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Category Archives for "Systems"

Docker All the Things at OSCON!

Last week, the Docker team headed to Austin for OSCON for a week packed full of containers and open source! The official conference agenda featured many Docker talks including a keynote session (complete with live open sourcing of the core … Continued

Six Ways Ansible Makes Docker-Compose Better

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Containers are popular for many reasons. One key reason: container images are easy to build and, once built, don't change.  When Developer A says, "Hey, check out this new application, just download this container image and run it," Developer B doesn't have to ask the question, "How do I configure it?"  Developer B can just download the image and run the container, and enjoy a high likelihood that it will run exactly as Developer A intended.

Until Developer A announces the need for a second, third and fourth container, that is.  A microservices approach advocates for simple containers, sure -- but that also means more of them, all doing different things, and all connecting together... somehow.  So now Developer A needs to tell Developer B "be sure to run all of these containers together, and make sure these two containers share a data volume, and make sure these other two containers have a network link between them, and make sure the REST API for this one is exposed on these ports. Oh, also! Make sure you've got your DNS set up right, because it's all a hilarious dumpster fire if you don't."

Complexity doesn't go away in the container world; it just moves to different Continue reading

Integrating Atlassian Bitbucket Pipelines with Ansible Tower

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Customers everywhere are using Ansible and Ansible Tower to deliver the promise of DevOps. Atlassian Bitbucket can be coupled with Ansible and Ansible Tower to create an application workflow. In this example workflow, a developer makes an update to their application, checks the code into source control, a continuous integration test passes, and it is automatically deployed by an orchestration system to the applicable systems.

One of the most popular requests we hear for Tower is to integrate with the Atlassian tool suite. Atlassian provides tools that allow developers to build many components of a CI/CD pipeline. From Bitbucket for code review, to JIRA as a ticketing system, and finally Hipchat to bring all of the teams involved in the pipeline to collaborate.

And, with Atlassian’s recent announcement of Bitbucket Pipelines, we are excited to demonstrate how Tower can now integrate these tools into a complete CI/CD pipeline environment.

Using our example workflow from above, let’s look at what this process looks like today-- without this integration. First, a developer checks in some code to Bitbucket Cloud, and a Pipelines job can build and test an artifact. Next, the developer would need to find the correct build, download it, and Continue reading

Thoughts on Luminus Networks

Late last week, Cyrus Durgin from Luminus Networks published an article on SDx Central titled “The (R)evolution of Network Operations.” You may notice that my name is mentioned at the bottom of the article as someone who provided feedback. In this post, I’d like to share some thoughts—high-level and conceptual in nature—on network operations and Luminus Networks.

I was first introduced to Luminus Networks when I met its CEO, Kelly Wanser, at the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) meeting in New York City last November. We met again in the Denver area in late December, and Kelly gave me a preview of what Luminus was building. I must confess that I was immediately intrigued by what Kelly was describing. One key thing really jumped out at me: we need to treat the network as a system, not as a bunch of individual elements.

When it comes to network monitoring/management/operations, so many of the tools are focused on the individual elements that comprise a network: provisioning a switch, pushing configuration changes to a router or group of routers, polling counters from interfaces on switches, etc. While there’s nothing wrong with any of these things, it seems to me that there’s Continue reading

How Flex Ciii Uses Ansible Tower for Benchmarking

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We love stories about how Ansible Tower has solved problems and made work easier. Special thanks to Hugh Ma from Flex for sharing his story about Ansible Tower.

Here at Flex, our Ciii Rack Scale Platforms team regularly deploys Openstack and Ceph on large clusters with various SDN platforms. With repeated multi-rack deployment, validation, benchmarking and tear down, automation plays a crucial role in improving the agility of our operations. For a small automation team to support a large group of engineers working across 200+ servers, it is necessary to select the right tools to simplify deployment, test infrastructure installation, debugging, and results collection. This enables the team to focus on reference architecture designs, benchmark logic, and results analysis. 

Background

We had originally developed a python-based automation framework for our testing. Some of its tasks included configuring operating system and OpenStack settings through their APIs, launching test workloads, and parsing output. However, with a small team, upkeep of such a large code base and an increasing complexity of test parameters became tedious  We started looking at configuration management(CM) tools. We wanted a CM tool that was based on Python but easy for non-developers to use and straight-forward to troubleshoot. After building Continue reading

AnsibleFest Call For Speakers Now Open

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AnsibleFest is heading back to San Francisco on Thursday, July 28. You can expect all the usual highlights, like product roadmaps and Ask an Expert sessions. Plus, this year we're planning distinct tracks to give you exactly the type of information you need for wherever you are in your Ansible journey. Track themes will include use cases, best practices, and technical deep-dives into trending topics. 

Do you have a story to share about how you're using Ansible?
Submit your abstract during our Call for Speakers - open until June 1. We'll select speakers and notify all participants by June 13.

To see examples of talks that have been accepted in the past, check out the recordings from our last two AnsibleFest events in London and San Francisco. 

Then buy your tickets now during Super Early Bird pricing. This exclusive $299 pricing ends on May 31 and you won't find a better deal. If you're selected as a speaker, we'll refund your ticket amount. 

See you in San Francisco! 

AnsibleFest 2016

WANT A TASTE OF ANSIBLEFEST?

Watch presentations from AnsibleFest London 2016.

 

Technology Short Take #66

Welcome to Technology Short Take #66! In this post you’ll find a collection of links to articles about the major data center technologies. Hopefully something I’ve included here will be useful to you. Enjoy!

Networking

  • I recently spoke at Interop 2016 in Las Vegas, and while I was there I scribbled down some notes pertaining to how decomposing applications into microservices-based architectures was similar in some respects to decomposing networks into an overlay network and an underlay (physical) network. It’s still something I’m exploring, but I hope to get something written up soon. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts about it. Feel free to hit me up on Twitter or drop me an e-mail.
  • While I’m talking about the overlay/underlay model, I found this article by Tom Nolle discussing how using the overlay/underlay model could enable agile infrastructure. It’s a good post, well worth reading (in my opinion).

Servers/Hardware

Nothing this time around. Maybe next time?

Security

  • In the event you’re interested in an idea of how much latency the use of in-kernel hypervisor firewalling (such as that offered by VMware NSX) adds, have a look at this article by Sean Howard.

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

Docker at OSCON: The Highlights

OSCON is the largest open source conference of the year, and Docker has a big presence again this year. OSCON starts with Open Container Day because of the importance the container ecosystem has taken on for the open source world. There will … Continued

Ansible as Automation Glue

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Throughout my time at Ansible, I have endeavoured to put together pertinent demos for customers - when I was 'on the other side of the fence' I always preferred it when a vendor asked about the challenges we faced and prepared the product to show how it would help me.

A few months back a customer told us about their challenge of getting code from development into production, and how it was taking almost a third of a year. They wanted to see how Ansible could help accelerate that workflow.

Since giving that demo I've not stopped asking customers about their challenges, but nine times out of ten they come back with the same answer these days - development to production workflow acceleration. That's when I show the same demo.

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After running through this so many times, I thought it might be useful to record it as a screencast to share it publicly - along with all the Ansible playbooks used to put it together. The demo runs to 18 minutes in total, but covers many aspects of how powerful and flexible Ansible is as a tool - from machine provisioning to configuration management to code deployment to interacting with various Continue reading

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