Category Archives: All

Terraform Usage Patterns (Gitops, IaC, Templates)

Cloud provisioning is very difficult when you go beyond simple provisioning and start thinking about how to to stitch together infrastructure in a repeatable way!

Specifically, today’s episode is a deep dive into Terraform usage patterns.

We get very hands on as we talk about how you manage state files and how you connect things together with Terraform.

We will spend a significant amount of time discussing in the fall because building infrastructure in a scalable automatable way, is a critical topic for the group.

This is an ongoing topic for us – stay tuned for more episodes!

Transcript: otter.ai/u/A-NgZOfa1xeIPA1uQOh8_bSStck
Photo by Artem Beliaikin from Pexels [ID 1079033]

Building our IT Talent Pipeline

In this episode, we question the IT talent pipeline. We really work through boot camps and how we are building talent and skills for the generation of IT workers.

We ask some key questions like:
Are degrees necessary?
Can you teach these things quickly?
How do we actually learn the skills that are necessary to build resilient systems?
And what would it look like if we were creating certification programs, real certification programs, like we have in other trades?

Transcript: otter.ai/u/FTOvatXEYSxNze00HKXVz8OZHxU
Photo by Yan Krukov from Pexels [ID 8613305]

Designing for 5G and Digital Twins

We talked about 5G, factories and edge infrastructure.

They are very interconnected because they live at the network edge and are sensitive to how we need to route traffic.

This is important as the basis for using digital twinning as a new user experience (UI/UX) around interacting with systems. This new approach is starting to emerge and it will be very network intensive, visually oriented, and involve overlaying the physical world with the virtual world.

How the heck are we going to connect all these things together?

Transcript: otter.ai/u/7lSSCwLdGiF9JqyunUHo19m6yPk
Photo: www.pexels.com/photo/two-boys-si…ent-moon-1651483/

Do we have a Right To Right for Data & IP?

Right to Repair is the idea that when you buy a product, you’re able to fix it. We’ve been building products lately that don’t have that inherent part of the contract.

In this episode, we really took Right to Repair to another level talking about Intellectual Property (IP) and ownership of that IP in the software components.

This topic impacts every single business and every single consumer!

Transcript: otter.ai/u/7EVT0C9T0KDCcUIWBsGYKHdiT6Y
Photo: Photo by Blue Bird from Pexels [ID 7218008]

That’s Not Terraform Orchestration!

This episode is about Terraform orchestration, what some people might call a TACO, in which we actually tried to do cloud provisioning in a orchestrated way. But this is a really challenging thing to do!

Orchestration is really hard so our discussion kept coming back to saying that this isn’t orchestration at all: it’s Infrastructure as Code and management.

We need to find a consistent way to to run a workflow or a control plane. We’re not even getting to the point where we’re coordinating or orchestrating aspects of different systems and using remote or API driven infrastructure.

Even if you use Terraform, you will get a lot out of this discussion!

Transcript: otter.ai/u/Ohbfr0Uprm95WYYI4357IdUodOU
Photo by Gabriel Santos Fotografia from Pexels [ID 2102568]

Distributed Infrastructure

With Distributed Infrastructure and the Edge, we cover the challenges of managing applications that are, by definition spread out throughout heterogeneous infrastructure.

Distributed Control is designed to control systems that are are not in cloud data centers with localized compute and storage. But then how do we manage it?

We discussed details about how these systems get built, and kept coming back to “do we need to have localized processing?” If we do, how do we manage it?

Transcript: otter.ai/u/BkxvOrQMmmQiYQpxa-OogrMyNNw
Photo by KEHN HERMANO from Pexels [ID 3881034]

Edge Impact of Digital Twins

We talk about Digital Twins and the Edge with Simon Crosby from Swim.AI. They are literally building digital twins in edge locations so he has a lot to share.

We work to expand and understand how Simon’s experience translates into general cases and what we’re seeing in the edge. The systems that we’re trying to build are at the intersection of models and “connectedness” of all the components for the edge.

These designs don’t fit traditional models and it is what makes edge unique. Edge is not a single application, but a connected system that going to have to emerge to make all this work together.

Transcript: otter.ai/u/-uFSclONwRhhc4QlFywiSJAIF10
Photo by Dmitriy Ganin from Pexels [ID 7538096]

Topics for a Security Training Course

DevOps Lunch and Learn was about security practices. Specifically, we built an outline of topics in security that we think are necessary for developers and operators to build secure applications.

We basically built a week long course curriculum!

As we go through what this course curriculum we walk through who needs to know this information and why.

If you want to see all of the detail here, please see: docs.google.com/document/d/1x5QLP…ng=h.c2phqte5q4pl

Transcript: otter.ai/u/UyMAmiHi-rRAreMa0FjxaVNomhQ
Photo by PhotoMIX Company from Pexels [ID 226746]

Smaller Nodes? Just the Right Size for Docker!

Container workloads have the potential to redefine how we think about scale and hosted infrastructure.

Last Fall, Ubiquity Hosting and RackN announced a 200 node Docker Swarm cluster as a phase one of our collaboration. Unlike cloud-based container workloads demonstrations, we chose to run this cluster directly on the bare metal.  

Why bare metal instead of virtualized? We believe that metal offers additional performance, availability and control.  

With the cluster automation ready, we’re looking for customers to help us prove those assumptions. While we could simply build on many VMs, our analysis is the a lot of smaller nodes will distribute work more efficiently. Since there is no virtualization overhead, lower RAM systems can still give great performance.

The collaboration with RackN allows us to offer customers a rapid, repeatable cluster capability. Their Digital Rebar automation works on a broad spectrum of infrastructure allow our users to rehearse deployments on cloud, quickly change components and iteratively tune the cluster.

We’re finding that these dedicated metal nodes have much better performance than similar VMs in AWS?  Don’t believe us – you can use Digital Rebar to spin up both and compare.   Since Digital Rebar is an open source platform, you can explore and expand on it.

The Docker Swarm deployment is just a starting point for us. We want to hear your provisioning ideas and work to turn them into reality.