Standardize your Operational Chaos for Provisioning Bliss

Posted on February 8, 2018 by spector13

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

Operations Standardization its Impact and Issues Solved with RackN from RackN

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

Call today at +1 (650) 557-3227
Email us at info@rackn.com
Join 30-day RackN Trial

Take part in the Digital Rebar Community

Rishidot Research Briefing Notes on RackN

Posted on October 25, 2017 by galthaus

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.

About Rishidot Research

In ancient Indian mythology, the Rishis were the embodiment of all-encompassing knowledge with the ability to foresee the future and help handle change. Named after the mythical Rishis, Rishidot Research LLC is an analyst firm dedicated to deep understanding of technology and the ability to foresee trends.

Unlike ever before, technological evolution is happening at an exponential rate. In order to maintain their competitive edge, organizations need to both keep up with emerging technologies and align the IT goals with their business objectives. Rishidot Research helps organizations transform to Modern Enterprise by offering strategic advise to leadership on their modernization strategy and help teams understand and navigate the technology landscape. Our focus is on helping enterprises decipher and adapt to the fast changing technological landscape dominated by cloud computing, Big Data, IoT and AI.

Contact: Krishnan Subramanian at @rishidot or +1-617-657-4744

Deep Thinking & Tech + Great Guests – L8ist Sh9y podcast relaunched

Posted on October 17, 2017 by Rob H

I love great conversations about technology – especially ones where the answer is not very neatly settled into winners and losers (which is ALL of them in IT). I’m excited that RackN has (re)launched the L8ist Sh9y (aka Latest Shiny) podcast around this exact theme.

Please check out the deep and thoughtful discussion I just had with Mark Thiele (notes) of Aperca where we covered Mark’s thought on why public cloud will be under 20% of IT and culture issues head on.

Spoiler: we have David Linthicum coming next, SO SUBSCRIBE.

I’ve been a guest on some great podcasts (Cloudcast, gcOnDemand, Datanauts, IBM Dojo, HPE, Foodfight) and have deep respect for critical work they do in industry.

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, GartnerSYM review, Kubernetes and, of course, our own Digital Rebar.

Soundcloud Subscription Information

Podcast: Mark Thiele Talks Cloud, IT, and Jevons Paradox

Posted on October 16, 2017 by Rob H

Rob Hirschfeld, CEO/Co-Founder of RackN speaks with Mark Thiele, Chief Strategy and CIO of Apcera on a variety of cloud and DevOps related topics including Mark’s recent blog post, Why Adoption of Public Cloud Likely Won’t Exceed 17 Percent of Total IT Demand by 2022.

TOPIC TIME
Intro to Mark / Latest on Culture 0:00 – 3:50
Winners/Losers Mentality in IT 3:50 – 8:35
Bottleneck in IT for Future 8:35 – 11:00
Pay Down Debt in Interconnected Systems 11:00 – 13:15
IT More Consumable 13:15 – 15:10
Resiliency 15:10 – 16:15
Jevons Paradox & Internal/External Cust 16:15 – 22:44
Public Cloud & Edge Computing 22:44 – 26:55
Problem is People Not Tech 26:55 – END

Don’t miss Mark talking about the Winchester Mystery House of IT at 12:07

Podcast Guest – Mark Thiele @mthiele10
Chief Strategy and Chief Information Officer – Apcera

Mark Thiele’s successful career in IT spans 25 years and has focused on both operating roles and on driving cloud adoption across enterprises of all sizes. Mark has deep industry experience and extensive knowledge of the requirements of policy-driven cloud computing and drives cross-functional strategic initiatives as Chief Strategy & Chief Information Officer for Apcera. Prior to joining Apcera, Mark was the executive vice president of ecosystem development at Switch SUPERNAP, builders of the world’s highest-rated data centers. He is also the president and founder of Data Center Pulse, an organization created to promote best practices in the data center industry. Mark has held executive roles at HP, Gilead, VMware and Brocade and is a member of nonprofit groups including The Green Grid and Infrastructure 2.0, where he advocates for data center and cloud industry evolution. A globally recognized speaker at leading industry events on a wide range of topics including cloud, IoT, data center, DevOps, and IT leadership. Mark is a regular content contributor to InformationWeek, GigaOm, Data Center Knowledge and other publications. Mark also serves on the technical advisory board of several startups.

Exploring the Edge Series: “Edge is NOT just Mini-Cloud”

Posted on September 20, 2017 by Rob H

While the RackN team and I have been heads down radically simplifying physical data center automation, I’ve still been tracking some key cloud infrastructure areas. One of the more interesting ones to me is Edge Infrastructure.

This once obscure topic has come front and center based on coming computing stress from home video, retail machine and distributed IoT. It’s clear that these are not solved from centralized data centers.

While I’m posting primarily on the RackN.com blog, I like to take time to bring critical items back to my personal blog as a collection. WARNIING: Some of these statements run counter to other industry. Please let me know what you think!

Don’t want to read? Here’s a summary podcast.

