technology News, Entwicklungen, Updates, HowTos - Seite 292 von 296

The post OpenStack Days Silicon Valley 2016 (The Unlocked Infrastructure Conference) Day 2 appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
The second day of OpenStack Days Silicon Valley continued with conversations about containers and the processes of managing OpenStack. If you missed the event and the live stream, no worries; here are the highlights.
Christian Carrasco – When OpenStack Fails. (Hint: It’s not the Technology)
Christian, a cloud advisor at Tapjoy, started off the day by sharing what Tapjoy has learned from working with OpenStack. Tapjoy is an SaaS player that from early on set its sights on OpenStack. The company has grown to be the leading player in the mobile app monetization space, with more than two million daily engagements, 270,000 active apps, and 500 million users.
However, interestingly, most of the lessons Christian has learned while working at Tapjoy have less to do with the technology or maturity underpinning OpenStack or the many components necessary to its deployment. Instead, they revolve around the people, process, and organizational choices that are necessary for your OpenStack cloud to succeed.
Christian urged the audience to stop focusing on building a better buggy, and to instead focus on making a better cloud—the next generation of cloud. Christian argued that before we can hyper-converge the cloud, we need interoperability standards, arguing that there were many industries that couldn’t have existed without standards, such as the internet, the automobile industry, and healthcare.
Luke Kanies &8211; DevOps: Myths vs. Realities
Next up was Luke Kanies, the founder and CEO of Puppet. Luke spoke to the audience about the myths that surround DevOps in the enterprise, and argued that we need to leave behind the old way of delivering software to adopt the new world of DevOps practices.
Luke made it clear just why: top performing DevOps teams deploy 200 times more often and recover from failure 24 times faster, he said.
Luke argued that the fears companies have about adopting DevOps practices are due to two beliefs. First, that certain practices just won’t work for an organization, due to factors such as legacy environments, traditional enterprises, or hierarchical organizations. The second belief, he said, is that DevOps practices are simply unworkable when enterprises are subject to a host of external regulatory and compliance requirements.
Luke said that most organizations (97-98 percent) that had fears about introducing DevOps practices had legacy issues, but he argued that ignoring those legacy issues undermined their work.
Luke ended his talk by discussing how to overcome misconceptions by dispelling the most common myths. He said that adopting DevOps practices didn’t have to be all or nothing, they could be simpler than it appeared, and that often the largest returns come from unexpected areas. Ultimately, he argued, you have a choice—do you want to start using DevOps practices, or would you prefer for your competitors to beat you to it?
James Staten &8211; Hybrid Cloud is About the Apps, Not the Infrastructure
James Staten, Microsoft’s Chief Strategist for the Cloud and Enterprise division, was next up on stage to talk about building and deploying true enterprise cloud apps.
James said the key to this is understanding how to blend your environments, as leading enterprise examples of #cloud computing are not exclusively private or exclusively public cloud deployments, but are instead a mixture of both plus multiple public clouds. He said that even Microsoft runs on a hybrid cloud.
James argued that the hybrid cloud is here to stay, and not just because of the legacy code that can’t move anywhere (let alone to the cloud). He pointed to statistics that showed 74 percent of enterprises believe a hybrid cloud will enable business growth, and 82 percent have a hybrid cloud strategy (up from 74 percent a year ago).
He said that organizations used to be worried about application integration, security, and data sovereignty when considering moving apps to a public cloud. However, now organizations say they don’t use public clouds because of needing compute on premises, the Internet of Things, optimization of economics, and wanting to leverage the right resources in the right places.
James ended his session by outlining new hybrid models with many elements, including local resources, public clouds, and SAAS apps and microservices. He said that hybrid isn’t just about location, but the programming languages, devices, and operating systems. He said that the apps we are building need to have compute capability everywhere, because a hybrid cloud is about the apps you are designing.
Alex Williams, Frederic Lardinois, Craig Matsumoto, Mitch Wagner &8211; Open Source and the News Media
The first panel discussion of the day was about Open Source and the News Media, with four technology journalists: Alex Williams (founder of The New Stack), Frederic Lardinois (writer for TechCrunch), Craig Matsumoto (Managing Editor at SDxCentral, and Mitch Wagner (Editor, Enterprise Cloud, for Light Reading).
