Category Archives: Digital Rebar

April 21 – Weekly Recap of All Things Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

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

DigitalRebar Provision deploy Docker’s LinuxKit Kubernetes


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Install Digital Rebar PXE Provision on a Mac OSX System and Test Boot using Virtual Box


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Packet Pushers 333 Automation & Orchestration in Networking
http://packetpushers.net/podcast/podcasts/show-333-orchestration-vs-automation/

While the discussion is all about NETWORK DevOps, they do a good job of decrying WHY current state of system orchestration is so sad – in a word: heterogeneity.  It’s not going away because the alternative is lock-in.  They also do a good job of describing the difference between automation and orchestration; however, I think there’s a middle tier  of resource “scheduling” that better describes OpenStack and Kubernetes.

Around 5:00 minutes into the podcast, they effectively describe the composable design of Digital Rebar and the rationale for the way that we’ve abstracted interfaces for automation.  If you guys really do want to cash in by consulting with it (at 10 minutes), just contact Rob H.
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Digital Magazine Launch: Increment On-Call
https://increment.com/on-call/

Increment is dedicated to covering how teams build and operate software systems at scale, one issue at a time. In this, our inaugural issue, we focus on industry best practices around on-call and incident response.
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Need PXW? Try out this Cobbler Replacement
https://robhirschfeld.com/2017/04/11/provision-preview/ 

INTRO
We wanted to make open basic provisioning API-driven, secure, scalable and fast.  So we carved out the Provision & DHCP services as a stand alone unit from the larger open Digital Rebar project.  While this Golang service lacks orchestration, this complete service is part of Digital Rebar infrastructure and supports the discovery boot process, templating, security and extensive image library (Linux, ESX, Windows, … ) from the main project.

TL;DR: FIVE MINUTES TO REPLACE COBBLER?  YES.

The project APIs and CLIs are complete for all provisioning functions with good Swagger definitions and docs.  After all, it’s third generation capability from the Digital Rebar project.  The integrated UX is still evolving.
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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.

DevOpsDays Austin : May 4-5, 2017 in Austin TX  

OpenStack Summit : May 8 – 11, 2017 in Boston, MA  

  • OpenStack and Kubernetes. Combining the best of both worlds – Kubernetes Day  

Interop ITX : May 15 – 19, 2017 in Las Vegas, NV

Gluecon : May 24 – 25, 2017 in Denver, CO

  • Surviving Day 2 in Open Source Hybrid Automation – May 23, 2017 : Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

SRE Weekly (@SREWeekly) – Issue #68

April 14 – Weekly Recap of All Things Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

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

Continuous Discussions (#c9d9) Episode 66: Scaling Agile and DevOps in the Enterprise Watch Rob Hirschfeld in this Electric Cloud Podcast held on 4/11.

On the Continuous Discussions (#c9d9) podcast the discussion was on Scaling Agile and DevOps in the Enterprise.

  • What’s between scaling Agile and scaling DevOps?
  • What are some learnings and patterns for scaling Agile, that can be applied for starting and scaling a DevOps transformation in the enterprise?

Podcast Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uffUoX-O3g8
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Rob Hirschfeld on Containers, Private Clouds, GIFEE, and the Remaining “Underlay Problem”
Rob Hirschfeld Q&A with Gene Kim on ITRevolution

INTRO
Back in October of 2016, I was at OpenStack Conference in Barcelona and ran into a long-time friend, Rob Hirschfeld. He surprised me by talking about a problem domain that we have had discussions about for years, reframing it as “the data center underlay problem.”

His provocative statement was that while OpenStack solves many problems, it didn’t address the fundamental challenges of how to run things like OpenStack on actual physical infrastructure. This is a problem domain that is being radically redefined by the container ecosystem.

