Category Archives: infrastructure

Podcast – Rob Lalonde on HPC in the Cloud, Machine Learning and Autonomous Cars

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Joining us this week is Rob Lalonde, VP & General Manager, Navops at Univa.

About Univa

Univa is the leading independent provider of software-defined computing infrastructure and workload orchestration solutions.

Univa’s intelligent cluster management software increases efficiency while accelerating enterprise migration to hybrid clouds. We help hundreds of companies to manage thousands of applications and run billions of tasks every day.

 Highlights

  • 1 min 6 sec: Introduction of Guest
  • 1 min 43 sec: HPC in the Cloud?
    • Huge migration of workloads to public clouds for additional capacity
    • Specialized resources like GPUs, massive memory machines, …
  • 3 min 29 sec: Cost perspective of cloud vs local HPC hardware
    • Primarily a burst to cloud model today
  • 5 min 10 sec: Good for machine learning or analytics?
  • 5 min 40 sec: What does Univa and Navops do?
    • Cloud cluster automation
  • 7 min 35 sec: Role of Scheduling
    • Job layer & infrastructure layer
    • Diversity of jobs across organizations
  • 9 min 30 sec: Machine learning impact on HPC
    • Survey of Users ~ Results
      • Machine learning not yet in production ~ still research
      • HPC very much linked to machine learning
      • Cloud and Hybrid cloud usage is very high
      • GPUs usage for machine language
    • 15 min 09 sec: GPU discussion
      • Similar to early cloud stories
    • 16 min 00 sec: Concurrency in operations in HPC & machine learning
      • Workload dependency ~ weather modeling
    • 18 min 12 sec: People bring workloads in-house after running in cloud?
      • Sophistication in what workloads work best where
      • HPC is very efficient ~ 1 Million Cores on Amazon : Successful when AWS called about taking all their resources for other customers 🙂
    • 23 min 56 sec: Autonomous cars discussion
      • Processing in the car or offloaded?
      • Oil and Gas exploration example (Edge Infrastructure example)
        • Pre-process data on ship then upload via satellite to find information required
      • 29 min 12 sec: Is Kubernetes in the HPC / Machine Learning world?
        • KubeFlow project
      • 35 min 8 sec: Wrap-Up

Podcast Guest:  Rob Lalonda, VP & General Manager, Navops

Rob Lalonde brings over 25 years of executive management experience to lead Univa’s accelerating growth and entry into new markets. Rob has held executive positions in multiple, successful high tech companies and startups. He possesses a unique and multi-disciplined set of skills having held positions in Sales, Marketing, Business Development, and CEO and board positions. Rob has completed MBA studies at York University’s Schulich School of Business and holds a degree in computer science from Laurentian University.

Podcast – Antonio Pellegrino on Infrastructure as Software at the Edge

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Joining us this week is Antonio Pellegrino, Founder & CEO at Mutable.

About Mutable
Mutable helps software developers create scalable and fast web services by automating DevOps and providing edge technology all around the world.

 Highlights

  • 0 min 35 sec: Introduction of Guest
  • 1 min 09 sec: Are you products edge-focused or just a market to promote to?
    • Building products to meet customers need for containers including edge
  • 2 min 58 sec: Sounds like a platform?
    • Developers create policies on latency, hardware needs, etc
  • 5 min 51 sec: Be aware of the location and structure of deployment hardware
    • Includes management and tracking of network traffic
    • Services see everything as one network even though it isn’t
  • 7 min 49 sec: Why not Kubernetes instead?
    • Kubernetes built for single network
  • 9 min 16 sec: Edge vs Core
    • Temporary services is a big factor in edge
    • HBO and Games of Throne example for supporting access to the feed
  • 13 min 45 sec: Edge is not infinitely elastic
    • Facial recognition example on iPhone
  • 17 min 53 sec: Algorithm to spin up services when needed not always available
  • 19 min 52 sec: How does software learn what to spin up and down
  • 21 min 22 sec: How do you manage storage?
    • Follows standard S3 storage model
  • 24 min 15 sec: NiCs are a core component ~ language for packet management
    • Sounds like a micro-kernel
    • Why people don’t leverage this concept more often?
  • 28 min 32 sec: Manipulate and manage networking at application layer
    • Mutable is building a full stack
    • Operator approach vs developer approach on networking
  • 33 min 21 sec: Control Plane challenges
  • 34 min 27 sec: What is the starting experience with Mutable like?
  • 35 min 55 sec: How is cable industry responding to edge computing?
    • Opportunity to deploy 5G
  • 39 min 23 sec: Wrap-Up

Podcast Guest: Antonio Pellegrino, CEO and founder if Mutable

Antonio is the CEO and founder of Mutable, the next generation platform as a service for microservices and distributed computing. He is a serial entrepreneur, and ran one of the largest e-sports streaming companies of its time. Antonio has built startups centered around developer tools for the past 8 years, saving their customers millions of dollars. Mutable has been a driver in microservices while distributed computing as we now it, allowing developers to push the application to the edge.

