Podcast: Nic Jackson on HashiCorp Product Philosophy in Open Source and Feature Minimization

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In this week’s podcast, we speak with Nic Jackson, Developer Advocate, HashiCorp (@sheriffjackson). Nic provides insight into the product and development philosophy of HashiCorp and how it impacts their products and open source components. The last section of the podcast on product feature limitations and how companies go too far is very interesting.

  • HashiCorp Overview and Design Philosophy of their Solutions
  • Company vs Community Open Source Comparison in Terraform
  • Abstractions and Portability Failings
  • Product Features and Doing Too Much

Topic                                                                     Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                                         0.0 – 0.53
HashiCorp Overview                                          0.53 – 3.20 (Started with Vagrant)
Design Philosophy of HashiCorp Tools           3.20 – 5.28 (Isolated Tooling)
Neutral Ground w/ Tools                                  5.28 – 7.46 (Open, Integrated Environments)
Engagement Model                                           7.46 – 10.28
Open Source Community Model                     10.28 – 12.56 (Tightly Controlled)
Software for Operators                                      12.56 – 16.30
Terraform De-Coupling                                     16.30 – 25.25 (Company Open Source)
Terraform – Awesome & Horrible                    25.25 – 29.15 (Edges around Terraform)
Portability & Abstraction                                    29.15 – 33.29 (Partial Abstractions Fail)
Industry Moving Fast & Tools are too Young  33.29 – 37.17
Build Set of Tools for Single Purpose               37.17 – 39.55 (Not All Tools Solve Every Problem)
Adopt Tool Knowing It’s Role                             39.55 – 41.45
Constant Workflow Across Platforms               41.45 – 43.25
Wrap-Up                                                                43.25 – END

Podcast Guest
Nic Jackson, Developer Advocate, HashiCorp

Nic Jackson is a developer advocate and polyglot programmer working for HashiCorp, and the author of “Building Microservices in Go” a book which examines the best patterns and practices for building microservices with the Go programming language. In his spare time, Nic coaches and mentors at Coder Dojo, teaches at Women Who Go and GoBridge, speaks and evangelizes good coding practice, process, and technique.

Follow Nic here: Nic’s Blog

Week in Review: common customer challenges and news on DevOps and edge computing

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Welcome to our new format for the RackN and Digital Rebar Weekly Review. It contains the same great information you are accustomed to; however, I have reorganized it to place a new section at the start with my thoughts on various topics. You can still find the latest news items related to Edge, DevOps and other relevant topics below.

Common Customer Challenges in Infrastructure Automation

RackN was started to solve the challenges faced in provisioning today’s heterogeneous IT environments with bare metal, containers, VMs, and in the future edge. Here are some common issues we are solving for today:

  • How can I eliminate manual, repetitive tasks that often lead to mistakes?
  • How can I merge my 15 different custom provisioning tools to 1 solution?
  • How can leave Cobbler and move to a modern solution without disrupting my servers?
  • How can I run my data center operationally like a cloud provider?
  • How can I manage a heterogeneous environment without customization for each component?
  • How can I reliably patch my software and hardware to upgrade security without significant downtown?

If these issues sound familiar to you, it’s time to learn more about RackN and how we are automating infrastructure with physical operations solutions. Contact us or visit www.rackn.com.

RackN Monthly Newsletter

We distribute a monthly email newsletter on the 2nd Monday every month focused on a common customer issue. This month’s topic is Cobbler replacement. See it here.

News

RackN

Digital Rebar Community

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Social Media

RackN talks Cloud Native Landscape on Rishidot.TV

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Rob Hirschfeld speaks on Rishidot.TV  as part of the Cloud Native Landscape video interview series. Questions asked:

  • Background on RackN
  • Cloud Native Ecosystem Fit – embracing DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering
    • Running “Cloud” in their existing data centers
  •  Differentiation – Build on open source Digital Rebar replacing Cobbler, Maas, and other provisioning tools
    • API driven, Infrastructure as Code feel
  • Use Cases –  Immutable Infrastructure & API driven design
    • Image-based Deployments direct to Metal
    • CI/CD infrastructure, zero-touch automation

 

Raise your Data Center above the Clouds

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As more and more companies move workloads and storage to public clouds, CIOs are forced to account for existing data center investments. Simply abandoning existing infrastructure is not an option and IT teams need to find new methodologies to fully use their available resources.   

