Talking the Future of Tech
Today we dive into RackN high availability technology and what we did to build consensus based raft HA capabilities directly into Digital Rebar. This is one of those episodes where we are talking specifically and only about Digital Rebar, so it is a vendored conversation from that perspective.
If you are building HA systems, or are interested in how HA systems work, this is a great session to learn firsthand from our experience!
Transcript: otter.ai/u/9lA9djczp5GkJbj12k…?utm_source=copy_url
Today we talk about backstage.io, and we have that conversation centered around a demo done by one of the RackN and interns, Zander Franks. Check out the demo video here: youtu.be/cAQQOmKz4OI
Zander has been exploring with the backstage to Digital Rebar integration, and the conversation that results explains backstage in some fundamental ways and also what it takes to build good developer portals.
You will find in this episode both the broader information about how to do integrations where you have a developer portal as a front end and the key insights about how backstage works.
To get the most out of the backstage pieces, you will definitely want to see the video on Youtube. Take time to enjoy this whole podcast, both in video and audio format.
Transcript: otter.ai/u/xWx-q_ZvK4oX1sDJS09F1BsaZZI
Image:www.pexels.com/photo/wood-fashio…n-people-5650782/
Rob’s Hot Take:
In the Cloud 2030 Podcast episode from January 10th, Rob Hirschfeld discusses the backstage integration, emphasizing the importance of understanding the dynamics involved in building an integration between a developer self-service portal and the systems responsible for a robust deployment experience. Hirschfeld underscores the critical point that while developer interfaces are crucial in platform engineering, they should not be expected to replace production tools like orchestrators, observability platforms, and infrastructure automation components. The episode features a demonstration and code exploration, providing valuable insights into the complexities and considerations of such integrations. For those interested in similar discussions, the Cloud 2030 community welcomes participation at the2030.cloud.
The RackN teams provides an in-depth overview of how DHCP and PXE boot work along with highlights in their remote booting on a Raspberry Pi
Rob Hirschfeld announces the new EdgeLab project (edgelab.digital) for developers looking to build an inexpensive edge infrastructure solution to test basic edge computing concepts. The project is on GitHub and contributions are welcome.
Rob Hirschfeld talks about the new open source Digital Rebar 4 release with its new features and flipped open source release changes.
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
Joining this week’s L8ist Sh9y Podcast is Will Dennis long-time member of the Crowbar community who continues to engage in helping drive Digital Rebar forward. Will is an excellent resource who takes us through the history from Crowbar to Digital Rebar Provision in a way that highlights how the project has changed and why the community scaled back from V2 to the new V3.1.
Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things SRE. 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)
SRE Items of the Week
RackN Announcement
[PRESS RELEASE] RackN Ends DevOps Gridlock in Data Center
Today we announced the availability of Digital Rebar Provision, the industry’s first cloud-native physical provisioning utility. We’ve had this in the Digital Rebar community for a few weeks before offering support and response has been great! READ MORE
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Cloud Native PHYSICAL PROVISIONING? Come on! Really?! By Rob Hirschfeld
Today, RackN announce very low entry level support for Digital Rebar Provisioning – the RESTful Cobbler PXE/DHCP replacement. Having a company actually standing behind this core data center function with support is a big deal; however…
We’re making two BIG claims with Provision: breaking DevOps bottlenecks and cloud native physical provisioning. We think both points are critical to SRE and Ops success because our current approaches are not keeping pace with developer productivity and hardware complexity. READ MORE
RackN @ DevOpsDays Austin
Slides from Rob Hirschfeld’s talk – The Server Cage Match
SRE vs DevOps vs Cloud Native: The Server Cage Match by Rob Hirschfeld
I don’t believe in DevOps shaming. Our community seems compelled to correct use of DevOps as an adjective for tools, teams and teapots. The frustration is reasonable: DevOps clearly taps into head space for both devs and operators who see a brighter automated future together. For example, check out this excellent DevOps discourse by Cindy Sridharan.
As an industry, we crave artificial conflict so it’s natural to try and distill site reliability engineering (SRE), DevOps and cloud native into warring factions when they are not. They all share a focus on Lean process. READ MORE
SRE News
What is DevOps? By Cindy Sridharan @copyconstruct
https://medium.com/@cindysridharan/what-is-devops-5b0181fdb953
It happened again this week.
At this Wednesday’s Prometheus meetup I was hosting, I asked one of the attendees what he did for work.
He looked at me briefly before he barked one word in reply — DevOps — and then promptly made a beeline for the pizza at the back of the room. READ MORE
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An Influx of Kubernetes Installers Raises Questions Around Conformance
https://thenewstack.io/kubernetes-installer-explosion-natural-enthusiasm/
For the Kubecon Europe last month, industry observer Joseph Jacks pulled together a list of over SIXTY (yes, 60) Kubernetes installers and services. This wealth of variation that made itself known as the conference, happily, kicked off a conformance effort to ensure that users get a consistent experience. I’m a strong believer that clear conformance builds ecosystems and have deep experience working on that from my OpenStack DefCore efforts.
In short, conformance is not a vendor issue: it’s a user experience and ecosystem issue. READ MORE
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.
