Tag Archives: meetup

We’re talking Immutable Containers at Container World

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RackN is attending next week’s Container World in Santa Clara, CA and looks forward to talking not just Containers, but image-based provisioning, immutable infrastructure, DevOps, and other topics. Rob Hirschfeld and Shane Gibson are attending and speaking on Wednesday in two sessions (see below).

We are interested in meeting and talking with fellow technologists. Contact us this week so we can setup times to meet at the event.

Rob and Shane are also presenting next Wed the 28th at the Downtown San Jose DevOps Meetup at 6:30pm. The topic is Building Immutable Kubernetes Clusters.

Sessions

Keeping up with patches has never been more critical.  For hardware, that’s… hard.  What if servers were deployed 100% ready to run without any need for remote configuration or access?  What if we were able to roll a complete rebuild of an entire application stack from the BIOS up in minutes?  Those are key concepts behind a cloud and container deployment pattern called “immutable infrastructure.”  It’s called immutable because the servers are deployed from container images produced by CI/CD process and destroyed after use instead of being reconfigured.  It’s a container and cloud pattern that has finally made it to physical.

In this talk, we’ll cover the specific process and its advantages over traditional server configuration. Then we’ll dive deeply into open tools and processes that make it possible to drive immutable containers into your own infrastructure. The talk will include live demos and will discuss process and field challenges that attendees will likely face when they start implementation at home.  We’ll also cover the significant security, time and cost benefits of this approach to make pitching the idea effective.

Join us for a spirited discussion engineering containers for security, touching on such topics as:

  • The security implications/value of containers on VM or Bare Metal, and is one model significantly more secure than another
  • What are the implications for one vs. the other relative to application portability?
  • Role of immutable infrastructure in managing services and software deployments in the context of security.
  • Is there an automation strategy that makes the portability question moot, or is it still an issue?
  • Security via policy and automation and how do we achieve that automation?
  • How it impacts to portability? Is it better than, or an alternative to automation?

January 12: 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

According to a recent report from Forrester, executives and DevOps practitioners are on very different pages when it comes to strategy, customer experience, and progress. Consider this: more than 60 percent of executives believe their organization’s DevOps plans have been implemented and will even expand in the new year. However, more than 50 percent of DevOps pros who are in the weeds and working through their pipelines every day disagree.

What’s leading to this disconnect?

Open source has officially been a thing for 20 years now. Did anyone notice?

No, really. For something as revolutionary as open source, you’d think it would have changed the way all software is developed, sold, and distributed. Unfortunately for those party planners looking to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of open source, it hasn’t—changed software, that is. For most developers, most of the time, software remains stubbornly proprietary.

A lot of tomorrow’s analytics will be done locally at the “edge,” or in a public or private cloud. Here’s what will drive where your analysis will happen.

Some say everything — all data and applications — will go to the cloud. Others, such as market research firm IDC, say that around 40 percent of data will be stored, managed, analyzed and kept right where it was produced, at the edge. So where’s the truth? Everywhere, actually. Analytics will be done locally at the edge of the data center, or in a public, private, or hybrid cloud.

Digital Rebar

RackN

Re-defining physical automation to make it highly repeatable and widely consumable while also meeting the necessarily complex and evolving heterogeneous data center environment is the challenge the RackN team is solving. To meet this challenge, we have developed a unique philosophy in how we build our technology; both open source Digital Rebar and the additional RackN packages.

  • Stand-alone Provisioning
  • Building Software from the API
  • Single Golang Executable
  • Modular Components – Composable Content
  • Operator Defined Workflows
  • Immutable Infrastructure
  • Distributed or Consolidated Architectures

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

In this week’s podcast, we speak with Stephen O’Donnell, Senior Analyst for Global Hive and author of What Every CIO Wants. He focuses on several interesting topics:

  • Building Massively Scalable Datacenters
  • What is the Edge? Complete 25 Use Case Definition
  • Enterprise Datacenters Move to Edge
  • Layering Solutions on Edge Services

UPCOMING EVENTS

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

 

December 22 – 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

DevOps is a means to an end — not doubt it will also evolve, as even iterative methods need to move with the times (keep an eye on how analytics and machine learning can further speed up the development process and increase operational efficiency).

Year after year businesses face challenges when it comes to security, and 2017 was no different. Instead of trying to lecture the industry about the importance of application security testing, organizations tried to find new ways to bring security front and center.