Key takeaway: People are often confused by messages coming from open source projects and companies that build products and services using them, and acronyms, clever names, and not-for-profit foundations had further contributed to this confusion. Alex said that some people would say that cloud service providers are the greatest threat to open source.
In addition, the panelists discussed the difficulties they had with tracking and learning all of the players and their interests in the Open Source movement.
Kim Bannerman (Director, Advocacy & Community &8211; Office of the CTO, Blue Box), Kenneth Hui (Senior Technical Marketing Manager, Rackspace), Patrick Reilly (Founder and Former CEO of Kismatic) — All Open Source Problems Solved in This Session
Next, Kim Bannerman, Kenneth Hui, and Patrick Reilly, a group of open source veterans, discussed critiques that are common for open source projects and looked at how to address them.
Patrick pointed out that OpenStack really is a community, and to have OpenStack work better you really need to participate. He argued that if you have a complaint, you should follow up and work to fix those issues.
Interestingly, the panel discussed the idea that often criticisms about open source projects, such as their governance, roadmap, and focus, are often just the downsides of advantages open source provides: transparency, inclusiveness, and agility.
Jonathan Donaldson (VP & GM, Software Defined Infrastructure at Intel) — The Future of OpenStack Clouds
Following the two panel discussions, Jonathan Donaldson of Intel and Craig McLuckie from Google talked to us about their collaboration and the future of OpenStack clouds.
Craig said that Google wants to be an enterprise software company, using OpenStack, because the market is too big to ignore. However, Craig said that Google is pretty behind.
During the talk, Jonathan discussed Intel’s Cloud for All initiative. It began last year and Intel began heavily investing in the OpenStack platform in an effort to improve OpenStack for the enterprise and to speed up its rate of adoption around the world. He said that Intel cares so much about a cloud for all because fostering innovation leads to use cases and creates value.
This has led to Intel and the broader community making OpenStack production-ready for enterprise workloads. He said that this has led to new features and significantly lower barriers for businesses that want to deploy private and hybrid clouds.
Randy Bias (VP of Technology, EMC), Sean Roberts (Director Technical Program Management, Walmart Labs), Mike Yang (GM of Quanta Cloud Technology) &8211; The State of OpenStack on Commodity Hardware
The first discussion of the final session was about OpenStack and commodity hardware. In the early days of OpenStack, open cloud software with “open” or commodity hardware was seen as a perfect match.
One question the panel discussed was whether BOMs that mix commodity and proprietary components were the norm, or whether pre-integrated and fully commodity BOMs with components from one manufacturer were more popular.
Randy pointed out that the bottom line is that open or commodity hardware is not free, as it still takes skill to deploy. He argued that while it eventually will be easy to deploy open hardware, it’s not there yet.
Adrian Cockcroft (Battery Ventures Technology Fellow), Boris Renski (Mirantis Co-Founder and CMO) &8211; Infrastructure Software is Dead… Or is it?
Next up Boris Renski from Mirantis and Adrian Cockcroft, a Battery Ventures Technology Fellow, conversed about Boris’ premise that Infrastructure software is dead.
As the two discussed the cloud revolution, Boris argued that the cloud revolution isn’t just about software, but also the delivery model, and that the delivery model for enterprise on-premises software has changed radically. Adrian agreed, adding that traditional hardware and software procurement cycles have collapsed with the cloud.
The two finished their talk by discussing the future of OpenStack. They said its future will not be in making the most “enterprise ready” software, but in building models for delivering customer outcomes that move the needle. Adrian said that he believed that unless you had very specialized or very large scale workloads, there is no competitive advantage to having your own data center.
Michael Miller (President of Strategy, Alliances and Marketing, SUSE) &8211; OpenStack Past, Present and Future
To wrap-up the conference, Michael Miller from SUSE discussed OpenStack’s journey from inception to the present and shared some thoughts on what to expect next, discussing just how quickly enterprise IT is now adopting OpenStack, despite initial apprehensions.
The Last Word
From hallway conversations, to expert commentary, to the swarms of people who were visiting sponsor booths, the OpenStack Days Silicon Valley conference was a great success in getting people talking not about whether OpenStack was a success—that part&8217;s a given—but why. Users were talking about where OpenStack fits in, how it&8217;s still important for enterprise workloads, and how to most efficiently leverage new technologies such as containers.
So here&8217;s our question to you: what do you think we&8217;ll be talking about next year?

