Podcast: Digital Rebar Tech Discussion on Patch APIs, Swagger, and Integrations

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In this week’s L8ist Sh9y Podcast, we bring on the Digital Rebar team at RackN to discuss several issues they have working on over the past few months:

  • Patch Rest APIs and CLI : Scaling Challenges Require Patch
  • Swagger API History and Changes : No CLI Generation
  • Integrations to Existing Tools up the Stack

Topic                                                   Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                              0.0 – 0.42
Intro to Digital Rebar Project                 0.42 – 1.58
Patch in Rest APIs                                    1.58 – 4.02  (Reference: JsonPatch.com)
Why not use PUT?                                  4.02 – 4.53
CLI use Reference Objects                    4.53 – 6.28
Examples of How Use This                    6.28 – 10.55
Patch Synchronous Question                10.55 – 12.32
Swagger Built into API                            12.32 – 15.44  (Reference: https://swagger.io/)
Operator view of CLI w/out Swagger  15.44 – 18.30
2 Key Points on Swagger Change         18.30 – 20.22
Integration to Other Systems                 20.22 – 28.13   (Grumpy Operators Syndrome)
Learn More About Digital Rebar            28.13 – END      (Digital Rebar Online Meetup Community)

Guest Podcast Attendees

  • Greg Althaus, Co-Founder, CTO RackN
  • Victor Lowther, Sr. Software Engineering, RackN
  • Shane Gibson, Sr. Architect and Community Evangelist, RackN

Digital Rebar is the open, fast and simple data center provisioning and control scaffolding designed with a cloud native architecture. Sponsored by RackN, this community is building an extensible stand-alone DCHP/PXE/IPXE service with minimal overhead offering a quick 5 minutes to provisioning solution.

Community Mission: Embrace the Heterogeneous Nature of Data Center Operations while Eliminating Complexity and Manual Steps.

December 15 – Weekly Recap of Digital Rebar, RackN and Latest 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

Anyone who predicted that 2017 would be the “Year of DevOps” has proved to hit the nail on the head. More enterprises than ever before are ditching their old methodologies, leadership philosophies, and legacy processes in favor of DevOps to achieve speed and agility in today’s constantly evolving technology landscape. In fact, a survey of 700 IT professionals conducted earlier this year found that 50 percent of companies polled were integrating DevOps, or had already done so this year. We are well beyond critical mass.

Automation is on the rise in IT shops, especially in the infrastructure and operations realm. Some automation discussions make it sound like a boogeyman – automation’s coming to get you – but that misses the point. It’s important to understand – and be able to articulate – the why of automation.

One of the fundamental concepts underpinning cloud computing is that the location of the servers and other physical infrastructure running the software and storing the data is entirely irrelevant.

That’s why it borrowed the metaphor of the cloud from old telecoms network diagrams, in which the telephone network (and later the internet) was represented by a cloud, to show that the technologies and locations of this part didn’t matter.

Digital Rebar

The Digital Rebar community solutions are available for download and testing from the community GitHub page. We recommend following our Quick Start instructions and checking out some example videos for using Digital Rebar Provision with Ansible, Terraform and Kubernetes.

RackN

  • Webinar: Immutable Kuberentes with RackN Provisioning

Learn more about the RackN Kubernetes installation integration using community tools like Kubeadm demonstrated at last 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.

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

Chris Steffen, Technical Security Director at Cryptzone joins Rob Hirschfeld and myself to cover the latest topics in cloud, edge and data security. Chris is a well-respected cloud security expert with practical experience securing large infrastructures as well as an excellent speaker and influencer on all things security,

Key Highlights:

  • Current State of Cloud Security
  • Where & What is On-Premises?
  • Hardware Security and Lack of Industry Use
  • Coming of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation from European Union) and Impact on US and Global Industry

UPCOMING EVENTS – None until 2018

Podcast with Chris Steffen on Security for Cloud, Edge, and the Coming of GDPR

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In this week’s podcast, Chris Steffen, Technical Security Director at Cryptzone joins Rob Hirschfeld and myself to cover the latest topics in cloud, edge and data security. Chris is a well-respected cloud security expert with practical experience securing large infrastructures as well as an excellent speaker and influencer on all things security,

Key Highlights:

  • Current State of Cloud Security
  • Where & What is On-Premises?
  • Hardware Security and Lack of Industry Use
  • Coming of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation from European Union) and Impact on US and Global Industry

Topic                                                             Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                                    0.0 – 0.30
State of Cloud Security                                0.30 – 2.52
Complexity is Enemy of Security               2.52 – 7.36 (Illusion of On-Prem being Secure)
People are a Vulnerability                           7.36 – 9.20 (Eliminate ALL People)
Rant Cast on Mgmt & Shadow IT               9.20 – 11.57 (Rant Podcast)
Cyxtera is Data Center / Why Security?   11.57 – 15.37 (More than Data Centers)
What is On-Prem?                                        15.37 – 20.00 (Physical Access is not Security)
Let’s Secure the Hardware                         20.00 –  21.39
Why Don’t Turn on H/W Tools?                 21.39 – 24.15
Disabling Security for Time to Market      24.15 – 26.02
GDPR is Coming                                           26.02 –  31.28
Data: Privacy and Ownership                     31.28 – 34.25
Edge Infrastructure and Security              34.25 – 36.29
Data Sensitivity in Edge Areas                   36.29 – 42.28 (Data locality and gov’t reach)
Conclusion and Wrap-Up                           42.28 – END

