data they produce.  They generally use cloud hosting, analytics and edge computing technology, often provided and connected via an IoT Platform – a set of tools and run-time systems hosted on the cloud that enable the development and deployment of a “complete IoT solution.”

With the advent of KubCon and CloudNativeCon in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday, assorted enterprise vendors have chosen this week to flog their latest devops-oriented wares, before the impending holiday torpor leaves IT folks too distracted, weary or inebriated to care.

Digital Rebar

RackN

Like other Gartner events, the Infrastructure and Operations (IO) show is all about enterprises maintaining systems.  There are plenty of hype chasing sessions, but the vibe is distinctly around working systems and practical implementations.  Think: sports coats not t-shirts.  In that way, it’s less breathless and wild-eyed than something like KubeCon (which is busy celebrating a bumper crop of 1.0 projects).  The very essence of this show is to project an aura of calm IT stewardship.

Join 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.

Dec 14, 2017 1:30 PM CST

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

Podcast Guest: Keith Townsend, The CTO Advisor

UPCOMING EVENTS – None until 2018

2017 Gartner IO & DC Wrap Up

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Like other Gartner events, the Infrastructure and Operations (IO) show is all about enterprises maintaining systems.  There are plenty of hype chasing sessions, but the vibe is distinctly around working systems and practical implementations.  Think: sports coats not t-shirts.  In that way, it’s less breathless and wild-eyed than something like KubeCon (which is busy celebrating a bumper crop of 1.0 projects).  The very essence of this show is to project an aura of calm IT stewardship.

So what keeps these seasoned IT pros awake?  Lack of cross-vendor Integration.

Terry Cosgrove of Gartner said this very clearly, “most components were not designed to work together.” This was not just a comment about the industry, but within vendor suites.  In today’s acquisitive and agile market, there’s no expectation that even products from a single vendor will integrate smoothly.  Why is integration so hard?  We’re innovating so quickly that legacy APIs and new architectures don’t align well. For enterprises who cannot simply jump to the new-new thing, integrations drive considerable value.

Cosgrove went on to add that enterprises need to OWN the integrations – they can’t delegate that to vendors.

That advice resonated for me.  We’re clearly in a best-of-breed IT environment where hybrid and portability concerns dominate discussions.  This is not about vendor lock-in but innovation.  That leads us back to the need for better integrations between products, platforms and projects.  Customers need to start rejecting products without great, documented APIs; otherwise, there is no motivation for products to focus on integration over adding features.  

Sadly, it was left to the audience to infer the “use dollars to force vendors to integrate” message.

There were many other topics of interest at the show.  Here’s a very short synopsis of my favorites:

  • Edge is coming and will be a big deal.  We’re still having to explain what it is.  Check back next summit (or listen to our great podcasts to get ahead of the curve).
  • AI Ops is not really AI, it’s just smarter logging.  We’ll get there eventually, but it will take some time.
  • DevOps is still a thing and it’s still hard because of the culture change required.  We’re slowly getting to a point where “DevOps = Automated Processes” and that’s OK.  If you agree with that then you’ve missed the point of system thinking and lean.  We’re done trying to explain it to you for now.
  • No start-ups.  Sadly, disruptive innovation is antithetical to this show and that may be OK.  The audience counts on the analysts to filter this for them instead of getting raw.

In all these cases, it’s listener beware.  There’s more behind the curtain that you are allowed to see.

Sound and Fury as AWS Pulls Back Curtain for Bare Metal Offering

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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.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is fundamentally about automation and API not the type of infrastructure.

Lack of drama is a key principle at RackN: provisioning hardware should be as easy to automate as a virtual machine. The addition of bare metal to the AWS instance types validates two important parts of the AWS cloud automation story.  First, having control metal is valuable and, second, operations are expected image (AMI) based deployments.

There are interesting AWS specific items to unpack around this bare metal announcement that shows otherwise hidden details about AWS infrastructure.

