Packet Pushers - Datanauts

Today on the Datanauts, we dive into the waters of infrastructure management to get a closer look at the Redfish protocol.

Redfish is an emerging IPMI replacement for out-of-band infrastructure management. The project is overseen by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), an industry organization that develops management standards for network-accessible devices.

Our guide is Jeff Autor, Distinguished Technologist at HPE. We’ll talk about why Redfish has been developed, how it works, how it addresses shortcomings in IPMI and SNMP, and what support it has in third-party management tools.

We also explore how to integrate Redfish into daily operations, what kind of data points it can report on, what devices it works with, and more.

To get more details on Redfish, check out the Show Links below.

Sponsor: ITProTV

This episode of Datanauts ​is brought to you by ITProTV. ​Enhance your technology aptitude. ITProTV​is the resource to keep your I.T. skills up to date, with engaging and informative video tutorials. For a free 7­-day trial and 30% off the life of your account, go to itpro.tv/datanauts ​and use the code DATANAUTS30​.

Sponsor The Datanauts

If you want to reach more than 10,000 curious and forward-thinking tech professionals, become a Datanauts sponsor and share your message with our listeners. To get more details, send an email to [email protected].

Show Links:

Redfish Videos from the DMTF – Youtube

DMTF

DMTF’s Redfish Developer Hub

DMTF Redfish Model Mockups

Redfish Forums

Containers as a Service (CaaS) is just what it sounds like: infrastructure abstraction for hosting containers, along with management and orchestration to tie it all together. Services are available in the cloud and on premises.

Today on Datanauts, we’re joined by Chris Tozzi, Senior Editor and DevOps Analyst with Fixate.io and Sweetcode.io, to get a better understanding of CaaS. We’ll talk about key components, how it differs from other services like IaaS, who the major providers are, and compelling use cases for CaaS.

Show Links:

5 Container as a Service Tools You Should Know About – Linux.com

Everything you need to know about containers as a service – TechTarget

Fixate.io

Sweetcode.io

Container Journal

Sometimes your infrastructure isn’t able to keep pace with a growing business, especially if your company is relatively new. So you do you scale out while the airplane is in flight? Short answer–it ain’t easy.

Today on Datanauts, we talk with Josh O’Brien, senior director of operations at Sauce Labs. Sauce Labs provides platforms for companies to test enterprise Web and mobile applications.

Josh shares his experiences in a young company that had to “just make it work” with piecemeal gear, and how that affected the direction the organization could take as it grew. He talks about the ins and outs of using grey market gear, how to get vendors to work better with you, the impact of Kubernetes on operations, fostering cooperation across the organization, and more.

Sponsor: Interop ITX

Interop ITX, May 15 – 19 in Las Vegas, is the only independent conference for technology leaders. Get a year’s worth of objective IT education in one week. And don’t miss the Packet Pushers’ Future Of Networking Summit at Interop. Visit interopitx.com and use promo code PacketPushers for a 20% discount.

Sponsor: Incapsula

Incapsula is a cloud-based service from Imperva that protects and accelerates your Web sites with services including DDoS and bot protection, traffic inspection, load balancing, and CDN. Incapsula protects over 4 million Web properties, from individual bloggers to the Fortune 50. Datanauts listeners can try Incapsula free! Just go to incapsula.com/packetpushers.

On today’s Datanauts episode we look at the changing world of Ops. We talk about what Ops means (Operations, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, etc.), though one common thread is that everyone in the organization has responsibility for delivering a quality product.

We also discuss the skill sets needed for today’s operations engineers, hiring issues, and concepts such as error budgets that are designed to encourage more risk-taking in an organization.

Our guest is Charity Majors, cofounder and CEO of Honeycomb, and formerly a production engineering manager at Facebook. You can find her on Twitter and check out her blog Charity.WTF.

We also get into databases and database reliability engineering (which Charity wrote a book about), including differences between MySQL and PostGres, as well as how MongoDB has evovled.

Sponsor: Incapsula

Incapsula is a cloud-based service from Imperva that protects and accelerates your Web sites with services including DDoS and bot protection, traffic inspection, load balancing, and CDN. Incapsula protects over 4 million Web properties, from individual bloggers to the Fortune 50. Datanauts listeners can try Incapsula free! Just go to incapsula.com/packetpushers.