Of course, legacy services continue to be served in these data centers; however there is ample opportunity for new technology to leverage the compute power by selecting a foundational provision and control solution from RackN. Our solution brings cloud management tooling found in public clouds to your data centers enabling IT teams the option of keeping resources in house.   

Issue :  Data Center as Clouds

  • Public Clouds – Shadow IT and leverage of public clouds have exposed the shortcomings of IT’s ability to deliver services in a timely manner for business needs
  • Data Center Sunk Costs – CIOs cannot simply leave existing data centers under-utilized with only legacy services and must enhance the operational skills of the IT team  

Impact : Data Center Investment

  • Data Center Management – Many services cannot be moved into a public cloud and IT teams must enhance their skills to maximize their available resources in-house
  • Automated Provision/Control – Standardizing your infrastructure foundation with RackN allows IT to manage all platforms including data centers and public clouds at scale and securely

RackN Solution : Data Center Efficiency

  • Operations Excellence – RackN’s foundational management ensures IT can operate services regardless of platform (e.g. data center, public cloud, etc)
  • Operational Improvement – RackN delivers a single platform for IT to leverage across deployment vehicles as well as ensure IT team efficiency across services

The RackN team is ready to start you on the path to operations excellence:

Podcast: Gina Rosenthal (Minks) on Ops Challenges, Day 2 Ops Support, and Dev Ops Communication

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In this week’s podcast, we speak with Gina Rosenthal (Minks), Product Marketing Manager, VMware and experienced sys-admin/operator. She also hosts the Wide World of Tech podcast.

  • Cloud debate on virtualization and hypervisors as requirement
  • What makes Ops so hard?
  • Technical Communities for Day 2 Ops
  • Community Support for Vendors and Open Source
  • Is DevOps different than 5 years ago?
  • Devs and Operators Communication and Working Together

Topic                                                   Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                             0.0 – 0.55
Background and Current Work            0.55 – 2.05
Wide World of Tech Podcast                2.05 – 4.00
Sys-Admin and Operators                     4.00 – 4.50
vSphere & Hypervisors for Cloud         4.50 – 5.28 (Hypervisors are a MUST for Cloud?)
What is a Cloud? Virtualization              5.28 – 7.33 (Building Blocks are Virtual?)
OpenStack Experience                           7.33 – 8.16 (Didn’t Fix Metal Part)
What makes Ops so hard?                     8.16 – 12.25
Devs want latest and Ops has old        12.25 – 16.03 (Demos and Stories)
Demo Day 2 for Ops                                16.03 – 19.10 (Maintaining product post install issues)
Community Vendor vs Open Source    19.10 – 25.03 (Vendors not accepted in open source)
Choosing Multiple Vendors/Tech         25.03 – 27.18 (Innovations and Stability)
2 Classes of Operators                            27.18 – 30.00 (Tension b/w new and stable is good)
DevOps is Dead                                        30.00 – 37.44 (VMware covered over Ops issues)
Too Much Abstraction for Devs?            37.44 – 49.55 (Key to Ops and Devs Communication)
Wrap Up                                                     49.55 – END

Podcast Guest
Gina Rosenthal (Minks), Product Marketing Manager, VMware

I have a varied background: technical trainer, *nix sysadmin, technical training developer, community manager, social media marketing manager, and now product marketing manager.

Those are just my paid gigs, I also have a social justice background, and have been blogging for 12 years. All these threads weave together in interesting and powerful ways.

At my core, I’m a storyteller and educator. I’m interested in telling the story of technology in simple, clear terms.