It took Amazon a long time to create this offering because allowing users to access bare metal requires a specialized degree of isolation inside their massive data center.  It’s only recently possible in AWS data centers because of their custom hardware and firmware.  These changes provide AWS with a hidden control layer under the operating system abstraction.  This does not mean everyone needs this hardware – it’s an AWS specific need based on their architecture.

It’s not a surprise the AWS has built cloud infrastructure optimized hardware.  All the major cloud providers design purpose-built machines with specialized firmware to handle their scale network, security and management challenges.

The specialized hardware may create challenges for users compared to regular virtualized servers.  There are already a few added requirements for AMIs before they can run on the i3.metal instance.  Any image deploy to metal process requires a degree of matching the target server.  That’s the reason that Digital Rebar defaults to safer (but slower) kickstart and pre-seed processes.

Overall, this bare metal announcement is signifying nothing dramatic and that’s a very good thing.

Automating every layer of a data center should be the expected default.  Our mission has been to make metal just another type of automated infrastructure and we’re glad to have AWS finally get on the same page with us.

RackN and Digital Rebar All Set For KubeCon + CloudNativeCon

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The RackN and Digital Rebar team are finalizing plans for next week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Austin, TX from Dec 6 – 8, 2017. Rob Hirschfeld is hosting 2 sessions and we are having a booth in the sponsor showcase. All the info you need is below and we look forward to seeing you in Austin.

SESSSIONS

SIG Cluster-Ops Update hosted by Rob Hirschfeld
Event Link: http://sched.co/CU8t
Thursday December 7 from 2:00 – 2:35pm

Operators of Kubernetes, Unite! SIG Cluster Ops was formed nearly two years ago with the goal of being an installer neutral place for operations to collaborate. Frankly, we’ve had challenges getting critical mass because operators cluster around their installer groups. This session will discuss re-chartering as a Working Group and review the mission of the group. We’ll also review plans for the next 6 months. If you’re hoping Kubernetes can limit the installer explosion then this session is a good one for you too.

Zero-Configuration Pattern on Kubernetes on Bare Metal by Rob Hirschfeld
Event Link: http://sched.co/CU8h
Friday December 8 from 11:55 – 12:30pm

In recent releases, we’ve enabled node admission and configuration APIs that eliminate configuration requirements for Kubernetes workers. This allows cluster operators to add and remove nodes from clusters without a configuration management tool driving the process. This fully automated node management behavior allows physical data centers to be much more cloud-lie and lights-out.

In this session, we’ll run this process as a demo and decompose the various parts that must work together for success. We’ll discuss the specific APIs and how to implement them in a coordinated way that ensures node security and minimizes workload disruption. We’ll also discuss how to improve node security by using trusted platform modules (TPM). By the end of the session, operators will be able to duplicate the steps on their own to learn the process.

While we focus on bare metal infrastructure for this session, the lessons learned are equally useable on cloud infrastructure.

SPONSOR SHOWCASE

Be sure to visit the RackN booth and talk Digital Rebar, Bare Metal, Infrastructure, DevOps, etc.

Hours:

  • Wednesday, December 6 from 10:30 – 8:30pm
  • Thursday, December 7 from 10:30 – 5:30pm
  • Friday, December 8 from 10:30 – 4:00pm

SOCIAL MEDIA

Be sure to follow @rackngo and @digitalrebar on Twitter during the event as we highlight all our activities.

Sirens of Open Infrastructure beacons to OpenStack Community

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OpenStack is a real platform doing real work for real users.  So why does OpenStack have a reputation for not working?  It falls into the lack of core-focus paradox: being too much to too many undermines your ability to do something well.  In this case, we keep conflating the community and the code.

I have a long history with the project but have been pretty much outside of it (yay, Kubernetes!) for the last 18 months.  That perspective helps me feel like I’m getting closer to the answer after spending a few days with the community at the latest OpenStack Summit in Sydney Australia.  While I love to think about the why, the what the leaders are doing about it is very interesting too.