Sponsor: INE

Need training? INE has an incredible library of over 8,500 network training videos, designed for the network engineer with a hands-on focus. Offerings include Cisco CCENT and CCIE, as well as Wireshark, SDN, Juniper, and more. Watch from any device, such as IOS, Android, tablet, PC, and even AppleTV. Get 15% off any product or an All Access Pass by going to ine.com/packet and using the code PACKET.

Show Links:

Hiring A Tech Ops Team – Video

Database Reliability Engineering – O’Reilly

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Database Needs – Presentation

Upgrading databases: without losing your data, your perf, or your mind – Presentation

DevOps Vs. SRE: Delayed Coverage Of The Dumbest War – Charity.WTF

The Accidental DBA – Charity.WTF

Today’s Datanauts episode is about your IT career and how to steer it in a positive direction. This show isn’t just about skills and training (although those play a part).

We focus on why you’re in IT and what you hope to get from this profession. Is it a sense of security? An opportunity to solve problems? A chance to get creative? Or something else entirely?

Our guest today is Neil Anderson, a cloud and data center trainer based in southeast Asia. We’ll talk with him about developing a career plan, and then how to execute it.

We’ll also talk about a survey he conducted of CTOs and HR heads about the skills and qualifications they’re looking for in IT, and what that means for your own professional development. We’ll also look at IT industry areas that have growth potential.

Check out Neil’s training videos and blogs at FlackBox and read his post The Best IT Career Advice from 111 Industry Gurus, which has details from the survey.

Sponsor: Incapsula

Incapsula is a cloud-based service from Imperva that protects and accelerates your Web sites with services including DDoS and bot protection, traffic inspection, load balancing, and CDN. Incapsula protects over 4 million Web properties, from individual bloggers to the Fortune 50. Datanauts listeners can try Incapsula free! Just go to incapsula.com/packetpushers.

Sponsor: Interop

Interop ITX is the only independent conference for technology leaders. Join us May 15-19 at the MGM in Las Vegas. Get a year’s worth of objective IT education in one week, including the Packet Pushers’ “Future Of Networking” Summit. Visit interopitx.com and use promo code PacketPushers for a 20% discount.

Just as containers are finding their place alongside virtual machines in the application landscape, unikernels are emerging as a container alternative.

Unikernels strip down an application’s execution environment to the barest essentials, increasing efficiency and reducing attack surface.

Adam Wick joins the Datanauts to explain unikernels and how they differ from containers, discuss what kinds of applications they run, and explore issues like networking, security, and orchestration.

Adam is Research Lead, Mobile Security & Systems Software at Galois an R&D company. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Utah. You can follow him on Twitter.

Sponsor: ITProTV

This episode of Datanauts ​is brought to you by ITProTV. ​Enhance your technology aptitude. ITProTV​is the resource to keep your I.T. skills up to date, with engaging and informative video tutorials. For a free 7­-day trial and 30% off the life of your account, go to itpro.tv/datanauts ​and use the code DATANAUTS30​.

Sponsor The Datanauts

If you want to reach more than 10,000 curious and forward-thinking tech professionals, become a Datanauts sponsor and share your message with our listeners. To get more details, send an email to [email protected].

Show Links:

Unikernel.org

Haskell Lightweight Virtual Machine – Galois

Backup. It’s that unglamorous but essential task that can save an organization’s proverbial bacon when a critical chunk of data absolutely needs to be recovered.

On today’s Datanauts episode, our intrepid explorers discuss how to get a better handle on backup in an era of increasing data volumes and more storage options.

They discuss various backup types, including snapshots, file system, and application backup. They also explain why replication isn’t the same as backup, and why that difference matters.

Other topics include the pros and cons of backing up to tape, disk, and the cloud; the role of deduplication; and the challenges of backing up ever-increasing amounts of data in a timely manner.

No backup discussion would be complete without talking about recovery, and the Datanauts get into issues about who’s responsible for recovery, the role of backups in DR, and how organizations can validate their backups to ensure the data can actually be recovered.

Sponsor: ITProTV

This episode of Datanauts ​is brought to you by ITProTV. ​Enhance your technology aptitude. ITProTV​is the resource to keep your I.T. skills up to date, with engaging and informative video tutorials. For a free 7­-day trial and 30% off the life of your account, go to itpro.tv/datanauts ​and use the code DATANAUTS30​.

Sponsor: You

If you want to reach more than 10,000 curious and forward-thinking tech professionals, become a Datanauts sponsor and share your message with our listeners. To get more details, send an email to [email protected].