Podcast – Ash Young talks Everything in your PC is IoT

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Joining us this week is Ash Young, Chief Evangelist of Cachengo and OPNFV Ambassador. Cachengo builds smart, predictive storage for machine learning.

NOTE – We had a microphone problem that is solved at the 9 minute 19 second mark of the podcast. Start there if you find the clicking noise an issue

Highlights

  • 1 min 34 sec: Time to Change Basic Storage Architecture
    • Converged Protocol Appliances & Nothing has changed form early 90s
  • 7 min 8 sec: Sounds like Hadoop?
    • Underlying hardware still used proprietary protocols
  • 9 min 19 sec: Single Drive Cluster – it’s built?
    • 24 Servers and 24 Drives in a 1U ; has done 48 drives
    • Working on a new design for 96 drives in a 1U
  • 11 min 52 sec: Truly a Distributed Storage Array
    • Storage focused microservers
  • 13 min 24 sec: Limitations in Operations with Hardware
    • Hinders Innovation
  • 15 min 40 sec: Lessons Learned on Managing Devices
    • Over-dependence on tunneling protocols requiring full networking (e.g. VPN)
    • Move to peer-to-peer network slicing
  • 17 min 28 sec: Software Defined Networking Topology
    • Introduce devices to each other and get out of the way
  • 18 min 33sec: Every Storage Node is Part of the Network
    • Moves into a world of networking challenges
    • Ipv4 cannot support this model
  • 21 min 06 sec: Networking Magic in the Model
    • Peer to Peer w/ Broker Introduction and then Removal from Traffic
    • Scale out for Edge Computing Requires this New Model
    • 5G Energy Cost Savings are a Must
  • 27 min 28 sec: Issues of Powering On/Off Machines to Save Money
    • Creating a massive array of smaller GPUs for Machine Learning
    • Build a fast, cheap, lower power storage system to get started in the model
  • 34 min 09 sec: Doesn’t fit the model that Edge infrastructure will be Cloud patterned
    • Rob makes a point to listeners to consider various ideas in future Edge infrastructure
  • 36 min 48 sec: State of Open Source?
    • Consortium’s and open source standards
    • Creating the lowest common denominator free thing so competitors can build differentiation on top of it for revenue
    • Not a fan of open core models
  • 41 min 44 sec: Does Open Source include Supporting Implementation?
    • Look at the old WINE project financing
    • You can’t just deploy people onsite for free<
  • 48 min 24 sec: Wrap-Up

Podcast Guest: Ash Young,Chief Evangelist of Cachengo

Technology leader with over 20 years experience, primarily in storage. Created the first open source NAS (network attached storage) stack, the first unified block/file storage stack for Linux, the first storage management software, and the list goes on.

Since 2012, I have been heavily involved in NFV (Network Functions Virtualization). I wrote a bunch of the standards and was editor for the Compute/Storage Domain in the Infrastructure Working Group for NFV. And then I started up the open source effort to close the gaps for achieving our vision of the NFVI. This was the precursor to OPNFV.

The best way to understand what I do is to imagine being a high-level marketing exec who comes up with a whiz bang product and business idea, including business plan, competitive analysis, MRD, everything, but now comes the hand-off with your engineering organization, only to hear a litany of nos. Well, I got tired of being told “No, it can’t be done” or “No, we don’t know how to do it”, so I started doing it myself. I call this skill “Rapid Prototyping”, and over the years I have found it to be a very missing gap in the product development process. When Marketing comes up with ideas, we need a way to very efficiently validate the technology and business concepts before we commit to a lengthy engineering cycle.

I’m just one person, working in a company of over 180,000 people and in a very dynamic industry. My ability to get creative and to influence businesses is never a dull moment; and I will probably be 100 years old and still writing open source software.

DRP v3.11 PROVISIONS WITHOUT REBOOTING

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast – Haseeb Budhani on App Development for Edge and Cloud Best Fit

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Joining us this week is Haseeb Budhani, Co-Founder and CEO, Rafay Systems.

About Rafay Systems

Rafay Systems enables next generation performance improvements for SaaS applications delivered over the Internet. Rafay’s Programmable Edge™ platform equips developers with a disruptive set of tools to automatically deploy performance and geography sensitive applications, or micro-services, closer to endpoints. With presence at the infrastructure edge, Rafay’s platform enables organizations to deliver a new set of experiences to their end customers. For more information, visit https://www.rafay.co and join the conversation on Twitter @RafaySystemsInc.