February 9 – Weekly Review Of Digital Rebar And RackN With DevOps And Edge 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)

News Items of the Week

As we develop increasingly sophisticated technologies like self-driving cars and industrial internet of things sensors, it’s going to require that we move computing to the edge. Essentially this means that instead of sending data to the cloud for processing, it needs to be done right on the device itself because even a little bit of latency is too much.

Intel announced a new chip today, called the Intel Xeon D-2100 processor, to help customers who want to move computing to the edge. It’s part of an effort by the chip giant to stay ahead of emerging technology trends like edge computing and the Internet of Things.

Someone’s been kicking up the “NoOps” ant pile again. There it was, sitting there finally rebuilt after the annual upturning, and The Lord of Cartography, Simon Wardley says: “I think you’ll find that the new legacy is going to be DevOps.” That said, it is winter, so the ants are moving a bit slower than usual.

The increased demand for cost-efficient hosted services to achieve increased performance, streamlined data operations, and data security would result in a higher adoption of bare metal cloud in various verticals within the near future. Currently, the world bare metal cloud market is driven by telecom & IT due to the growing big data and increasing demand for effective storage. However, advertising is the most money making end use segment and this trend is expected to continue over the forecast period.

Bare metal cloud offers many advantages such as increased security, easy maintenance of records, monitoring activities in commercial & residential areas, and empowering nations against terrorism & external threats at different locations. The adoption of hosted services is significantly high in the telecom & IT end use industry, owing to the enhanced demand for virtual storage facility.

Digital Rebar

Digital Rebar is a community-based solution for an open PXE provisioning solution for infrastructure including bare metal, cloud, and edge.

RackN

How secure is your infrastructure? Not just your internal data centers, but what about your networks connecting to public clouds or hosting providers? How about your corporate data which could be anywhere in the world as you certainly have Shadow IT somewhere?

RackN believes that IT security begins with a secure foundation for provisioning not only within your data center but into your cloud environments as well. Having a single tool architected with security as a key feature allows SecOps to spend more time worrying about protecting attacks at the application and data storage layer instead of allowing attacks at the metal.

A common side-effect of rapid growth for any organization is the introduction of complexity and one-off solutions to keep things moving regardless of the long-term impact. Over time, these decisions add up to create a chaotic environment for IT teams who find themselves unable to find an appropriate time to stop and reset.

IT operations teams also struggle in this environment as management knowledge for all these technologies are not often shared appropriately and it is common to have only 1 operator capable of supporting specific technologies. Obviously, enterprises are at great risk when knowledge is not shared and there is no standard process across a team.

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

In this week’s podcast, we speak with Paul Teich, Principal Analyst, Tirias Research. Paul offered his insight into several key industry trends as well as the recent Spectre and Meltdown discoveries.

* Spectre and Meltdown – Will this drive additional security focus?
* Augmented Reality and AI is the holy grail of Edge and Cloud
* Capabilities of 5G and its impact over next 10 years
* Why is Hyper Converged Infrastructure popular?

UPCOMING EVENTS

Follow the latest info on RackN and Digital Rebar events at www.rackn.com/events

Standardize your Operational Chaos for Provisioning Bliss

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A common side-effect of rapid growth for any organization is the introduction of complexity and one-off solutions to keep things moving regardless of the long-term impact. Over time, these decisions add up to create a chaotic environment for IT teams who find themselves unable to find an appropriate time to stop and reset.  

IT operations teams also struggle in this environment as management knowledge for all these technologies are not often shared appropriately and it is common to have only 1 operator capable of supporting specific technologies. Obviously, enterprises are at great risk when knowledge is not shared and there is no standard process across a team.

Issue :  Infrastructure Management

  • One-Off Operations – Customized operation tooling per service leads to team dysfunction as operators cannot support each due to inexperience with unique tools
  • IT Productivity – Data centers struggle to meet business needs with no standard process or tools; cloud platforms expose this deficiency causing business to go shadow IT

Impact : Delivery Times

  • Costly and Slow – Many data centers operate with dated processes and tools causing significant delays in new service rollout as well as maintaining existing services
  • Cross Platform Support – IT teams MUST maintain control over company services by supporting internal data centers as well as cloud deployments from a single platform  

RackN Solution : Global Standard

  • Operations Excellence – RackN’s foundational management ensures IT can operate services regardless of platform (e.g. data center, public cloud, etc)
  • Operational Standardization – RackN delivers a single platform for IT to leverage across deployment vehicles as well as ensure IT team efficiency across services

The RackN team is ready to start you on the path to operations excellence:

Take part in the Digital Rebar Community

Great Fun Accessing your Infrastructure: How Secure are You?