This is a problem that Rob has been tirelessly working on for nearly a decade, and it was interesting to get his perspective on the emerging ecosystem, including OpenStack, Kubernetes, Mesos, containers, private clouds in general (which include Azure Stack), etc.  I thought it would be useful to share this with everyone.
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Need PXE? Try out this Cobbler Replacement
Rob Hirschfeld Blog (https://robhirschfeld.com)

INTRO
We wanted to make open basic provisioning API-driven, secure, scalable and fast.  So we carved out the Provision & DHCP services as a stand alone unit from the larger open Digital Rebar project.  While this Golang service lacks orchestration, this complete service is part of Digital Rebar infrastructure and supports the discovery boot process, templating, security and extensive image library (Linux, ESX, Windows, … ) from the main project.

TL;DR: FIVE MINUTES TO REPLACE COBBLER?  YES.

The project APIs and CLIs are complete for all provisioning functions with good Swagger definitions and docs.  After all, it’s third generation capability from the Digital Rebar project.  The integrated UX is still evolving.
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Open Source Collaboration: The Power of No & Interoperability
Christopher Ferris, IBM OpenTech

INTRO
It’s a common misconception that open source collaboration means saying YES to all ideas; however, the reality of successful projects is the opposite.

Permissive open source licenses drive a delicate balance for projects. On one hand, projects that adopt permissive licenses should be accepting of contributions to build community and user base. On the other, maintainers need to adopt a narrow focus to ensure project utility and simplicity. If the project’s maintainers are too permissive, the project bloats and wanders without a clear purpose. If they are too restrictive then the project fails to build community.

It is human nature to say yes to all collaborators, but that can frustrate core developers and users.

For that reason, stronger open source projects have a clear, focused, shared vision.  Historically, that vision was enforced by a benevolent dictator for life (BDFL); however, recent large projects have used a consensus of project elders to make the task more sustainable.  These roles serve a critical need: they say “no” to work that does not align with the project’s mission and vision.  The challenge of defining that vision can be a big one, but without a clear vision, it’s impossible for the community to sustain growth because new contributors can dilute the utility of projects.  [author’s note: This is especially true of celebrity projects like OpenStack or Kubernetes that attract “shared glory” contributors]
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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.

DockerCon 2017 : April 17 – 20, 2017 in Austin, TX
DevOpsDays Austin : May 4-5, 2017 in Austin TX
OpenStack Summit : May 8 – 11, 2017 in Boston, MA  

  • OpenStack and Kubernetes. Combining the best of both worlds – Kubernetes Day  

Interop ITX : May 15 – 19, 2017 in Las Vegas, NV

Gluecon : May 24 – 25, 2017 in Denver, CO

  • Surviving Day 2 in Open Source Hybrid Automation – May 23, 2017 : Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

SRE Weekly (@SREWeekly) – Issue #67

Containers, Private Clouds, GIFEE, and the Underlay Problem

ITRevoluion

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.

kubernetesWe’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.

Why is RackN advancing OpenStack on Kubernetes?

Yesterday, RackN CEO, Rob Hirschfeld, described the remarkable progress in OpenStack on Kubernetes using Helm (article link).  Until now, RackN had not been willing to officially support OpenStack deployments; however, we now believe that this approach is a game changer for OpenStack operators even if they are not actively looking at Kubernetes.

We are looking for companies that want to join in this work and fast-track it into production. If this is interesting, please contact us at sre@rackn.com.

Why should you sponsor? Current OpenStack operators facing “fork-lift upgrades” should want to find a path like this one that ensures future upgrades are baked into the plan. This approach provide a fast track to a general purpose, enterprise grade, upgradable Kubernetes infrastructure.

Here is Rob’s Demo

Rob’s Original Blog Post

RackN revisits OpenStack deployments with an eye on ongoing operations. I’ve been an outspoken skeptic of a Joint OpenStack Kubernetes Environment because I felt that the technical hurdles of cloud native architecture would prove challenging.

I was wrong: I underestimated how fast these issues could be addressed.

… read the rest at Beyond Expectations: OpenStack via Kubernetes Helm (Fully Automated with Digital Rebar) — Rob Hirschfeld

Shouldn’t we have Standard Automation for Commodity Infrastructure?

sre-seriesOur focus on SRE series continues… At RackN, we see a coming infrastructure explosion in both complexity and scale. Unless our industry radically rethinks operational processes, current backlogs will escalate and stability, security and sharing will suffer.

bookAn entire chapter of the Google SRE book was dedicated to the benefits of improving data center provisioning via automation; however, the description was abstract with a focus on the importance of validation testing and self-healing. That lack of detail is not surprising: Google’s infrastructure automation is highly specialized and considered a competitive advantage.