OpenStack Summit : May 8 – 11, 2017 in Boston, MA
Interop ITX : May 15 – 19, 2017 in Las Vegas, NV during Open Source IT Summit – Tuesday, May 16, 9:00 – 5:00pm
Gluecon : May 24 – 25, 2017 in Denver, CO
OTHER NEWSLETTERS
SRE Weekly (@SREWeekly) – Issue #70
Today we announced the availability of Digital Rebar Provision, the industry’s first cloud-native physical provisioning utility. We’ve had this in the Digital Rebar community for a few weeks before offering support and response has been great!
By releasing their API-driven provisioning tool as a stand-alone component of the larger Digital Rebar suite, RackN helps DevOps teams break automation bottlenecks in their legacy data centers without disrupting current operations. The stand-alone open utility can be deployed in under 5 minutes and fits into any data center design. RackN also announced a $1,000 starter support and consulting package to further accelerate transition from tools like Cobbler, MaaS or Stacki to the new Golang utility.
“We were seeing SREs suffering from high job turnover,” said Rob Hirschfeld, RackN founder and CEO. “When their integration plans get gridlocked by legacy tooling they quickly either lose patience or political capital. Digital Rebar Provision replaces the legacy tools without process disruption so that everyone can find shared wins early in large SRE initiatives.”
The first cloud-native physical provisioning utility
Data center provisioning is surprisingly complex because it’s caught between cutting edge hardware and arcane protocols and firmware requirements that are difficult to disrupt. The heart of the system is a fickle combination of specific DHCP options, a firmware bootstrap environment (known as PXE), a very lightweight file transfer protocol (TFTP) and operating system specific templating tools like preseed and kickstart. Getting all these pieces to work together with updated APIs without breaking legacy support has been elusive.
By rethinking physical ops in cloud-native terms, RackN has managed to distill out a powerful provisioning tool for DevOps and SRE minded operators who need robust API/CLI, Day 2 Ops, security and control as primary design requirements. By bootstrapping foundational automation with Digital Rebar Provision, DevOps teams lay a foundation for data center operations that improves collaboration between operators and SRE teams: operators enjoy additional control and reuse and SREs get a doorway into building a fully automated process.
A pragmatic path without burning downing the data center
“I’m excited to see RackN providing a pragmatic path from physical boot to provisioning without having to start over and rebuild my data center to get there.” said Dave McCrory, an early cloud and data gravity innovator. “It’s time for the industry to stop splitting physical and cloud IT processes because snowflaked, manual processes slow everyone down. I can’t imagine an easier on-ramp than Digital Rebar Provision”
The RackN Digital Rebar is making it easy for Cobbler, Stacki, MaaS and Forman users to evaluate our RESTful, Golang, Template-based PXE Provisioning utility. Interested users can evaluate the service in minutes on a laptop or engage with RackN for a more comprehensive trail with expert support. The open Provision service works both independently and as part of Digital Rebar’s full life-cycle hybrid control.
S
ee specific features at http://rackn.com/provision/drsa.
Want help starting on this journey? Contact us and we can help.
At Dockercon this week, Docker announced an immutable operating system called LinuxKit which is powered by a Packer-like utility called Moby that RackN CTO, Greg Althaus, explains in the video below.
For additional conference notes, check out Rob Hirschfeld’s Dockercon retro blog post.
With a mix of excitement and apprehension, the RackN team has been watching physical deployment of immutable operating systems like CoreOS Container Linux and RancherOS. Overall, we like the idea of a small locked (aka immutable) in-memory image for servers; however, the concept does not map perfectly to hardware.
Note: if you want to provision these operating systems in a production way, we can help you!
These operating systems work on a “less is more” approach that strips everything out of the images to make them small and secure.
This is great for cloud-first approaches where VM size has a material impact in cost. It’s particularly matched for container platforms where VMs are constantly being created and destroyed. In these cases, the immutable image is easy to update and saves money.
So, why does that not work as well on physical?
First: HA DHCP?! It’s not as great a map for physical systems where operating system overhead is pretty minimal. The model requires orchestrated rebooting of your hardware. It also means that you need a highly available (HA) PXE Provisioning infrastructure (like we’re building with Digital Rebar).
Second: Configuration. That means that they must rely on having cloud-init injected configuration. In a physical environment, there is no way to create cloud-init like injections without integrating with the kickstart systems (a feature of Digital Rebar Provision). Further, hardware has a lot more configuration options (like hard drives and network interfaces) than VMs. That means that we need a robust and system-by-system way to manage these configurations.
Third: No SSH. Yes another problem with these minimal images is that they are supposed to eliminate SSH. Ideally, their image and configuration provides everything required to run the image without additional administration. Unfortunately, many applications assume post-boot configuration. That means that people often re-enable SSH to use tools like Ansible. If it did not conflict with the very nature of the “do-not configure-the-server” immutable model, I would suggest that SSH is a perfectly reasonable requirement for operators running physical infrastructure.
In Summary, even with those issues, we are excited about the positive impact this immutable approach can have on data center operations.
With tooling like Digital Rebar, it’s possible to manage the issues above. If this appeals to you, let us know!