Category Archives: Week in Review

Friday Posts with Latest from RackN and Digital Rebar

Week in Review: L8istSh9y Podcast Finds a New Home

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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.

L8ist Sh9y Podcast Goes Solo in New Blog

For active followers of the L8istSh9y podcast we are pleased to announce a new “home” at https://medium.com/@l8istsh9y. We will continue to publish a blog weekly here at RackN but will expand content on our new site. Be sure to follow us on Medium.

Digital Rebar Online Community Meetup

We are skipping the July 3rd Meetup due to a US holiday. We will resume on July 17th.

Summer Vacation 

As we slow down for the summer, we will be moving the Week in Review post from weekly to monthly. RackN will continue to post the L8istSh9y podcast on Mondays and an industry thought leadership post on Wednesdays.

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)

Digital Rebar Community

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Social Media

Week in Review – Ansible Integration and Community Welcome Guide Released

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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.

Infrastructure Provisioning for Ansible with Digital Rebar Provision

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.

READ MORE

Digital Rebar Community Welcome Guide Released

This document contains information about the open source Digital Rebar community building Digital Rebar Provision. It is especially useful for new users, developers or other interested parties in understanding the community, its methodologies, communication channels, and community standards.

Read Welcome Guide

News

RackN

  • RackN Trial – 30-day access to RackN technology with support and training from RackN team – Register Today
  • NEW YouTube Videos
    • Digital Rebar Inventory Stage (RackN Task-Library) – Listen (17 min 06 sec)
    • 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

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

Week in Review: Automation and L8istSh9y Podcast Makes DZone

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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.

RackN Solutions – Automation

Automation is not simply taking manual tasks and replacing them with a machine. Rather, it is a methodology to assemble hardware and software infrastructure in a reliable, repeatable way saving time and effort. Automation also provides IT teams with the capability to rapidly meet new business challenges, learn new technologies, and reduce fire drills rather than spending significant cycles manually pushing buttons.

L8istSh9y Podcast on DZone

Jordan Rinke on Open Source, Kubernetes, and Edge Computing

On occasion the DZone / Cloud Zone site selects content from the RackN Blog to promote to their audience. Our recent post on Jordan Rinke’s podcast is a recent selection. Full Post

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

Week in Review: OpenStack Summit Highlights on Edge and Immutability

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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.

Getting Edge-Y at OpenStack Summit – 5 Ways it’s an Easy Concept with Hard Delivery

The 2018 Vancouver OpenStack Summit is very focused on IT infrastructure at the Edge. It’s a fitting topic considering the telcos’ embrace for the project; however, building the highly distributed, small footprint management needed for these environments is very different than OpenStack’s architectural priorities. There is a significant risk that the community’s bias towards it’s current code base (which still has work needed to service hyper-scale and enterprise data centers) will undermine progress in building suitable Edge IT solutions.

There are five significant ways that Edge is different than “traditional” datacenter.  We often discuss this on our L8istSh9y podcast and it’s time to summarize them in a blog post.

Full Post

Avoiding Infrastructure at Rest -The Power of Immutable Infrastructure Talk 

Rob Hirschfeld’s talk at OpenStack Summit on Image-Based Deployment

News

RackN

Digital Rebar Community

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Social Media

Week in Review: Move Away from Virtualization Overheard with Bare Metal

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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.

Had Enough Virtualization Overheard? Time to Think Bare Metal

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 Provision (DRP) plugin for users of HashiCorp’s Terraform.

More on RackN Terraform Opportunity

Observability into Bare Metal Provisioning with RackN

(Posted 5/15 on Honeycomb.io Blog)

At RackN, a core design principle is that operations should be easy to track and troubleshoot. We work hard to automate provisioning with observable processes because insight into complex interactions within a modern data center is critical for success. So, it’s not helpful if we require complex technologies to understand where issues arise from disconnected processes. RackN and the open source Digital Rebar community require a simple, best in class solution to provide a better way to observe provisioning operations within our system without adding complexity and overhead.

Full Post on Honeycomb.io

News

RackN

Digital Rebar Community

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Social Media

Week in Review : The CTO Advisor talks RackN at InteropITX

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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.

Rob Hirschfeld and The CTO Advisor from Interop ITX

During Interop ITX 2018, Keith Townsend had a chance to catch up with RackN CEO Rob Hirschfield to discuss the company. Learn how RackN orchestrates bare metal workloads to provide cloud capability to the data center.

News

RackN

Digital Rebar Community 

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Social Media

Week in Review: Plugin Model for Digital Rebar Provision Example

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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.

Enhancing Digital Rebar Potential with Plugins – Honeycomb Example

The open source Digital Rebar Provision (DRP) solution provides a basic set of features that are enhanced with plugins offering additional services to customers. These plugins are provided by the Digital Rebar community, customers, partners, and RackN delivering significant value over and above the base provisioning capability of DRP.

RackN and Honeycomb developed a unique plugin during SRECon Americas a few weeks back allowing DRP events to be visible within the Honeycomb tool. Offering partners like Honeycomb an opportunity to integrate with DRP provides partners with a methodology to offer their services to the Digital Rebar community. For the community, having a simple plugin capability allows for use of pre-existing infrastructure tools.

Full Post

Immutable Deployments Hands-On Lab from Interop ITX

Greg Althaus presented a hands-on lab to 50 attendees to use Digital Rebar Provision and the RackN Portal to provision a pre-built Linux image for rapid node availability.

News

RackN

Digital Rebar Community

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Social Media

Week in Review: Operational Paralysis is Real

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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.

Mobilize your Ops Team Against Operational Paralysis  

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.

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.

Full Post

News

RackN

Digital Rebar Community

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Social Media

Week in Review: Data Center 2020 Blog Series Update on Data Centric Computing

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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.

DC2020: Putting the Data Back in the Data Center

For the past two decades, data centers have been more about compute than data, but the machine learning and IoT revolutions are changing that focus for the 2020 Data Center (aka DC2020). My experience at IBM Think 2018 suggests that we should be challenging our compute centric view of a data center; instead, we should be considering the flow and processing of data. Since data is not localized, that reinforces our concept of DC2020 as a distributed and integrated environment.

…

As an industry, we are rethinking management automation from declarative (“start this”) to intent (“maintain this”) focused systems.  This is the simplest way to express the difference between OpenStack and Kubernetes. That change is required to create autonomous infrastructure designs; however, it also means that we need to change our thinking about infrastructure as something that follows data instead of leads it.

Read Post and Full DC2020 Blog Series

News

RackN

Digital Rebar Community 

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Social Media