At AWS re:Invent this week, there was much fanfare about the public cloud provider’s new solutions for on-premises clouds. In fact, many pundits in the industry look at the hyperscale clouds, and AWS specifically, and see a future where only a select few understand infrastructure and operations. The future is portrayed as a place void of the expertise required by operations and reliability engineering. But that vision of the future is a foregone reality, or simply a marketing narrative?
Continued Innovations for On-Premises Clouds
AWS providing services for on-premises clouds is news, but innovation for this segment of operations has not waited for help from the public cloud. For example, in the last week the RackN team has added TWO new provisioning approaches to our already exhaustive list of ways to bootstrap systems:
- Improving security by eliminating DHCP and network booting via Redfish Media Attach (demo below)
- Reducing deployment variations with an immutable infrastructure approach via RHEL Edge images.
I detail these new approaches during my “Give your PXE wings” talk at SREcon 2020 next week. The talk is a deep-dive discussion into considerations behind provisioning choices.
These are just a couple of examples that represent the accelerating pace of infrastructure innovation. Other current innovations include new architectures such as more ARM choices and new supervision tech with SmartNICs.
SREcon 2020
SREcon 2020 is also packed with other operational and infrastructure innovations such as Chaos engineering, observability protocols, and automation practice. These fields are expanding rapidly with new tools and techniques that are essential to building robust applications. This year’s show is going to be amazing!
Cloud innovation means it’s even more important than ever to understand the nuances of infrastructure. Why? Because there is incredible choice and complexity for on-premises clouds. It’s important to understand how these systems operate to establish consistent operations that create a pattern of operational success.
Join us at SREcon and learn more! Attend my talk on Wednesday 12/9 @ 10 ET, and visit the RackN booth to talk with our engineers.