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How secure is your infrastructure? Not just your internal data centers, but what about your networks connecting to public clouds or hosting providers? How about your corporate data which could be anywhere in the world as you certainly have Shadow IT somewhere?

RackN believes that IT security begins with a secure foundation for provisioning not only within your data center but into your cloud environments as well. Having a single tool architected with security as a key feature allows SecOps to spend more time worrying about protecting attacks at the application and data storage layer instead of allowing attacks at the metal.  

Issue – Secure the Enterprise

  • Many enterprises fail to patch both software and hardware on a regular basis due to their inability to reliably and safely manage the process without impacting service delivery.
  • With applications and data running globally, IT has lost the ability to know with certainty where their services are operating from and how secure they are; this is true even beyond public clouds.

Impact – Business is Digital

  • All business is now digital and a majority of companies don’t have the technical staff to ensure a high level of security and simply trusting cloud providers is not enough.
  • Companies must ensure that networks are protected and that applications and hardware are updated with the latest patches; is your company doing this?

RackN Solution – Secure Foundation

  • Delivering provisioning via an automated layered approach provides IT teams a secure and repeatable process to ensure application availability regardless of location; e.g. Data Center, Hosting Provider, Public Cloud, and eventually Edge infrastructure.
  • Like any construction project security starts with a solid foundation; RackN is that foundation to build your IT infrastructure on.

The RackN team is ready to start you on the path to operations excellence:

Podcast: Paul Teich on Enterprise Security, Hardware Issues at Edge, Augmented Reality and 5G

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In this week’s podcast, we speak with Paul Teich, Principal Analyst, Tirias Research. Paul offered his insight into several key industry trends as well as the recent Spectre and Meltdown discoveries.

  • Spectre and Meltdown – Will this drive additional security focus?
  • Augmented Reality and AI is the holy grail of Edge and Cloud
  • Capabilities of 5G and its impact over next 10 years
  • Why is Hyper Converged Infrastructure popular?

Topic                                                                     Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                                          0.0 –  3.06 (Texas and Texas A&M)
Spectre and Meltdown Lead to Security?      3.06 – 6.30
Industry-Wide Refresh                                       6.30 – 10.38 (At least 12 months to new silicon)
Enterprise Thoughts on Patching/Updates   10.38 – 15.03 (Profit over Security)
Major Services and Rolling Blackouts             15.03 – 16.06 (Service Patching Underway – Intel)
Security Vulnerabilities Always Exist              16.06 – 17.50
Edge ~ Highly Distributed Management        17.50 – 22.23 (Definition)
Hardware Component to Edge                        22.23 – 25.03 (Opening for ARM?)
Edge is Heterogeneous                                    25.03 – 27.48
Portability b/w Cloud and Edge Required    27.48 – 31.47 (End of Mgmt from H/W Vendors)
GPUs on the Edge                                              31.47 –  36.29 (Tesla and Nvidia Announcement)
Infrastructure Deployment in an Instant        36.29 – 40.00
Multi-Tenancy at Edge                                       40.00 – 42.50 (Jevon’s Paradox Appears Again)
Augmented Reality & AI                                    42.50 – 45.13
5G Rollout                                                            45.13 – 47.17
Hyper Converged Infrastructure – Why?       47.17 – 52.30
Wrap-Up                                                               52.30 – END

Podcast Guest
Paul Teich, Principal Analyst, Tirias Research

Paul Teich is a Principal Analyst with a technical background and over 30 years of industry experience in computing, storage, and networking. Paul’s strength is in assessing the technical feasibility and market opportunity for new technologies and developing profitable strategies to commercialize those technologies.

