Category Archives: Week in Review

Friday Posts with Latest from RackN and Digital Rebar

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

 

Nov 3 – 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

Join us Tuesday November 7th at 11am PST for our next Digital Rebar Online Community Meetup #4.

Long-time community member going back to the original Project Crowbar days Will Dennis talks with Rob Hirschfeld in in this week’s Podcast about the value of Digital Rebar technology as an operator for a complex lab environment.

Stay in Touch with the Community:

RackN

We released our 2nd White Paper this week: The New Economics for Data Center Infrastructure: RackN Automation Improves Speed and Agility by Reducing Cost and Risk.

Executive Summary

RackN’s mission is to fix the current lack of fast, simple and standard ways to manage fundamental data center infrastructure activities. These include updating server firmware, operating systems and integrating provisioning into application life-cycles. RackN on-premises software integrates easily with existing processes while providing a clear path from home-grown scripting to common best-practices. RackN customers achieve a 10x performance improvement by automating provisioning and orchestration. Like any building activity, a solid foundation makes the entire stack more robust and secure.

Podcast with Bernard Golden

We spoke to Bernard Golden about his recent blog post Edge Computing and the Death of Cloud: Nonsense.

For those of you who prefer to access Podcasts via YouTube, all L8ist Sh9y podcasts are now available at this Playlist.

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

October 27 – 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 Online Community Meetup #3

Meetup Content:

  • Digital Rebar Provision 3.2 Update
  • Feature Tags
  • Endpoint + UX
  • Demo w/ Virtual Box
  • Community Roundtable

Stay in Touch with the Community:

RackN

This week’s Podcast with David Linthicum, SVP Cloud Technology Partners on a variety of cloud related topics including DevOps, Containers, Edge Computing, etc.

For those interested in Podcasts but prefer to listen via YouTube, we have a new Playlist of all the Podcasts available.

Rishidot Research recently published a profile of the new RackN Beta program, Briefing Notes: RackN Launches in Beta. This document contains a Market Overview, RackN Offering, SWOT Analysis, and Conclusions.

Rishidot provided several key messages in their briefing notes that are worth highlighting:

  • Bare Metal as a Service– offers a better fit for running containers in the enterprise without the overhead of virtualization.
  • Simplification and Choice– by decoupling provisioning, management, and orchestration into distinct layers, RackN allows customers flexibility in choosing orchestration tools already in use
  • Data Center vs Cloud – RackN automation to underlying infrastructure makes datacenter provisioning competitive in a cloud world

Read the Complete Briefing Notes

Disclosure: RackN has hired Rishidot in the past.

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

October 20 – 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

Have you registered to join our RackN Beta Program? Simply click over to our Beta Program page and learn more about this opportunity to engage directly with RackN engineering and the Digital Rebar Community to automate and provision your existing infrastructure just like the public cloud providers. In fact, for users of Terraform we have our bare metal plugin available in the Beta to enhance your existing Terraform solution. It’s simple to join the Beta Program via our website.

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

From Rob Hirschfeld’s post on this newly launched podcast:

We feel there’s still room for deep discussions specifically around automated IT Operations in cloud, data center and edge; consequently, we’re branching out to start including deep interviews in addition to our initial stable of IT Ops deep technical topics like Terraform, Edge Computing, Gartner Symposium review, Kubernetes and, of course, our own Digital Rebar.

This past week our guest was Mark Thiele of Apcera where we covered Mark’s thought on why public cloud will be under 20% of IT and culture issues head on.

Soundcloud Subscription Information

Digital Rebar

Digital Rebar Online Community Meetup #3

  • Next Tuesday at 11am PST is our third Online Meetup – Join Us

Stay in Touch with the Community:

Coming Soon!

Next week we are releasing a new Podcast with David Linthicum, SVP,  Cloud Technology Partners

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

October 13 – 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 Online Community Meetup #2

Community Content Video

Stay in Touch with the Community

RackN

Making Server Deployments 10x Faster – the ROI on Immutable Infrastructure

Rob Hirschfeld discusses the benefits of Immutable Infrastructure or Image-based provisioning around three concepts:

  • Simplicity
  • Repeatability
  • Speed

Read the post here

Fast, Simple, and Open: 10x ROI of Building Infrastructure in Layers

Read our new white paper on why RackN created a new data center provisioning software solution to automate  and simplify data center operations.

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Read the paper here

Coming Soon!

Next week we are releasing a new Podcast with Mark Thiele, Chief Strategy and Chief Information Officer at Apcera.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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
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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