The post OpenStack Days Silicon Valley 2016 (The Unlocked Infrastructure Conference) Day 2 appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
Quelle: Mirantis

11. August 201611. August 2016

da Agency

Publishing an Ansible Job Template as a Service in CloudForms

This is part 4 of our series on Ansible Tower Integration in Red Hat CloudForms.
In the previous article, we have seen how Ansible Job Templates can be launched from a VM button in CloudForms. In this article, we explore how Ansible Job Templates can be published as Catalog Items and made available for end user consumption from a CloudForms Service Catalog.
In this example, we use ec2_elb_lb, an Ansible core module, to demonstrate how we can easily extend the capabilities of CloudForms by re-using automation already provided by Ansible. In particular, we provide the ability to create an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) from CloudForms Service Catalog without having to write any Ruby code.
A simple Ansible Playbook for this example can be found on GitHub and imported into Ansible Tower. A ‘Create AWS ELB’ Job Template is created with this playbook, allowing the end user to specify input values for the name of the ELB and a list of instances to associate to the new load balancer (as an extra variable called elb_name and instance_ids on the Job Template).
In CloudForms, we can auto-generate a dialog following the steps from our previous article from ‘Configuration > Configuration Management > Ansible Tower Job Templates > Create AWS ELB’ and selecting ‘Create Service Dialog from this Job Template’ from the ‘Configuration’ button.
The generated Service Dialog can be edited. In our case, we can remove the limit field (as this Ansible Job does not require to run on a particular host) and remove the ‘read-only’ option from the other fields.

Next, we create a Service Item by navigating to ‘Services > Catalogs > Catalog Items’ and selecting ‘Add a new Catalog Item’ from the ‘Configuration’ button. You will notice in CloudForms 4.1 that new Catalog Item Types are introduced. We select ‘AnsibleTower’ in our example, which causes CloudForms to present us with a dialog prompting for Ansible Tower related details.

We populate the name and description, and select a Catalog (previously created) where we want our new Service Item to be displayed. For the Dialog field, we select the Service Dialog we just created. The Provider and Ansible Tower Job Template fields are specific to the AnsibleType catalog item type and specify which Ansible Tower provider to reach out to as well as which Ansible Job Template to launch when the Catalog Item is ordered. In our example, we select our Ansible Tower provider from the drop down list and our ‘Create AWS ELB’ from the Job Template drop down (automatically populated with all available job templates). The Provisioning Entry Point State Machine can remain as default.

Once saved, we can change the icon for the Service Item and make it available to our end users. In this example, we have created a specific group and role and configured service visibility by tag. Our Service Item is available in CloudForms Self-Service portal.

The user can order the service by specifying input values, adding it to the shopping cart and checking it out.

Upon ordering, CloudForms launches the Job Template via Ansible Tower passing the dialog values and receives a notification from Ansible Tower once complete. A new Amazon Elastic Load Balancer is deployed.
In this article, we looked at how to publish an Ansible Tower Job Template in a CloudForms Service Catalog. We successfully ordered this service from CloudForms Self-Service portal. In the following article, we will go further and explore how to use Ansible Service Items as part of a CloudForms Service Bundle and automatically launch Job Templates on newly provisioned VMs.
Quelle: CloudForms

11. August 201611. August 2016

da Agency

DAY 1- OPENSTACK DAYS SILICON VALLEY 2016

The post DAY 1- OPENSTACK DAYS SILICON VALLEY 2016 appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
THE UNLOCKED INFRASTRUCTURE CONFERENCE
By Catherine Kim

This year’s OpenStack Days Silicon Valley, held once again at the Computer History Museum, carried a theme of industry maturity; we&8217;ve gone, as Mirantis CEO and co-Founder Alex Freedland said in his introductory remarks, from wondering if OpenStack was going to catch on to wondering where containers fit into the landscape to talking about production environments of both OpenStack and containers.