Podcast Guest: Christopher Steffen

Christopher Steffen joined Cryptzone in October 2016 as the Technical Director to educate and promote information security and regulatory compliance as it relates to network access management and cloud computing solutions. Before joining the team at Cryptzone, Chris served as the Chief Evangelist – Cloud Security for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). He has also served in executive roles as the Director of Information Technology at Magpul Industries (a plastics manufacturing company) and as the Principal Technical Architect for Kroll Factual Data (a credit service provider). Steffen has presented at numerous conferences and has been interviewed by multiple online and print media sources. Steffen holds several technical certifications, including CISSP and CISA. Follow him on Twitter at @CloudSecChris.

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.

Webinar: Immutable Kubernetes with RackN Provisioning

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Watch 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.

After this webinar, you’ll be prepared to attempt this install strategy on your own.

Why attend this webinar?
* Benefits of the Immutable Infrastructure provisioning model
* Solve installation issues with Kubernetes using community Kubeadm tooling
* Overview of the RackN + Digital Rebar automated provisioning solution

Speakers:
Rob Hirschfeld : CEO/Co-Founder, RackN
Greg Althaus : CTO/Co-Founder, RackN

Day & Time:

Dec 14, 2017 1:30 PM CST

Watch the Webinar on YouTube

Podcast with The CTO Advisor on Edge vs Cloud, Compute vs Data Gravity, and Impact of Massive Scale

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Joining us this week is Keith Townsend, The CTO Advisor, for a joint podcast of the L8ist Sh9y and CTO Advisor Podcast. Keith and Rob discuss the Edge Computing concept and several issues facing enterprise companies looking to move beyond the current cloud offerings. Key highlights from the podcast:

  • What is the Edge? 2 Separate Definitions are Discussed
  • Comparison of Edge and the Electricity Model
  • Building and Managing Apps for Edge at Massive Scale
  • Data vs Compute Gravity

Topic                                                        Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                              0.00 – 1.30
What is Edge?                                           1.30 – 2.30
Hands-Off Edge Infrastructure              2.30 – 5.20   (Snowball Edge)
General Purpose App Stacks in Edge  5.20 – 6.38
AWS Predictions                                      6.38 – 7.32
Enterprise Model for Edge                     7.32 – 9.24
Bernard Golden and Death Cloud        9.24 – 15.15   (Edge vs Electric Market / AWS in China)
Will Edge be Transaction Model?        15.15 – 19.32  (Workloads Space Access?)
What is the Edge? (Second Pass)         19.32 – 21.55
Scale of Edge / Thousands of Nodes   21.55 – 25.27   (Building Apps for Massive Scale)
Centrally Managed Edge                       25.27 – 29.20   (Patch Management)
Cloud Outages                                         29.20 – 31.39
SAP Example                                            31.39 – 33.10
Scale and Automation from AWS         33.10 – 34.46
Edge not like Cloud for App Devs        34.46 –  37.04  (Control Plane too large for Edge)
Compute Now has Gravity                     37.04 – 40.00  (Data vs Compute Gravity)
Conclusion and Wrap-Up                      40.00 – END

 

Podcast Guest: Keith Townsend, CTO Advisor

Keith is a Principal CTO Advisor with 20 years of experience helping organizations achieve their mission through optimized IT infrastructures. Keith holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computing and a Master’s in IT Project Management from DePaul University. Follow Keith on Twitter @CTOAdvisor

December 1 – 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

Edge computing, in the context of IoT, is the idea that you can actually do some of the computational work required by a system close to the endpoints instead of in a cloud or a data center. The intent is to minimize latency, which, according to Renaud, means that it’s going to be a hot trend in certain kinds of industrial IoT application.

Solution providers that have been hit hard by a data center hardware retreat are finding sales and profit growth by living on the edge—the network edge, that is.

DevOps — a term used to refer to the integration of software developers and operations teams — continues to spread like wildfire throughout the open networking ecosystem. The main idea behind DevOps is that by breaking down barriers between these two departments, market applications can be delivered faster with lower costs and better quality. Nevertheless, for all the advantages attached to DevOps, it is still a budding concept since it is primarily concerned with re-aligning the workforce with a variety of tools. The following, therefore, is a list of DevOps trends to keep an eye out for.

Digital Rebar

Our architectural plans for Digital Rebar are beyond big – they are for massive distributed scale. Not up, but out. We are designing for the case where we have common automation content packages distributed over 100,000 stand-alone sites (think 5G cell towers) that are not synchronously managed. In that case, there will be version drift between the endpoints and content. For example, we may need to patch an installation script quickly over a whole fleet but want to upgrade the endpoints more slowly.

Prior Meetup on November 21st Notes

RackN

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.

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 pagey so we can provide you all the necessary links.

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Podcast Guest: Krishnan Subramanian, Rishidot Research

Founder and Chief Research Advisor, Infrastructure, Application Platforms and DevOps

UPCOMING EVENTS

  • KubeCon + CloudNativeCon : Dec 6 – 8 in Austin, TX

Event plans for the RackN and Digital Rebar team include 2 sessions and the RackN booth. We look forward to seeing you in Austin.

The RackN team is 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

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.