This 30 minute Packet Pushers Day 2 Cloud podcast with Rob Hirschfeld discusses how Edge infrastructure is different has has both similar and unique challenges compared to regular data centers.
Provision Virtual Machines with an Open Source Physical Infrastructure Solution
Rob Hirschfeld, CEO/Co-Founder, RackN created a new Digital Rebar Provision (DRP) video highlighting the creation of virtual machines within the standard automation process. Highlights:
- Create a New Virtual Machine from the Physical Provisioning Tool – DRP
- VirtualBox IMPI Plugin – Preview of Pre-Release Tool
- RackN Portal will inventory virtual machines available on network for management
- Packet IMPI Plugin – enable creation of VMs on Packet cloud hardware
This expansion to virtual machines allows DRP users to not only provision physical infrastructure but virtual as well both locally and in clouds.
More information on the Digital Rebar community and Digital Rebar Provision:
- Digital Rebar Community – http://rebar.digital
- Slack Channel Request to talk Digital Rebar w/ Community
- Create an account on RackN Portal
- Digital Rebar Overview – https://www.rackn.com/rebar/
- Deploy and Test Digital Rebar Provision in Less than 10 Minutes (How To Guide)
Standardize your Operational Chaos for Provisioning Bliss
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:
- 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
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
Podcast: Mark Thiele Talks Cloud, IT, and Jevons Paradox
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.
Containers, Private Clouds, GIFEE, and the Underlay Problem
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
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.