Highlights

  • Building an application deployment platform as close to the Edge as possible
  • Supporting containers, microservices (move latency sensitive parts of app to Edge) and availability of infrastructure
  • Definition of Edge to Rafay Systems
  • Issues of massive amount of data at the Edge to be handled – Use Cases
  • Will Edge suffer from device specific infrastructure needs?
  • Application bottlenecks and impact of cloud locations and end user
  • Placement control of services is still an open issue based on user requirements
  • IT infrastructure and ownership and performance issues (IT vs Operation Teams)
  • Cloud and Edge are not competitive; they work together to offer applications best fit

Topic                                                                                    Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction (and US Weather Update)                               0.0 – 1.52
What is Rafay Systems trying to solve?                               1.52 – 2.50
How does this fit in the world of containers?                      2.50 – 4.40
What does Edge mean to you?                                             4.40 – 7.37
Issues of data at the Edge                                                      7.37 – 12.52
Device specific vendors at Edge?                                         12.52 – 19.07
Recognize where application bottlenecks are                   19.07 – 24.30
Placement of apps using Rafay Systems platform            24.30 – 28.25
Comcast as your data center                                                 28.25 – 28.53
IT infrastructure and ownership                                            28.53 – 33.45
Closing thought from Haseeb                                               33.45 – 35.48
Wrap Up                                                                                    35.48 – END

 

Podcast Guest: Haseeb Budhani, Co-Founder and CEO, Rafay Systems

Haseeb Budhani is the CEO of Rafay Systems, which he co-founded in late 2016. Prior to Rafay, Haseeb spent a year at Akamai Technologies as the company’s Vice President of Enterprise Strategy. Akamai acquired Haseeb’s previous company, Soha Systems, in October 2016. Haseeb co-founded Soha in the second half of 2013 and served as the company’s CEO. Prior to Soha, Haseeb served as the Chief Product Officer for Infineta Systems, where he was responsible for overseeing all aspects of the company’s product marketing, marketing communications and partner management activities. Prior to Infineta, Haseeb served as Vice President for NET’s Broadband Technology Group, spearheading the group’s product marketing, program management and business development functions. Previously, Haseeb held senior product management, marketing and engineering roles at Personal IT, Citrix Systems, Orbital Data, IP Infusion and Oblix. Haseeb holds an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.

 

Podcast – Matt Trifiro talks Jitter, Real Estate and Augmented Reality for Edge

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Joining us this week is Matt Trifiro, CMO of Vapor.io. Matt offers insight into how Edge infrastructure and 5G will be deployed to meet the increased demand for low latency, high data distributed technology.

Highlights

  • Edge is a place: the last mile network
  • Jitter at the Edge (Jitter definition)
  • Data sovereignty and location
  • Apps for Edge have are not similar to existing apps for communication processes
  • Edge as multi-vendor data sharing environment
  • Real estate problem – solved by Akamai
  • Vision of schedulers on keeping apps running vs keeping apps fast
  • Cloud providers will extend into the Edge
  • Augmented reality discussion of video and latency (Digital Twin)
  • Importance of 5G to Edge and commercial impact
  • Real estate is key in Edge computing
  • Building and Managing Edge infrastructure
  • What does Vapor do?

Topic                                                                                    Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction (and US Weather Update)                                0.0 – 2.51
Edge Computing Podcasting & Dr Edge                              2.51 – 4.00
Definition of Edge (Many Defs) / Latency                            4.00 – 7.15
Jitter – Signal Variation in Data Transfers                              7.15 – 8.48
Data Sovereignty and Location                                               8.48 – 9.45
Apps for Edge have a Unique Communication Pattern.     9.45 – 11.42
Edge as Multi-Vendor Data Sharing Environment               11.42 – 16.00
Real Estate Problem and Tracking                                         16.00 – 20.43 (Chetan Podcast)
Vision of Schedulers                                                                 20.43 – 21.27
Extending Edge from Cloud Providers                                  21.27 – 24.07
Human vs Machine Latency                                                    24.07 – 29.13
How Important is 5G?                                                               29.13 – 34.18
REIT Structures for Data Centers                                           34.18 – 35.19
How do we Build & Manage Edge Infrastructure?              35.19 – 40.07
What does Vapor.io do?                                                           40.07 – 45.06
Wrap Up                                                                                     45.06 – END

