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Category Archives for "Systems"

No Hands on Keyboards

Untitled_design-1Be honest. How many of you are still logging directly into the systems that you administer, via SSH, and changing things? I am. It’s a hard habit to break, but it’s one worth breaking. Luckily I don’t have very many servers of my own to manage, but changing things manually, instead of modeling those things in a language of automation is a sure way to build up technical debt and regret it later.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done any sort of system administration as my day job. But I talk to Ansible customers on a daily basis, and I have seen all sorts of environments: simple, complicated, small, large, well-managed, and poorly-managed. But one constant that I see throughout is increasing complexity and scale. Even for small shops with a few users, today’s platforms for data management, cloud hosting, and containers require a lot more distinct machines under management for their operation than the good old days when a couple of bare-metal LAMP servers could run a full web application.

Many people have written about the exponential growth in computing: from the early days of mainframes hosting hundreds of users and applications, to a single server rack Continue reading

Some Cumulus Linux Networking Concepts

As I’ve recently had the opportunity to start working with Cumulus Linux (running on a Dell S6000-ON switch), in this post I wanted to share a few concepts I’ve learned about networking with Cumulus Linux.

I’m not a networking guru, but I’m also not new to configuring network equipment—I’ve configured GRE tunnels on a Cisco router, set up link-state tracking, and enabled jumbo frames on a Nexus 5000 (to name a few examples). I’ve worked with Cisco gear, HP equipment, Dell PowerConnect switches, and Arista EOS-powered switches. However, as a full distribution of Linux, networking with Cumulus Linux is definitely different from your typical network switch. To help make the transition easier, I’ll share here a few things I’ve learned so far.

It’s important to understand that Cumulus Linux isn’t just a “Linux-based network OS”—it’s actually a full Linux distribution (based on Debian). Lots of products are Linux-based these days, but often hide the full power of Linux behind some sort of custom command-line interface (CLI) or shell. Not so in this case! I think this fact is perhaps a bit easy to overlook, but it shapes everything that happens in Cumulus Linux:

Ansible at IPEXPO: Simplicity – The Art of Automation

combbkgAnsible's Director of EMEA Business Development, Mark Phillips, presented at the recent IPEXPO. His talk Simplicity - The Art of Automation was recorded and he was able to combine the slides and the video.

IT infrastructures have grown in complexity over recent years as businesses seek every last competitive gain. Managing these complex infrastructures has become almost as complicated, but should it have? Could we actually gain more, by doing less?

 

#AnsibleFest NYC 2015 – Speaker Lineup

AnsibleFest NYC 2015

We’re proud to announce some of the speaker lineup for AnsibleFest NYC. AnsibleFest is a day-long conference bringing together hundreds of Ansible users, developers and industry partners to share best-practices, case studies and Ansible news.

Check out our line up of some of the sessions.

AnsibleFest is next Thursday, June 4th in NYC.

Register today as space is very limited.

Ansible v2, James Cammarata, Director of Engineering

A walk through of some of the new features and benefits in the 2.0 release.

Bio:

James Cammarata is a Director of Engineering at Ansible. He is the lead developer of Ansible, and has worked on tools such as Ansible and Cobbler in the past.

Twitter @thejimic

Ansible Tower 2.2, Bill Nottingham, Director of Product, Ansible

Everyone knows about Ansible’s simple, agentless, and powerful automation. (At least, we assume that’s why you’re here.)  But sometimes you need more in your organization - you want to be able to find out what happened with your playbook run last week. You want to delegate your rollouts to the dev team, so you don’t have to do it.

We’ll show how Ansible Tower adds control, security, and delegation around Ansible. Plus, we’ll Continue reading

Rubrik and Converged Data Management

Rubrik today announced a new Series B investment (of $41 million) and introduced their r300 Series Hybrid Cloud Appliance, powered by what they’re touting as a “Converged Data Management” platform. Wow—that’s a mouthful, isn’t it? It sounds a bit like buzzword bingo, but after having spent a bit of time talking to Rubrik last week, there are some interesting (in my opinion) things going on here.