Shouldn’t everyone be able to do this?

After all, data centers are built from the same basic components with the same protocols.

Unfortunately, the stack of small (but critical) variations between these components makes it very difficult to build a universal solution. Reasonable variations like hardware configuration, vendor out-of-band management protocol, operating system, support systems and networking topologies add up quickly. Even Google, with their tremendous SRE talent and time investments, only built a solution for their specific needs.

To handle this variation, our SRE teams bake assumptions about their infrastructure directly into their automation. That’s expedient because there’s generally little operational reward for creating generic solutions for specific problems. I see this all the time in data centers that have server naming conventions and IP address schemes that are the automation glue between their tools and processes. While this may be a practical tactic for integration, it is fragile and site specific.

Hard coding your operational environment into automation has serious downsides.

First, it creates operational debt [reference] just like hard coding values in regular development. Please don’t mistake this as a call for yak shaving provisioning scripts into open ended models! There’s a happy medium where the scripts can be robust about infrastructure like ips, NIC ordering, system names and operating system behavior without compromising readability and development time.

Second, it eliminates reuse because code that works in one place must be forked (or copied) to be used again.  Forking creates a proliferation of truth and technical debt.  Unlike a shared script, the forked scripts do not benefit from mutual improvements.  This is true for both internal use and when external communities advance.  I have seen many cases where a company’s decision to fork away from open source code to “adjust it for their needs” cause them to forever lose the benefits accrued in the upstream community.

Consequently, Ops debt is quickly created when these infrastructure specific items are coded into the scripts because you have to touch a lot of code to make small changes. You also end up with hidden dependencies

However, until recently, we have not given SRE teams an alternative to site customization.

Of course, the alternative requires some additional investment up front.  Hard coding and forking are faster out of the gate; however, the SRE mandate is to aggressively reduce ongoing maintenance tasks wherever possible.  When core automation is site customized, Ops loses the benefits of reuse both internally and externally.

That’s why we believe SRE teams work to reuse automation whenever possible.

rebar-1Digital Rebar was built from our frustration watching the OpenStack community struggle with exactly this lesson.  We felt that having a platform for sharing code was essential; however, we also observed that differences between sites made it impossible to share code.  Our solution was to isolate those changes into composable units.  That isolation allowed us take a system integration view that did not break when inevitable changes were introduced.

If you are interested in breaking out of the script customization death spiral then review what the RackN team has done with Digital Rebar.

Even if you don’t use the code, the approach could save your SRE team a lot of heartburn down the road.  Of course, if you do want to use it then just contact us at sre@rackn.com.

Digital Rebar Training Videos

We’re excited to announce an updated set of Digital Rebar training videos.  In response to requests to go beyond the simple Quick Start guide, we created a dedicated training channel and have been producing 15 minute tutorials on a wide range of topics.

Want us to cover a topic?  Just ask us on Gitter!

 

In some cases, these videos contain information that has not made it into documentation yet.  Our documentation is open source, we’d love to incorporate your notes to help make the experience easier for the next user.

Thanks!

Bugs Bunny, Prince and Enabling True Hybrid Infrastructure Consumption

OK- Stay with me on this. I’m drawing parallels again.  🙂

Like many from my generation, my initial exposure to classical music and opera was derived from Bugs Bunny on Saturday mornings (culturally deprived, I know). One of the cartoons I remember well was with Bugs trying to get even with the heavy-set opera singer who disrupts Bugs’ banjo playing. In order to exact his revenge, Bugs infiltrates the opera singer’s concert by impersonating the famous long-hared (hared…get it?) conductor, Leopold Stokowski. He proceeds to force the tenor to hit octaves that structurally compromise the amphitheater and as it crumbles leaves him bruised and battered. Bugs is as always, victorious.

