How to staff the hybrid cloud

The IT team at Perkins+Will used to support a sprawling SAN environment for its complex commercial-building renderings.When the Chicago-based architecture firm – which has 2,500 employees in 30 locations around the world – outgrew its SAN environment, Perkins+Will chose to migrate away from on-premises data centers and edge devices to a cloud-based storage system. Suddenly CIO Murali Selvaraj faced a difficult challenge: How to restructure the firm's 50-person global IT organization to meet the needs of the hybrid cloud?To read this article in full, please click here

A Sandbox for Learning Pulumi

I recently started using Pulumi, a way of using a general purpose programming language for infrastructure-as-code projects. I’ve been using Pulumi with JavaScript (I know, some folks would say I should question my life decisions), and while installing Pulumi itself is pretty low-impact (a small group of binaries) there are a number of dependencies that need to be installed when using Pulumi with JavaScript. As I’m a stickler for keeping my primary system very “clean” with regard to installed packages and software, I thought I’d create a means whereby I can easily spin up a “sandbox environment” for learning Pulumi.

When creating this sandbox environment, I turned to some tools that are very familiar:

  • I used virtualization (a virtual machine) as the isolation mechanism. The next step is to use a Linux container, like a Docker container, as the isolation mechanism, but I thought I’d start with something a bit simpler at first.
  • Vagrant provides a way of automating the creation/destruction of said VM. Again, Vagrant is well-understood and widely used.
  • Ansible provides the automation to configure the VM with the necessary software (Pulumi and associated dependencies).
  • I also thought that some folks might find it interesting or useful Continue reading

The speed of BGP network propagation

The speed of BGP network propagation