Post 1: OpenStack On Edge? 4 Ways Edge Is Distinct From Cloud

By far the largest issue of the Edge discussion was actually agreeing about what “edge” meant. It seemed as if every session had a 50% mandatory overhead in definitioning. Putting my usual operations spin on the problem, I choose to define edge infrastructure in data center management terms. Edge infrastructure has very distinct challenges compared to hyperscale data centers. Read article for the list...

Post 2: Edge Infrastructure Is Not Just Thousands Of Mini Clouds

Running each site as a mini-cloud is clearly not the right answer. There are multiple challenges here. First, any scale infrastructure problem must be solved at the physical layer first. Second, we must have tooling that brings repeatable, automation processes to that layer. It’s not sufficient to have deep control of a single site: we must be able to reliably distribute automation over thousands of sites with limited operational support and bandwidth. These requirements are outside the scope of cloud focused tools.

Post 3: Go CI/CD And Immutable Infrastructure For Edge Computing Management

If “cloudification” is not the solution then where should we look for management patterns? We believe that software development CI/CD and immutable infrastructure patterns are well suited to edge infrastructure use cases. We discussed this at a session at the OpenStack OpenDev Edge summit.

What do YOU think? This is an evolving topic and it’s time to engage in a healthy discussion.

Containers, Private Clouds, GIFEE, and the Underlay Problem

Posted on April 10, 2017 by spector13

ITRevoluion

Gene Kim (@RealGeneKim) posted an exclusive Q&A with Rob Hirschfeld (@zehicle) today on IT Technology: Rob Hirschfeld on Containers, Private Clouds, GIFEE, and the Remaining “Underlay Problem.”

Questions from the post:

Gene Kim: Tell me about the landscape of docker, OpenStack, Kubernetes, etc. How do they all relate, what’s changed, and who’s winning?
GK: I recently saw a tweet that I thought was super funny, saying something along the lines “friends don’t let friends build private clouds” — obviously, given all your involvement in the OpenStack community for so many years, I know you disagree with that statement. What is it that you think everyone should know about private clouds that tell the other side of the story?
GK: We talked about how much you loved the book Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems by Betsy Beyer, which I also loved. What resonated with you, and how do you think it relates to how we do Ops work in the next decade?
GK: Tell me what about the work you did with Crowbar, and how that informs the work you’re currently doing with Digital Rebar?

Read the full Q&A here.

Accelerating Community Ops on Kubernetes in Hybrid Style

Posted on March 16, 2017 by Rob H

Preface: RackN is looking for SRE teams who are enthusiastic about accelerating Kubernetes on-premises in a long term operational way that can be shared and reused across the community.

We’re excited to see and be part of the community progress towards enterprise-ready Kubernetes operations on both cloud and on-premises. The RackN team is excited to be part of multiple groups establishing patterns with shareable/reusable automation. I strongly recommend watching (or, better, collaborating in) these efforts if you are deploying Kubernetes even at experimental scale.

We’ve worked hard to make shared community ops work accessible, repeatable and multi-platform without compromising scale or security.

The RackN team has been enthusiastic supporters of Kubernetes since the 1.0 launch with our first deployments going back to June 2015 with updates for 1.2, 1.3 and now 1.5. I’m excited to report that fully converged the composable Digital Rebar approach with the Kubernetes Kargo Ansible. Our 1.2 efforts leveraged the Kargo predecessor “Kubespray.” This integration brings the parallel hybrid operation and node-by-node function of Digital Rebar with the Ansible community efforts around Kargo.

Composable design is a key element the RackN focus on SRE automation because it allows ecosystem

That allows a fully integrated deploy where Digital Rebar stages the environment and then use Kargo directly from upsteam to install Kubernetes. Post-deployment, Digital Rebar is able to extend the cluster with packages like Helm, Deis, Dashboard and others.

Since Digital Rebar supports parallel deployments, it’s possible to fully exercise the options enabled by Kargo simultaneously for development and testing. Benefits????

For example, you can built-test-destroy coordinated Kubernetes installs on Centos, Redhat and Ubuntu as part of an automation pipeline. Unlike client side approaches like Terraform or Ansible, our infrastructure allows transparent monitoring of the deployments including Slack integration.

Flexibility is also important between users because Ops variation is both a benefit and a cost.

A key Digital Rebar design goal is for users to explore useful variation and still share operational best practices. We are proving that shared community automation can support many different scenarios including variation between between clouds, physical, operating system, networking and container engine.

If we cannot manage this variation in a consistent way then we’re doomed to operational fragmentation (like OpenStack has endured).

We’re inviting you to check out our open work supporting the Kubernetes Ops community. As Rob Hirschfeld says, looking for “Day 2” minded operators who want to make sure that we are always able to share Kubernetes best practices.

5 Key Aspects of High Fidelity DevOps [repost from DevOps.com]

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Rob H

For all our cloud enthusiasm, I feel like ops automation is suffering as we increase choice and complexity. Why is this happening? It’s about loss of fidelity.