“I think edge is to fog as…apple is to fruit,” Helder Antunes, chairman of the OpenFog Consortium explained. “We look at fog computing as an end-to-end architecture from the cloud to the very thing connected. It encompasses bits and pieces from the cloud. Edge means different things to different people. Edge is of course a big part of it. When you talk about fog nodes and fog gateways, aggregating sensory devices at the edge, it is in essence an aspect of edge computing.”

Digital Rebar

RackN

White Papers 

RackN allows Enterprises to quickly transform their current physical data centers from basic workflows to cloud-like integrated processes. We turned decades of data center experience into data center provisioning software so simple it only takes 5 minutes to install and provides a progressive path to full autonomy. Our critical insight was to deliver automation in a layered way that allows operations teams to quickly adopt the platform into their current processes and incrementally add autonomous and self-service features.

READ PAPER

 

 

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.

READ PAPER 

 

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

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

UPCOMING EVENTS – Stay Tuned for our 2018 Plan

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

 

First Digital Rebar Online Meetup Next Week

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Welcome to the first Digital Rebar online meetup!  In our inaugural meetup we’ll provide an introduction to  Digital Rebar Provision, name our mascot, discuss current and future features, and do a short demo of the product. The meetup is Sept 26, 2017 at 11:00am PST. Please join the community at https://www.meetup.com/digitalrebar/ and register for the event.

Online Link – https://zoom.us/j/3403934274  

We will cover the following topics:

  • 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

NOTES:

Please note we’ll be using Zoom.us for our meeting; so please check in a few minutes early and make sure you have the Zoom client installed and working for you.

[1]
Name the mascot: https://twitter.com/digitalrebar/status/907724637487935488
Digital Rebar Provision:  http://rebar.digital/
RackN: https://www.rackn.com/

why is hardware hard? Ready State Physical Ops Meetup on Tuesday 12/2 9am PT

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meh.  Compared to cloud, Ops on physical infrastructure sinks.physical outlet

Unfortunately, the cloud and scale platforms need to run someone so someone’s got to deal with it.  In fact, we’ve got to deal with crates of cranky servers and flocks of finicky platforms.  It’s enough to keep a good operator down.

If that’s you, or someone you care about, join us for a physical ops support group meetup on Tuesday 9am PT (11 central).

There is a light at the end of the tunnel!  We can make it repeatable to provision OpenStack, Hadoop and other platforms.

As a community, we’re steadily bringing best practices and proven automation from cloud ops down into the physical space.   On the OpenCrowbar project, we’re accelerating this effort using the ready state concept as a hand off point for “physical-cloud equivalency” and exploring the concept of “functional operations” to make DevOps scripts more portable.

Join me and Rafael Knuth for a discussion about how operators can work together to break the cycle.

Running with scissors > DefCore “must-pass” Road Show Starts [VIDEOS]

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The OpenStack DefCore committee has been very active during this cycle turning the core definition principles into an actual list of “must-pass” capabilities (working page).  This in turn gives the community something tangible enough to review and evaluate.

Capabilities SelectionTL;DR!  We appreciate those in the community who have been patient enough to help define and learn the process we’re using the make selections; however, we also recognize that most people want to jump to the results.

This week, we started a “DefCore roadshow” with the goal of learning how to make this huge body of capabilities, process and impact easier to digest (draft write-up for review & Troy Toman’s notes).  So far we’ve had two great sessions on this topic.  We took notes and recorded at both meetups (San Francisco & Austin).

My takeaways of these initial meetups are:

  • Jump to the Capabilities right away, the process history is not needed up front
  • You need more graphics – specifically, one for the selection criteria (what do you think of my 1st attempt?)
  • Work from some examples of scored capabilities
  • Include some specific use-cases with a user, 2 types of private cloud and a public cloud to help show the impact

Overall, people like what they are hearing.  It makes sense and decisions are justified.

We need more feedback!  Please help us figure out how to explain this for the broader community.

OpenStack Core Online Forum, Oct 16 13:30 UTC / Oct 22 0100 UTC

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Go Online!OpenStack Community, you are invited on an online discussion about OpenStack Core on October 16th at UTC 13:30 (8:30 am US Central) and October 22nd at UTC 0100 (8:00 pm US Central)

At the next OpenStack Foundation Board meeting, we will be setting a timeline for implementing an OpenStack Core Definition process that promotes a clear and implementation driven metric for deciding which projects should be considered “required.”  This is your chance to review and influence the process!

We’ll review the OpenStack Core Definition process (20 minutes) and then open up the channel for discussion using the IRC (#openstack-meeting) & Google Hangout on Air (link posted in IRC).

The forum will be coordinated through the IRC channel for links and questions.

Can’t make it?  The session was recorded > here!