Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and Co-Founder, RackN talks with Stephen Spector, HPE Cloud Evangelist about the recent uptake in Ansible news as well as how Digital Rebar Provision assists Ansible users.
Listen to the 9 minute podcast here:
As this is the launch of L8ist Sh9y Podcast from RackN we encourage you to visit our site at https://soundcloud.com/user-410091210 or subscribe to the RSS Feed. We will also be publishing on iTunes as well shortly.
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
Beyond Google SRE: What is Site Reliability Engineering like at Medium?
https://blog.netsil.com/beyond-google-sre-what-is-site-reliability-engineering-like-at-medium-71c65bd35f4e
We had the opportunity to sit down with Nathaniel Felsen, DevOps Engineer at Medium and the author of “Effective DevOps with AWS”. We are happy to share some practical insights from Nathaniel’s extensive experience as a seasoned DevOps and SRE practitioner.
While we hear a lot about these experiences from Google, Netflix, etc., we wanted to gather perspectives on DevOps and SRE life with other easily relatable companies. From tech-stack challenges to organization structure, Nathaniel provides a wide range of practical insights that we hope will be valuable in improving DevOps practices at your organization. READ MORE
GitHub seeks to spur innovation with Kubernetes migration
http://www.zdnet.com/article/github-seeks-to-spur-innovation-with-kubernetes-migration/
GitHub on Wednesday is sharing the details of the massive technical endeavor its engineers went through to migrate the infrastructure that powers github.com and api.github.com — some of its most critical workloads — from a set of manually-configured physical servers to Kubernetes clusters that run application containers.
GitHub is confident the move will allow for faster innovation on the online code sharing and development platform. READ MORE
SRE Thinking: Reframing Dev + Ops
http://bit.ly/2w2I53F
Last month, Eric Wright and I were able to complete a discussion the inspired my guest post for CapitalOne “How Platforms and SREs Change the DevOps Contract.” While our conversation ranged widely over the challenges of building and integration of IT processes, the key message is simple: we need to make investments in operations. READ MORE
Coal or Diamonds? Configuration Management is Under Pressure
http://bit.ly/2uTvADN
Cloud Native thinking is thankfully changing the way we approach traditional IT infrastructure. These profound changes in how we build applications with 12-factor design and containers has deep implications on how we manage configuration and the tools we use to do it. These are not cloud only impacts – the changes impact every corner of IT data centers. READ MORE
Subscribe to our new daily DevOps, SRE, & Operations Newsletter https://paper.li/e-1498071701#/
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
Cloud Native thinking is thankfully changing the way we approach traditional IT infrastructure. These profound changes in how we build applications with 12-factor design and containers has deep implications on how we manage configuration and the tools we use to do it. These are not cloud only impacts – the changes impact every corner of IT data centers.
“You still have to do configuration management but… we’re getting to a point we can do a lot less” (8:30)
Configuration Management is both necessary and very hard. I’ve written and spoken about the developer rebellion against Infrastructure (and will again at DOD Dallas!). The TL;DR on that lightning talk is “infrastructure sucks.”
In this podcast, Eric and I have time to stretch out and really discuss what’s going on with in both broad and specific terms. At the 15 minute mark, we start talking about how “radical simplicity” is coming to provisioning and deployment automation. We break down how the business needs for repeatable and robust automation are driving IT to rethinking huge swaths of their infrastructures. That transitions into making a whole data center into a CI/CD pipeline.
Podcast: Episode 15: The Death of Configuration Management with Rob Hirschfeld
“If we have radically better control of the physical infrastructure, then I don’t need anything else to install Kubernetes.” (22:00)
Like always, Eric and I are not shy about taking on IT hot topics. Dig deep, enjoy and let us know what YOU think about these topics. We want to hear from you.
Last month, Eric Wright and I were able to complete a discussion the inspired my guest post for CapitalOne “How Platforms and SREs Change the DevOps Contract.” While our conversation ranged widely over the challenges of building and integration of IT processes, the key message is simple: we need to make investments in operations.
This podcast explains why I’ve been using Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) as a proxy for this DevOps inspired rethinking of operations.