Paul’s prior experience includes being a key member of AMD’s Opteron server processor team in the early 2000s, which redefined 64-bit computing; product manager of a web service at the height of the first internet bubble; designer of low-cost consumer PCs before multi-PC households were common; and product manager of RISC processors used as graphics accelerators in the early 1990s, which is now back in vogue on a larger scale with deep learning.

Over the past few years Paul has spoken and moderated panels at many industry events, including IoT Dev-Con, Open Server Summit, Dell World, TiEcon Silicon Valley, NIWeek, ARM TechCon, and SXSW Interactive. Paul is quoted by an equally diverse set of industry press, including: IDG, SiliconANGLE, ComputerWorld, InfoWorld, eWeek, and Processor.com.

Paul also serves as an adviser to the EEMBC Cloud and Big Data Server Benchmarking working group (“ScaleMark”) and has been a co-organizer of the Open Server Summit’s scale-out server track. In addition, he has recently been an expert consultant in an intellectual property court case and has supported a client in front of a US government committee.

Paul holds a BS in Computer Science from Texas A&M and an MS in Technology Commercialization from the University of Texas’ McCombs School of Business. His technical accomplishments include 12 US patents and senior membership in both the ACM and the IEEE.

February 2 – Weekly Review Of Digital Rebar And RackN With DevOps And Edge 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)

News Items of the Week

Imagine you’re an organisation that is looking to implement a DevOps approach to applications and services, or perhaps you’ve already started, but you’re worried about security.

DevOps is all about rapid iteration and continuous delivery, but your security folks still want to be able to do checks to ensure systems are as bulletproof as possible. They likely to make sure your organisation is meeting regulatory requirements like GDPR, which comes into force very soon. How do you fit in security while staying agile?

Edge computing has moved to the forefront of digital manufacturing and Industrial Internet of Things discussions over the past few years because of its ability to bring the data storage and analysis capabilities of the cloud into the facility. In many cases, edge computing devices can be co-located with the equipment whose data it is responsible for managing.

At first, you might say “really, is that all?” but let’s be clear on what we (and the industry) means by ‘open source’.

It’s not to do with copyright either. US law didn’t allow software to be copyrighted until 1974, but that’s still 24 years in the wilderness. Open source software still has a copyright. Somewhere. Lots of them in fact.

Open source is not free. Well, it usually is, but that’s not the point. Open source means literally, that – the source code is open and editable and anyone can have it and modify it under the terms of a set licence. It’s free to the end user, providing you don’t profit from it yourself, and (in most cases) you contribute any changes you make back to the community.

Digital Rebar

Digital Rebar Provision is a community-based solution for an open PXE provisioning solution for infrastructure including bare metal,  clouds, and edge.

RackN

Internal business units continue to bypass traditional IT in many organizations creating shadow IT leaving corporate data unsecured, networks exposed through unknown entry points, and the possibility of wasting IT resources by paying for services already provided by the company. CIOs must regain control of their IT sprawl to ensure security, resource allocation, and operational control of the business.

RackN offers IT leaders a new way forward to take back control of their services by establishing a solid foundation capable of managing internal data centers, external hosting services, public clouds, and even the upcoming edge infrastructure opportunity.

In this video, Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus provide operators real-world examples of how best to migrate your provisioning platform to Digital Rebar Provision. This blog highlights one of these migration ideas.

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Coming direct from Cambodia is a rare podcast with Jim Plamondon, the creator of how software platforms were built at Microsoft via APIs and developer evangelism. In this podcast, he talks about the early history of developer evangelism at Apple and Microsoft, the current state of open source, and the upcoming competitive industry coming from China and its roots in the third world.

Highlights
* Soviet Agriculture and Technology Market Comparison
* Why NeXT and Apple Failed with Software Industry but iPhone Succeeded
* China Industry Takeover is Coming: Product Price Points

UPCOMING EVENTS

Follow the latest info on RackN and Digital Rebar events at www.rackn.com/events