Podcast Guest: Matt Trifiro, CMO of Vapor.io

Matt Trifiro leads the company’s global marketing, branding and communications. He is a technology industry veteran and a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded or led over a half dozen startup companies. Prior to joining Vapor IO, he was entrepreneur in residence at Xseed Capital and chief marketing officer and senior vice president at Mesosphere. At Mesosphere, he created a new industry category, the Datacenter Operating System, and helped the organization grow from a seed stage startup to a full-scale operating company, generating significant revenue. Prior to Mesosphere, Trifiro was chief marketing officer at Heroku, a division of Salesforce, and prior to that he served as senior vice president of marketing for Salesforce Desk.com. He was also a co-founder and CEO of e-commerce startup 1000 Markets (sold to Bonanza) and co-founder and vice president of marketing for interactive television pioneer Wink Communications (NASDAQ IPO). He currently holds advisory roles with venture-funded startups Buoyant and ListenLoop.

Infrastructure Provisioning for Ansible with Digital Rebar Provision

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

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

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

Demonstration Video of Kubespray with Digital Rebar Provision:

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

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

Week in Review – Immutable Infrastructure and Podcast with CNCF Ambassador

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

Immutable Infrastructure

Immutable infrastructure offers IT a new deployment methodology of create / destroy / repeat from a fixed image for deploying services vs the more common method of deploying once and then patching regularly to keep a service in operations. Continually tearing down and launching fixed images solves challenges such as hacking, version control, and unknown service status.

RackN automation and provisioning management simplify the immutable infrastructure methodology allowing IT team to focus on issues other than version control and hacked services.

Learn More 

L8istSh9y Podcast

Chris Short, Senior DevOps Advocate, SJ Technologies and CNCF Ambassador provides his thoughts on Site Reliability Engineering, DevSecOps, Kubernetes and other hot topics in the industry.

News

RackN

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

Digital Rebar Community 

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Social Media

Catch up with the RackN and Digital Rebar Team at OpenStack Summit

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We are heading out to Vancouver next week for the OpenStack Summit from May 21 – 24. Rob Hirschfeld, our Co-Founder/CEO will be available to meet onsite as well as help drive the OpenStack community forward. If you are interested in meeting, please contact me.

Rob has 2 sessions scheduled and we encourage you to attend.

Sessions

Security Considerations for Cloud Edge Computing
Date & Time: May 23 from 11:50 – 12:30pm

Location: Vancouver Convention Centre West – Level 2 – Room 205-207

Panel: (Moderator) Beth Cohen, Verizon : Rob Hirschfeld, RackN : Glen McGowan, Dell EMC : Shuquan Huang, 99cloud

Cloud Edge computing use cases range from IoT to VR/AR and any widely distributed application in between.  However, taking OpenStack out of the data center requires an entirely new approach to security when there is far less ability to restrict access and often the applications require a shared tenant model.

Avoiding Infrastructure at Rest – The Power of Immutable Infrastructure

Date & Time: May 23 from 3:30 – 4:10pm
Location: Vancouver Convention Center West – Level Three – Room 301

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 deployment pattern called “immutable infrastructure”  because the servers are deployed from images produced by CI/CD process and destroyed after use instead of being reconfigured.

We’ll cover the specific process and it’s advantages.  Then we’ll dive deeply into open tools and processes that make it possible to drive immutable images into your own infrastructure.  The talk will include live demos and go 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.

Mobilize your Ops Team Against Operational Paralysis

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Many IT departments struggle with keeping “the lights on” as legacy hardware and software consume significant resources preventing the team from taking advantage of new technologies to modernize their infrastructure. These legacy issues not only consume resources but also cause challenges to find qualified experts to keep them operational as the older the technology the less likely to find experienced support. Even worse, new employees are typically not interested in working on old technology while the IT press obsesses on what comes next.

Freezing older technology in place without capable support or an understanding of how the product works is certainly not an industry best practice; however, it is commonly accepted in many large IT organizations. RackN has built a single, open source platform to manage not just new technologies but also legacy services allowing IT teams to actively engage the older technology without fear.

Issue: Expertise & the Unknown

  • Existing Infrastructure – legacy technology abounds in modern enterprise infrastructure with few employees capable of maintaining
  • State of the Art vs the Past – new employees are experienced in the latest technology and not interested in working on legacy solutions

Impact: Left Behind

  • Stuck in the Past – IT teams are unwilling to touch old technology that just works
  • Employee Exodus – limited future for employees maintaining the past

RackN Solution: Stagnation to Action

  • Operations Excellence – RackN’s foundational management ensures IT can operate services regardless of platform (e.g. data center, public cloud, etc)
  • Operational Paralysis – RackN delivers a single platform for IT to single platform capable of supporting existing solutions, newly arriving technologies as well as prepare for future innovation down the road.

The RackN team is ready to unlock your operational potential by preventing paralysis: