Saturday, November 8, 2014

The Cloudcast #170 - Reigniting of the Cloud Wars

Topic 1 - We’re now about 90 days from the 2015 Krispy Kreme Challenge, which means two things: (a) we need to start getting our fat asses in shape, and (b) we need to start campaigning with our community to help us do awesome stuff for the kids that benefit from the services of the
baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">NC Children’s Hospital. The last two years we’ve raised +$11,000 and won the donation contest both time - which is an incredible recognition of the power of this community (good people, supporting good causes). This year’s goal is $8000.
Topic 2 - This last week was Google Cloud Platform announcement day, and a bunch of interesting stuff - Carrier Interconnect & Direct Peering, Enterprise VPN, lower prices (in APAC), Google SDN everywhere, Kubernetes-as-a-Service, more Container stuff   


Topic 3 - You were at OpenStack Summit. What was the vibe there? Anything interesting? Didn’t seem like a lot of new announcements, just lots of panels. And of course the OpenStack Foundation took a swipe at AWS dominance - not sure why? Is OpenStack going to lose the modern-app-infrastructure game to Docker?


Topic 4 - Canonical quietly slipped out that they are developing a new container/virtualization technology called LXD (lex-dee).

Topic 5 - You’ll be out at AWS re:Invent, enjoying Vegas while I’m actually working, so what are you looking forward to out there this week? Any predictions on their announcements?

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

The Cloudcast #169 - DevOps Incident Management with BigPanda


Big Panda - http://bigpanda.io/




Topic 1 - Announced A Round and came out of stealth yesterday. Give us a quick overview of Big Panda and the problem you are trying to solve


Topic 1.5 - The service - Is it an aggregator, a single interface or a different way to create a contextual view of apps? “Command and Control?”


Topic 2 - Is this a service for Ops teams, or do you see developers wanting access to validate what Ops might be telling them? (Mention the Blog Post Above)


Topic 3 - What Big Data do you have in the background to drive faster incident closure?


Topic 4 - You integrate with ticketing systems like Service Now, Jira, BMC Remedy. What's a typical incident workflow when integrating with those tools?


Topic 5 - How do you keep the incident tagging consistent from all the different sources? How do you avoid conflicts as environments get larger, or the downstream services (generating events) change over time?

Topic 6 - Early use cases? Anything surprising emerging from the data?

The Cloudcast #168 - Containerized Continuous Delivery




Topic 1 - You have an very interesting background to some of our listeners having been involved in XBox Live and Kinect platforms. What was that like? What CI/CD needs to you encounter?

Topic 2 - CI/CD with a “developer cloud” focus. Where does Jenkins fit into this picture? Is Jenkins more about vm’s and this is about containers? You mentioned in an interview that code and apps are in the cloud (github) but CI is in-house, that didn’t make sense to you.

Follow Up: As I see it, a developer can spin up a container on their laptop, then move this container to another environment test/det, AWS, production in house, etc. and you are potentially removing the gotchas of “It worked on my laptop”, correct?

Topic 3 - In addition, what other problems you are trying to solve with Containerized CI/CD? Faster time to value? Portability between environments? All of the above? I see you have integration with Docker Hub, Chef, Puppet, even Kubernetes

Topic 4 - We keep mentioning micro-service as an architecture on the show. Is this an example of the CI/CD ecosystem evolving to embrace containers and a micro-service architecture?

Topic 5 - You also did a podcast with friend of the show Lucas Carlson (http://www.centurylinklabs.com/the-future-of-continuous-integration-with-shippable-founder-avi-cavale/). We had him on to discuss Panamax. Do you integrate with Panamax?

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

The Cloudcast #165 - DevOps Automation as a Service






Topic 1 - Tonight is interesting because we are pulling in pieces from a bunch of previous podcasts and past guest topics. We have spoken about the many emerging trends and use cases in DevOps, but a big problem has been how do you put all the pieces together. You hear about Jenkins, Docker, OpenStack, PagerDuty, Loggly, AWS, etc. A lot of moving pieces that we have to integrate together and then actually operate efficiently.


Let’s start at the start, what is the concept of Automation as a Service and what problem are we trying to solve?


Topic 2 - Quote from Blog: "because developers are in charge that every single API must be a first class citizen. They determine whether your API is inadequate very quickly. If you treat your APIs badly by deprecating them suddenly and without warning, you are essentially slapping developers that use your APIs in the face." - Very true. There is a presentation your company did on OpenStack vs. VMware and the idea of closed vs. open with some great analogies to history and advancements in efficient. How does AaaS help developers?


Topic 3 - Third Wave in IT. You present a potential framework:
  1. Docker automating tracking of all dependencies for an environment while providing efficient and very fast to deploy containers; 
  2. Jenkins automating QA testing; 
  3. OpenStack and Docker orienting orchestration solutions 
  4. Monitoring 
  5. StackStorm and others are focusing on automation as a service - Remediation through automation?
Topic 4 - Is AaaS the “glue” between a bunch of existing projects and frameworks to create an automation workflow through change management, remote execution? Not trying to replace Docker, Salt, Ansible, Chef, OpenStack, Jenkins, New Relic? Aren’t all these integrations points a nightmare? Is this an on-prem product, cloud offering?

Topic 5 - You mention machine learning and artificial intelligence. This sounds a bit like what VMturbo tries to do at the hypervisor level. In discussion with them I know getting people flipping the bit that enables full automation makes some folks uncomfortable. They start to think of SkyNet in Terminator and the machines taking over the world. Thoughts?