bugs

In examining Bugs’ strategy (let’s assume he actually had one), Bugs took over operations of the orchestra’s musical program to achieve his goal of getting the tenor “in-line” so to speak. As I prepare to head down to the OpenStack Conference in Austin, TX next week, I’m seeing similar patterns develop in the cloud and data center infrastructure space which are very “Bugs/Leopold-like”. With organizations deciding on how to consolidate data centers, containerize apps and move to the cloud, vendors and open source technologies offer value, however true operational, infrastructure and platform independence are not what they appear to be. For example, once you move your apps off the data center to AWS or VMware and then later determine you are paying too much or the workload is no longer is appropriate for the infrastructure, good luck replicating the configuration work done on CloudFormation on another cloud or back in the data center. Same rationale is applicable to other technologies such as converged infrastructure and proprietary private cloud platforms. As the customer, to achieve scale and remove operational pain you must fall in line. That in itself is a big commitment to make in a still-evolving and maturing technology industry and a dynamic business climate.

On an unrelated topic, I was saddened to learn of the passing of Prince this past week. While not a die-hard fan, I liked his music. He was a great composer of songs and had a style all to his own. Beyond his music and sheer talent, I admired his business beliefs and deep desire to maintain creative ownership and control of his music and his brand.

princeDespite his fortune and fame, there was a period in the middle of Prince’s career in which he felt creatively and financially locked-in by the big record companies. Once Prince (and the unpronounceable symbol) broke away from Warner Music, he was able to produce music under his own label. This action enabled him to create music without a major record label dictating when he needed to produce a new album and what it needed to sound like. In addition, he was now able to market his new recordings to the distribution platform that supported his artistic and financial goals. While still having ties to Warner Music, he was no longer bound by their business practices. Along with starting his own music subscription service, Prince cut deals with Arista, Columbia, iTunes and Sony. Prince’s music production had operational portability, business agility and choice (seven Grammy awards and 100 million record sales also help create that kind of leverage.).

While open APIs and containers offer some portability, at RackN we believe they do not offer a completely free market experience to the cloud and infrastructure consumer. If the business decides it is paying too much for AWS, it should not allow for the operational underlay and configuration complexity to lock them to the infrastructure provider. They should be able to transfer their business to Google, Azure, Rackspace or Dreamhost with ease. We believe technologies that create portable, composable operational workflows drive true infrastructure and platform independence and as a benefit, reduces business risk. Choosing a platform and being forced to use it are two very different things.

In conclusion, when considering moving workloads to the cloud, converged infrastructure platforms or using DevOps automation tools, consider how you can achieve programmable operational portability and agility. Think about how you can best absorb new technologies without causing operational disruption in your infrastructure. Furthermore, ensure you can accomplish this in a repeatable, automated fashion. Analyze how you can abstract away complex configurations for security, networking and container orchestration technologies and make them adaptable from one infrastructure platform to another. Attempt to eliminate configuration versioning as much as possible and make upgrades simplistic and automated so your DevOps staff does not have to be experts (they are stressed out enough.).

If you are attending the OpenStack Conference this week, look me up. While I am far from a music expert, i’ll be happy to share with you my insights on how to spot a technology vendor that likes to play a purple guitar as opposed to one that eats carrots and plays the banjo.

-Dan Choquette: Co-Founder, RackN

 

 

 

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.

2015 Container Review

It’s been a banner year for container awareness and adoption so we wanted to recap 2015.  For RackN, container acceleration is near to our heart because we both enable and use them in fundamental ways.   Look for Rob’s 2016 predictions on his blog.

The RackN team has truly deep and broad experience with containers in practical use.  In the summer, we delivered multiple container orchestration workloads including Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, StackEngine and others.  In the fall, we refactored Digital Rebar to use Docker Compose with dramatic results.  And we’ve been using Docker since 2013 (yes, “way back”) for ops provisioning and development.

To make it easier to review that experience, we are consolidating a list of our container related posts for 2015.

General Container Commentary

RackN & Digital Rebar Related