Fundamentally, OpenStack’s problem is that infrastructure automation is too hard and big to be solved within a single effort.  

It’s so big that any workable solution will fail for a sizable number of hopeful operators.  That does not keep people from the false aspiration that OpenStack code will perfectly fit their needs (especially if they are unwilling to trim their requirements).

But the problem is not inflated expectations for OpenStack VM IaaS code, it’s that we keep feeding them.  I have been a long time champion for a small core with a clear ecosystem boundary.  When OpenStack code claims support for other use cases, it invites disappointment and frustration.

So why is OpenStack foundation moving to expand its scope as an Open Infrastructure community with additional focus areas?  It’s simple: the community is asking them to do it.

Within the vast space of infrastructure automation, there are clusters of aligned interest.  These clusters are sufficiently narrow that they can collaborate on shared technologies and practices.  They also have an partial overlap (Venn) with adjacencies where OpenStack is already present.  There is a strong economic and social drive for members in these overlapped communities to bridge together instead of creating new disparate groups.  Having the OpenStack foundation organize these efforts is a natural and expected function.

The danger of this expansion comes from also carrying the expectation that the technology (code) will also be carried into the adjacencies.  That’s my my exact rationale the original VM IaaS needs to be smaller.  The wealth of non-core projects crosses clusters of interests.  Instead of allowing these clusters to optimize their needs around shared interests, the users get the impression that they must broadly adopt unneeded or poorly fit components.  The idea of “competitive” projects should be reframed because they may overlap in function but not ui use-case fit.

It’s long past time to give up expectations that OpenStack is a “one-stop-shop” of infrastructure automation.  In my opinion, it undermines the community mission by excluding adjacencies.

I believe that OpenStack must work to embrace its role as an open infrastructure community; however, it must also do the hard work to create welcoming space for adjacencies.  These adjacencies will compete with existing projects currently under the OpenStack code tent.  The community needs to embrace that the hard work done so far may simply be sunk cost for new use cases. 

It’s the OpenStack community and the experience, not the code, that creates long term value.

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

 

Building Kubernetes based highly customizable environments on OpenStack with Kubespray

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This talk was given on November 8 at the OpenStack Summit Sydney event.

Abstract

Kubespray (formerly Kargo) – is a project under Kubernetes community umbrella. From the technical side, it is a set of tools, that bring the possibility to deploy production-ready Kubernetes cluster easily.

Kubespray supports multiple Linux distributions to host the Kubernetes clusters (including Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS/RHEL and Container Linux by CoreOS), multiple cloud providers to be used as an underlay for the cluster deployment (AWS, DigitalOcean, GCE, Azure and OpenStack), together with the ability to use Bare Metal installations. It may consume Docker and rkt as the container runtimes for the containerized workloads, as well as a wide variety of networking plugins (Flannel, Weave, Calico and Canal); or built-in cloud provider networking instead.

In this talk we will describe the options of using Kubespray for building Kubernetes environments on OpenStack and how can you benefit from it.

What can I expect to learn?

Active Kubernetes community members, Ihor Dvoretskyi and Rob Hirschfeld, will highlight the benefits of running Kubernetes on top of OpenStack, and will describe how Kubespray may simplify the cluster building and management options for these use-cases.

Complete presentation

Slides
https://www.slideshare.net/RackN/slideshelf

Speakers

Ihor Dvoretskyi

Ihor is a Developer Advocate at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), focused on the upstream Kubernetes-related efforts. He acts as a Product Manager at Kubernetes community, leading Product Management Special Interest Group with the goals of growing Kubernetes as a #1 open source container orchestration platform.

Rob Hirschfeld

Rob Hirschfeld has been involved in OpenStack since the earliest days with a focus on ops and building the infrastructure that powers cloud and storage.  He’s also co-Chair of the Kubernetes Cluster Ops SIG and a four term OpenStack board member.