The blog. Originally a shortened form of “web log”, the blog has become a staple of the digital information age. Less formal than an essay, more casual than reporting from a mainstream news organization, the blog is a unique medium for people with a deep interest in a subject to share that interest with others.

Today we’re discussing a sub-genre of this medium, the technical blog. Lots of people do it. You could do it too. Is this a good idea? How does one get started? Are there any benefits?

We’ll focus on the good, the bad, and the ugly of technical blogging. We’ll talk about processes, content, feedback, and outcomes from spending years raving on our respective blogs, and the risks and rewards of writing things down for other people to read.

Sponsor: Incapsula

Incapsula is a cloud-based service from Imperva that protects and accelerates your Web sites with services including DDoS and bot protection, traffic inspection, load balancing, and CDN. Incapsula protects over 4 million Web properties, from individual bloggers to the Fortune 50. Datanauts listeners can try Incapsula free! Just go to incapsula.com/packetpushers.

Sponsor: You

If you want to reach more than 10,000 curious and forward-thinking tech professionals, become a Datanauts sponsor and share your message with our listeners. To get more details, send an email to [email protected].

Show Notes:

Part 1 – Thinking About Content

* How do you come up with content?

* There’s no real reason to scour the Internet to see if someone else has written about the topic you’re learning or wish to share.

* The answer is pretty much always: yes, someone has written about it.

* It’s OK to also write about it.

* If you feel like a piece of content was helpful, say so – and add a link to the content. Links are a great way for the author to see that you are writing about them via a Pingback (essentially a comment that generally appears on most websites saying “Hey, I created a link to you!” in their feed).

* Content comes and goes

* Some days you’ll have more ideas than others

* Use a tool to help jot down these ideas.

* Chris just saves new ideas a blog posts drafts. This is where links, images, and what-not are saved for later. I usually have half a dozen just sitting around in various stages of formation.

* Scrivener

* Use the Pomodoro technique to write

* http://wahlnetwork.com/2015/10/22/picking-up-new-skills-tips-and-tricks-to-build-your-technical-tool-chest/

* http://wahlnetwork.com/2015/06/03/pomodoro-standdesk-review/

* Content from work

* You’re always within your rights to share ideas and thoughts that are original.

* But be careful what you are bound to from an employment perspective. Some employers retain intellectual rights on everything you do.

* Never share information about your clients or your specific day job work unless you are 100% sure it’s OK. I often advise having written permission. Even then, talking about a client is risky. It’s pretty much best to generalize the client and abstract the problem, your understanding of the technology, and the solution.

* Don’t even use muddled wording, such as “the best provider of widgets in the South” to obscure the client – because someone will probably fig...

A new approach to OpenStack deployment is to run it in containers. This might sound like the IT equivalent of an M.C. Escher drawing. Don’t we run OpenStack to deploy virtual machines and containers? But we want to run OpenStack in containers?

Can this actually be made to work? Yes, it certainly can. And on today’s Datanauts episode, we’re going to talk about how and why.

Our guest is Robert Starmer, CTO and Principal at Kumulus Technologies. We begin by exploring aspects of OpenStack that lend itself to being run in containers and look at operational benefits.

We also look at the relationship between OpenStack and Kubernetes, and how to address requirements like storage or databases that might require persistent state. We also look at the Kolla Project, which brings together OpenStack, Docker, and Ansible.

Sponsor: ITProTV

This episode of Datanauts ​is brought to you by ITProTV. ​Enhance your technology aptitude. ITProTV​is the resource to keep your I.T. skills up to date, with engaging and informative video tutorials. For a free 7­-day trial and 30% off the life of your account, go to itpro.tv/datanauts ​and use the code DATANAUTS30​.

Sponsor: Your Company Here!

If you want to reach more than 10,000 curious and forward-thinking tech professionals, become a Datanauts sponsor and share your message with our listeners. To get more details, send an email to [email protected].

Show Links:

Five Minutes of Cloud – Robert Starmer’s Video Tutorials

Docker containers and software-defined storage – Hedvig

Persistent Storage for Docker Containers – SolidFire

Welcome to Kolla’s documentation! – OpenStack

Kolla Kubernetes Quickstart Guide – OpenStack

Kolla-Kubernetes – GitHub

OpenStack is an Application! Deploy and Manage Your Stack with Kolla-Kubernetes – OpenStack Foundation YouTube Video

Thousand Instances of Cassandra using Kubernetes Pet Set – Kubernetes