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Technology Short Take #67

Welcome to Technology Short Take #67. Here’s hoping something I’ve collected for you here proves useful!

Networking

  • Anthony Burke has written a script that uses VMware NSX to protect VMware Log Insight instances. More information on the script is in his blog post.
  • Russ White tackles the issue of networking engineers needing to learn to code. Is it necessary? Russ thinks so—but probably not for the reasons you might think. I tend to agree with Russ’ line of thinking.
  • This article from Marcos Hernandez shows one way to do dynamic routing in OpenStack. It’s a bit of a hack, to be honest, but it gets the job done until dynamic routing makes its way into OpenStack Neutron (which looks like it may have landed in the Mitaka release—can anyone confirm?).
  • Jason Messer has an article describing how networking works with Windows containers.
  • Tom Hollingsworth discusses how the rise of overlay networks killed large layer 2 networks and tools for building large layer 2 networks, like TRILL.
  • Dmitri Kalintsev examines some options for addressing storage-related connectivity in NSX environments.

Servers/Hardware

Spousetivities at DockerCon 2016

Long-time readers of my site know that my wife, Crystal, launched what is now known as Spousetivities at VMworld 2008. Since that time, she’s been able to organize activities for hundreds of companions at dozens of events around the world. This year she’s adding another event to the roster: DockerCon 2016 in Seattle!

That’s right, Crystal and Spousetivities will be available at DockerCon in Seattle. Here’s a quick look at some of the things she’s got planned:

  • Morning yoga on both Monday and Tuesday (both days of the conference), led by a Docker employee
  • Food tour plus a visit to Woodland Park Zoo (great option for attendees traveling with kids)
  • Tours of Seattle on both Monday and Tuesday, including stops at the Space Needle, Pioneer Square, Pike Place Market, and the Kerry Park scenic overlook.
  • Wine and chocolate tastings plus a visit to Sqonalmie Falls

All in all, it sounds like a great set of activities. Also, I’m very impressed that DockerCon is also offering childcare during the event. Between Spousetivities offering kid-friendly events both days and DockerCon providing childcare, there’s no reason not to bring the family with you to Seattle.

If you’re interested in signing up for any Continue reading

Podcast Update

As many of you probably know, I launched a new podcast, called the Full Stack Journey Podcast, back in January. (Here’s the blog post announcing the new podcast.) In this post, I wanted to provide a quick update on the podcast.

Dedicated Website Now Up

First, the podcast now has its own website! Like this site, the Full Stack Journey site is a Jekyll-powered site hosted on GitHub (here’s the site’s repository). I find the Jekyll+GitHub Pages workflow works really well for me, so leveraging the same workflow for the Full Stack Journey site—as opposed to using WordPress or some other CMS—will (hopefully) help make it easier to continue to produce and publish the podcast.

Late Episodes Available

The effort involved in getting the dedicated site up took up a fair amount of time over the last few weeks. This leads me to the second point, which is that I’ve published episode #4 with Brent Salisbury, and will soon (in the next few days) be publishing episode #5 with Patrick Kelso. These episodes are very late (sorry!). June’s episode shouldn’t be as late, and I’m aiming to be back on track with an early July Continue reading

Introducing Ansible 2.1: Networking, Windows, Azure, and Containers

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I am pleased to announce the availability of Ansible version 2.1. Ansible 2.1 is Red Hat’s next major release since we pushed  2.0 in January. This new version adds a number of new features and fixes, and we’re excited to get it out into your hands. We’ve added key functionality in networking, took the beta tag off of our Microsoft Windows support, expanded our support for Microsoft Azure, enhanced our Docker containers support, and added a number of key internal features for ziploader and elsewhere.

On the networking front, we’ve included managing networking infrastructure as first-order feature set in Ansible--no separate download required. We previously released the Networking tech preview in February at AnsibleFest in London, and now it is fully integrated into Ansible as part of 2.1 Ansible’s agentless model works particularly well in the network management space, and with a lot of help and support from the vendors, we are very pleased to have our first major release with support for these features. Networking now includes support for:

  • Cisco
  • HP Enterprise
  • Juniper
  • Arista Networks
  • Cumulus Networks

In the Microsoft world, we significantly upped our game for both Windows and Azure Cloud. We’re happy to Continue reading

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

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