I hope you’ll take the time to listen to this deep conversation about very real IT issues. Eric and I are not shy about expressing our opinions, but we’re also anti-shaming. The simple reality is that building infrastructure is hard and we all make difficult choices. My hope is that we can start sharing the fixes and helping each other out.
Do these topics inspire you? Creating data center automation for SREs is our mission at RackN. We believe that well run infrastructure requires building APIs from the ground up and keeping them simple. I hope that you’ll take 5 minutes to try our latest offering, Digital Rebar Provision and join us on the quest drive excellence in operations.
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
Report: DevOps is still considered a new phenomenon
http://sdtimes.com/report-devops-still-considered-new-phenomenon
While companies have grasped that DevOps leads to an increase in innovation, DevOps adoption and implementation still remains a challenge for many. Logz.io, an AI-powered log analytics company, released its DevOps Pulse 2017 survey in time for today’s SysAdmin Day, highlighting some of the challenges and benefits to DevOps.
The DevOps Pulse report this year was based on data from a survey of 700 companies, with an additional section on DevOps culture because, according to Logz.io, it’s one topic that wasn’t researched enough. READ MORE
Immutable Infrastructure Deployment Challenges for DevOps
http://bit.ly/2vFAWq1
Rob Hirschfeld and Gareth Rushgrove (@garethr) discuss the issues.
DevOps vs SRE vs Cloud Native Talk at DevOps Summit
http://news.sys-con.com/node/4134816
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN, will explore this trend and discuss concrete ways to cope with the coming changes. He’ll look at the reasons why SRE is attractive and get specific about ways that teams can bootstrap their efforts and keep their DevOps Fu strong.
Meet the Digital Rebar Mascot
http://bit.ly/2fvnrT7
The Digital Rebar project is pleased to announce our new mascot; however, she doesn’t have a name. We are looking for ideas and you can reach us at @digitalrebar, @zehicle, or comment on this blog. READ MORE
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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
The Digital Rebar project is pleased to announce our new mascot; however, she doesn’t have a name. We are looking for ideas and you can reach us at @digitalrebar, @zehicle, or comment on this blog.
Current ideas:
If you need help finding a “bear” name, try this interesting name generator based on animal type: http://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/pet-bear-names.php. I also found a site with construction worker slang: http://www.theunionbootpro.com/slang/.
We look forward to hearing your ideas and are quickly working on stickers and other assorted gear with the new mascot.
Last week, Gareth Rushgrove (@garethr) and I hashed out our viewpoints on the intersection of DevOps and Immutable Infrastructure. We recorded the call because we want to expand the discussion to include a broader audience and we’d love to hear your opinions!
The gist of the call is that DevOps processes are moving faster and faster as teams embrace the create-destroy-repeat pattern of cloud automation. This pattern favors immutable images driven by cloudinit style bootstrapping. This changes our configuration management practice because configuration is front loaded. It also means that we destroy rather than patch.
We both felt that this immutable pattern will become dominate overtime.
However, there was significant nuance in our position about this change and the challenges that it will pose to operators. If you care about how immutable infrastructure is going to impact your DevOps plans then you’ll enjoy listening to our short discussion.
If you’re still hungry for the how’s and why’s of Immutable infrastructure, I suggest listening to the excellent panel discussion RackN hosted last May.
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)
This week, we launched our new RackN website to provide more information on our solutions and services as well as provide customer examples. Click over to our new site and let us know your thoughts.