Nearly a year ago, I was inspired by a mention of “Fidelity Gaps” during a Cloud Foundry After Dark session. With additional advice from DevOps leader Gene Kim, this narrative about the why and how of DevOps Fidelity emerged.

As much as we talk about how we should have shared goals spanning Dev and Ops, it’s not nearly as easy as it sounds. To fuel a DevOps culture, we have to build robust tooling, also.

That means investing up front in five key areas: abstraction, composability, automation, orchestration, and idempotency.

Together, these concepts allow sharing work at every level of the pipeline. Unfortunately, it’s tempting to optimize work at one level and miss the true system bottlenecks.

Creating production-like fidelity for developers is essential: We need it for scale, security and upgrades. It’s not just about sharing effort; it’s about empathy and collaboration.

But even with growing acceptance of DevOps as a cultural movement, I believe deployment disparities are a big unsolved problem. When developers have vastly different working environments from operators, it creates a “fidelity gap” that makes it difficult for the teams to collaborate.

Before we talk about the costs and solutions, let me first share a story from back when I was a bright-eyed OpenStack enthusiast…

Read the Full Article on DevOps.com including my section about Why OpenStack Devstack harms the project and five specific ways to improve DevOps fidelity.

12 Predictions for ’16: mono-cloud ambitions die as containers drive more hybrid IT

Posted on December 31, 2015 by Rob H

I expect 2016 to be a confusing year for everyone in IT. For 2015, I predicted that new uses for containers are going to upset cloud’s apple cart; however, the replacement paradigm is not clear yet. Consequently, I’m doing a prognostication mix and match: five predictions and seven items on a “container technology watch list.”

TL;DR: In 2016, Hybrid IT arrives on Containers’ wings.

Considering my expectations below, I think it’s time to accept that all IT is heterogeneous and stop trying to box everything into a mono-cloud. Accepting hybrid as current state unblocks many IT decisions that are waiting for things to settle down.

Here’s the memo: “Stop waiting. It’s not going to converge.”

2016 Predictions

Container Adoption Seen As Two Stages: We will finally accept that Containers have strength for both infrastructure (first stage adoption) and application life-cycle (second stage adoption) transformation. Stage one offers value so we will start talking about legacy migration into containers without shaming teams that are not also rewriting apps as immutable microservice unicorns.
OpenStack continues to bump and grow. Adoption is up and open alternatives are disappearing. For dedicated/private IaaS, OpenStack will continue to gain in 2016 for basic VM management. Both competitive and internal pressures continue to threaten the project but I believe they will not emerge in 2016. Here’s my complete OpenStack 2016 post?
Amazon, GCE and Azure make everything else questionable. These services are so deep and rich that I’d question anyone who is not using them. At least one of them simply have to be part of everyone’s IT strategy for financial, talent and technical reasons.
Cloud API becomes irrelevant. Cloud API is so 2011! There are now so many reasonable clients to abstract various Infrastructures that Cloud APIs are less relevant. Capability, interoperability and consistency remain critical factors, but the APIs themselves are not interesting.
Metal aaS gets interesting. I’m a big believer in the power of operating metal via an API and the RackN team delivers it for private infrastructure using Digital Rebar. Now there are several companies (Packet.net, Ubiquity Hosting and others) that offer hosted metal.

2016 Container Tech Watch List

I’m planning posts about all these key container ecosystems for 2016. I think they are all significant contributors to the emerging application life-cycle paradigm.

Service Containers (& VMs): There’s an emerging pattern of infrastructure managed containers that provide critical host services like networking, logging, and monitoring. I believe this pattern will provide significant value and generate it’s own ecosystem.
Networking & Storage Services: Gaps in networking and storage for containers need to get solved in a consistent way. Expect a lot of thrash and innovation here.
Container Orchestration Services: This is the current battleground for container mind share. Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm get headlines but there are other interesting alternatives.
Containers on Metal: Removing the virtualization layer reduces complexity, overhead and cost. Container workloads are good choices to re-purpose older servers that have too little CPU or RAM to serve as VM hosts. Who can say no to free infrastructure?! While an obvious win to many, we’ll need to make progress on standardized scale and upgrade operations first.
Immutable Infrastructure: Even as this term wins the “most confusing” concept in cloud award, it is an important one for container designers to understand. The unfortunate naming paradox is that immutable infrastructure drives disciplines that allow fast turnover, better security and more dynamic management.
Microservices: The latest generation of service oriented architecture (SOA) benefits from a new class of distribute service registration platforms (etcd and consul) that bring new life into SOA.
Paywall Registries: The important of container registries is easy to overlook because they seem to be version 2.0 of package caches; however, container layering makes these services much more dynamic and central than many realize. (more? Bernard Golden and I already posted about this)

What two items did not make the 2016 cut? 1) Special purpose container-focused operating systems like CoreOS or RancherOS. While interesting, I don’t think these deployment technologies have architectural level influence. 2) Container Security via VMs. I’m seeing patterns where containers may actually be more secure than VMs. This is FUD created by people with a vested interest in virtualization.

Did I miss something? I’d love to know what you think I got right or wrong!