So what exactly is Rubrik doing? Here’s the “TL;DR” for those of you that don’t have the patience (or the time) for anything more in-depth: Rubrik is targeting the secondary storage and backup/recovery market with a solution that combines a distributed file system, a distributed metadata service, clustering, and a distributed task scheduler to provide a scale-out backup/recovery solution that also seamlessly integrates cloud storage platforms for long-term retention. The catch-phrase they’re using is “Time Machine for cloud infrastructure” (I wonder how our good friends in Cupertino will react to the use of that phrase?).

Here’s a bit more detail on the various components of the solution:

  • Rubrik has its own distributed file system (imaginatively named the Rubrik Cloud-Scale File System) that was designed from scratch to store and manage versioned data. The Continue reading

Bootstrapping Servers into Ansible

As part of a lab rebuild I’ve been doing over the last few weeks (funny how hardware failures can lead to a lab rebuild), I’ve been expanding the use of Ansible for configuration automation. In this post, I’m going to share the process I’ve created for bootstrapping newly-built servers into Ansible.

I developed this Ansible bootstrapping process to work in conjunction with the fully automated Ubuntu installation method that I described in an earlier post. The idea is that I would be able to boot a new server (virtual or physical), choose a configuration from the PXE menu, and a few minutes later have a built Ubuntu system. Then, with a single command, I could “bootstrap” the server into an Ansible configuration automation system. This latter part—configuring systems to work with Ansible—is what I’ll be describing here.

First, a (very) brief overview of Ansible. Ansible is a configuration automation tool that leverages standard SSH connections to remote devices in order to perform its work. Ansible is agentless, so no software has to be pre-installed on the managed servers, but this means Ansible has to authenticate against remote systems in order to establish these SSH connections. This authentication should, in ideal Continue reading

Technology Short Take #51

Welcome to Technology Short Take #51, another collection of posts and links about key data center technologies like networking, virtualization, cloud management, and applications/operating systems. Here’s hoping you find something useful in this collection!

Networking

  • I’m not sure if this falls here or into the “Cloud Computing/Cloud Computing” category, but Shannon McFarland—fellow co-conspirator with the Denver OpenStack Meetup group—has a nice article describing some design and deployment considerations for IPv6 in the OpenStack Kilo release.
  • I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned Open Virtual Network (OVN) here before, as I’m pretty jazzed about the work going on with this project. If you’re unfamiliar with OVN, Gal Sagie has a couple of articles that might help. I’d start with the later of the two articles, which provides an introduction to OVN, before moving on to Gal’s discussion of OVN and the distributed controller and his article on OVN and containers.
  • Speaking of OVN, Russell Bryant has a detailed description of using OVN with OpenStack Neutron (via DevStack).
  • Using Jinja2 templates for automating network device configuration is a topic that’s getting a fair amount of attention (there were at least two sessions discussing this technique while I was at Interop). Rick Sherman has Continue reading

#Simple OpenStack Collaboration Day Recap

Untitled_designWe were excited to announce our Simple OpenStack Initiative earlier this week which kicked off with our Collaboration Day in Vancouver at the OpenStack Summit.

The weather, the setting and the conference overall have been just fantastic. I wanted to recap some of the discussions we had in during our collaboration day as it was the perfect jumpstart to this already great week.

We had solid participation from across the board -– networking and hardware leaders, consultants, cloud providers, etc. -- and it reinforced to me how much interest there is in Ansible, and how many angles there are to consider while trying to remain true to our mission of simplicity.

Ansible’s goal is to help everyone move faster to make OpenStack more viable. We really don’t have a horse in the race; we are not in the business of betting on who will get there first, or better.  We just want OpenStack to work, for all of us.

There were two high-level themes to the day --  undercloud and overcloud -- and lots of listening, learning and active discussions.

The Undercloud Discussion: OSAD and friends

Kevin Carter of Rackspace, PTL of the OS-Ansible-Deployment (OSAD) project, opened the day with Continue reading

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