SRE Items of the Week
Site Reliability Engineer: Don’t fall victim to the bias blind spot
http://sdtimes.com/site-reliability-engineer-dont-fall-victim-to-the-bias-blind-spot/
To ensure websites and applications deliver consistently excellent speed and availability, some organizations are adopting Google’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) model. In this model, a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) – usually someone with both development and IT Ops experience – institutes clear-cut metrics to determine when a website or application is production-ready from a user performance perspective. This helps reduce friction that often exists between the “dev” and “ops” sides of organizations. More specifically, metrics can eliminate the conflict between developers’ desire to “Ship it!” and operations desire to not be paged when they are on-call. If performance thresholds aren’t met, releases cannot move forward. READ MORE
Episode 50 – SRE Revisited plus the Challenge of Ops and more with Rob Hirschfeld
http://podcast.discoposse.com/e/ep-50-sre-revisited-plus-the-challenges-of-ops-and-more-with-rob-hirschfeld-zehicle/
This fun chat expands on what we started talking about in episode 42 (http://podcast.discoposse.com/e/ep-42-spiraling-ops-debt-sre-solutions-and-rackn-chat-with-rob-hirschfeld-zehicle/) as we dive into the challenges and potential solutions for thinking and acting with the SRE approach. Big thansk to Rob Hirschfeld from @RackN for sharing his thoughts and experiences from the field on this very exciting subject. LISTEN HERE
Site Reliability Engineering – Operators and Developers Working Together
http://bit.ly/2u7eSmm
Rob Hirschfeld, Co-Founder and CEO of RackN provides his thoughts on how operators are equivalent to developers and work together to accomplish the critical task of keep the infrastructure running and available with constant changes in the data center
Subscribe to our new daily DevOps, SRE, & Operations Newsletter https://paper.li/e-1498071701#/
_____________
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
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
Teradata Acquires San Diego-based Start-up StackIQ to Strengthen Teradata Everywhere and IntelliCloud Capabilities
http://prn.to/2vicpUb
SAN DIEGO, July 13, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the leading data and analytics company, today announced the acquisition of StackIQ, developers of one of the industry’s fastest bare metal software provisioning platforms which has managed the deployment of cloud and analytics software at millions of servers in data centers around the globe. The deal will leverage StackIQ’s expertise in open source software and large cluster provisioning to simplify and automate the deployment of Teradata Everywhere. Offering customers the speed and flexibility to deploy Teradata solutions across hybrid cloud environments, allows them to innovate quickly and build new analytical applications for their business.
How Platforms and SREs Change the DevOps Contract on CapitalOne DevExchange
http://bit.ly/2uVXekf
DevOps struggles under a “fully shared responsibility” contract for Developers and Operations that drives a futile search for elusive “full-stack engineers.” It’s time to revisit how to Dev and Ops are going to collaborate because these jobs often have different priorities. READ MORE
RackN Introduction Video
Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and Co-Founder introduces RackN in 48 seconds
Kubernauts Worldwide Meetup
This video is from our first Kubernauts Worldwide Meetup covering the new features in Kubernetes 1.7 presented by Ihor Dvoretskyi, Kubernetes Pain Points and Upgrade presented by Rob Hirschfeld and about Kubernauts Training presented by Des Drury. Arash Kaffamanesh moderated the online meetup and provided a short overview about what Kubernauts are about.
Rob starts at 38 minute 50 seconds
Video Series w/ Packet.net
Three videos showing how to use Packet.net custom IPXE option with Digital Rebar IPXE provisioning
http://bit.ly/2t54J65 (Video 1 of 3)
http://bit.ly/2tO5WCy (Video 2 of 3)
http://bit.ly/2vi5dXZ (Video 3 of 3)
Let’s DevOps IRL: My SRE Postings on RackN by Rob Hirschfeld
http://bit.ly/2tzCvnj
I’m investing in these Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) discussions because I believe operations (and by extension DevOps) is facing a significant challenge in keeping up with development tooling. The links below have been getting a lot of interest on twitter and driving some good discussion. READ MORE
Subscribe to our new daily DevOps, SRE, & Operations Newsletter https://paper.li/e-1498071701#/
_____________
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
I’m investing in these Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) discussions because I believe operations (and by extension DevOps) is facing a significant challenge in keeping up with development tooling. The links below have been getting a lot of interest on twitter and driving some good discussion.
Addressing this Ops debt is our primary mission at my company, RackN: we believe that integrated system level tooling is required. We also believe that new tools should not disrupt environments so we work very hard to adapt to requirements of individual sites.
SRE is urgent because it provides a pragmatic path and rationale for investment.
Even if you don’t agree with Google’s term or all their practices, I think fundamental concepts of system thinking, status/pay, automation investment and developer collaboration are essential. It should come as no surprise that these are all Lean/DevOps concepts; however, SRE has the pragmatic side of being a job function.
Here are some recent relevant discussions I’ve been having about SREs with links to both the audio and my text show notes.
Of course, RackN is also doing a WEEKLY SRE update that captures general interest items. Check that out and subscribe.
Rob Hirschfeld 