Here&8217;s a look at what you missed.
OpenStack: What Next?
OpenStack Foundation Executive Director Jonathan Bryce started the day off talking about the future of OpenStack. He&8217;s been traveling the globe visiting user groups and OpenStack Days events, watching as the technology takes hold in different parts of the world, but his predictions were less about what OpenStack could do and more about what people — and other projects &8212; could do with it.

Standard frameworks, he said, provided the opportunity for large numbers of developers to create entirely new categories. For example, before the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) the web was largely made up of static pages, not the dynamic applications we have now. Android and iOS provided common frameworks that enable developers to release millions of apps a year, supplanting purpose-built machinery with a simple smartphone.

To make that happen, though, the community had to do two things: collaborate and scale. Just as the components of LAMP worked together, OpenStack needed to collaborate with other projects, such as Kubernetes, to reach its potential.

As for scaling, Jonathan pointed out that historically, OpenStack has been difficult to set up. It’s important to make success easier to duplicate. While there are incredible success stories out there, with some users using thousands of nodes, those users originally had to go through a lot of iterations and errors. For future developments, Jonathan felt it was important to share information about errors made, so that others can learn from those mistakes, making OpenStack easier to use.

To that end, the OpenStack foundation is continuing to produce content to help with specific needs, such as explaining the business benefits to a manager to more complex topics such as security. He also talked about the need to raise the size of the talent pool, and about the ability for students to take the Certified OpenStack Administrator exam (or others like it) to prove their capabilities in the market.
User talks
One thing that was refreshing about OpenStack Days Silicon Valley was the number of user-given talks. On day one we heard from Walmart, SAP, and AT&T, all of which have significantly transformed their organizations through the use of OpenStack.

OpenStack, Sean Roberts explained, enabled Walmart to make applications that can heal themselves, with failure scenarios that have rules about how they can recover from those failures. In particular, WalmartLabs, the online end of the company, had been making great strides with OpenStack, and in particular with a devops tool called OneOps. The tool makes it possible for them to manage their large number of nodes easily, and he suggested that it might do even better as an independent project under OpenStack.

Markus Riedinger talked about SAP and how it had introduced OpenStack. After making 23 acquisitions in a small period of time, the company was faced with a diverse infrastructure that didn&8217;t lend itself to collaboration. In the last few years it has begun to move towards cloud based work and in 2013 it started to move towards using OpenStack. Now the company has a container-based OpenStack structure based on Puppet, providing a clean separation of control and data, and a fully automatic system with embedded analytics and pre-manufactured PODs for capacity extension. Their approach means that 1-2 people can take a data center from commissioned bare metal to an operational, scalable Kubernetes cluster running a fully configured OpenStack platform in less than a day.

Greg Stiegler discussed AT&T’s cloud journey, and Open Source and OpenStack at AT&T. He said that the rapid advancements in mobile data services have resulted in numerous benefits, and in turn this has exploded network traffic, with traffic expected to grow 10 times by 2020. To facilitate this growth, AT&T needed a platform, with a goal of remaining as close to trunk as possible to reduce technical debt. The result is the AT&T Integrated Cloud. Sarobh Saxena spoke about it at the OpenStack Summit in Austin earlier this year, but new today was the notion that the community effort should have a unified roadmap leader, with a strategy around containers that needs to be fully developed, and a rock solid core tent.

Greg finished up by saying that while AT&T doesn’t expect perfection, it does believe that OpenStack needs to be continually developed and strengthened. The company is grateful for what the community has always provided, and AT&T has provided an AT&T community team. Greg felt that the moral of his story was that by working together, community collaboration brings solutions at a faster rate, while weeding out mistakes through the experiences of others.
What venture capitalists think about open source
Well that got your attention, didn&8217;t it? It got the audience&8217;s attention too, as Martin Casado, a General Partner from Adreessen Horowitz, started the talk by saying that current prevailing wisdom is that infrastructure is dead. Why? Partly because people don’t understand what the cloud is, and partly because they think that if the cloud is free, then they think “What else is there to invest in?” Having looked into it he thinks that view is dead wrong, and even believes that newcomers now have an unfair advantage.

Martin (who in a former life was the creator of the “software defined” movement through the co-founding of SDN maker Nicira) said that for this talk, something is “software defined” if you can implement it in software and distribute it in software. For example, in the consumer space, the GPS devices have largely been replaced by software applications like Waze, which can be distributed to millions of phones, which themselves can run diverse apps to replace may functionalities that used to be &8220;wrapped in sheet metal&8221;.

He argued that infrastructure is following the same pattern. It used to be that the only common interface was internet or IP, but that we have seen a maturation of software that allows you to insert core infrastructure as software. Martin said that right now is one of these few times where there’s a market sufficient for building a company with a product that consists entirely of software. (You still, however, need a sales team, sorry.)

The crux of the matter, though, is that the old model for Open Source has changed. The old model for Open Source companies was being a support company, however, now many companies will use Open Source to access customers and get credibility, but the actual commercial offering they have is a service. Companies such as Github (which didn&8217;t even invent Git) doing this have been enormously successful.
And now a word from our sponsors…
The morning included several very short &8220;sponsor moments&8221;; two of which included very short tech talks.

The third was Michael Miller of Suse, who was joined onstage by Boris Renski from Mirantis. Together they announced that Mirantis and Suse would be collaborating with each other to provide support for SLES as both hosts and guests in Mirantis OpenStack, which already supports Ubuntu and Oracle Linux.

“At this point, there is only one conspicuous partner missing from this equation,” Renski said. Not to worry, he continued. SUSE has an expanded support offering, so in addition to supporting SUSE hosts, through the new partnership, Mirantis/SUSE customers with CentOS and RHEL hosts can also get support. “Mirantis is now a one-stop shop for supporting OpenStack.”

Meanwhile, Sujal Das, SVP of Marketing for Netronome, discussed networking and security and the many industry reports that highlight the importance of zero-trust defense security, with each VM and application needing to be trusted. OpenStack enables centralised control and automation in these types of deployments, but there are some challenges when using OVS and connection tracking, which affect VMs and the efficiency of the server. Ideally, you would like line red performance, but Netronome did some tests that show you do not get that performance with zero-trust security and OpenStack. Netronome is working on enhancements and adaptations to assist with this.

Finally, Evan Mouzakitis of Data Dog gave a great explanation of how you can look at events that happen when you are using OpenStack more closely to see not only what happened, but why. Evan explained that OpenStack uses RabbitMQ by default for message passing, and that once you can listen to that, you can know a lot more about what’s happening under the hood, and a lot more about the events that are occurring. (Hint: go to http://dtdg.co/nova-listen.)
Containers, containers, containers
Of course, the main thrust was OpenStack and containers, and there was no shortage of content along those lines.
Craig McLuckie of Google and Brandon Philips of CoreOS sat down with Sumeet Singh of AppFormix to talk about the future of OpenStack, namely the integration of OpenStack and Kubernetes. Sumeet started this discussion swiftly, asking Craig and Brandon “If we have Kubernetes, why do we need OpenStack?”

Craig said that enterprise needs hybrids of technologies, and that there is a lot of alignment between the two technologies, so both can be useful for enterprises. Brandon also said that there’s a large incumbent of virtual machine users and they aren’t going to go away.

There’s a lot of integration work, but also a lot of other work to do as a community. Some is the next level of abstraction – one of those things is rallying together to help software vendors to have a set of common standards for describing packages. Craig also believed that there’s a good opportunity to think about brokering of services and lifecycle management.

Craig also mentioned that he felt that we need to start thinking about how to bring the OpenStack and Cloud Native Computing foundations together and how to create working groups that span the two foundation’s boundaries.

In terms of using the two together, Craig said that from his experience he found that enterprises usually ask what it looks like to use the two. As people start to understand the different capabilities they shift towards it, but it’s very new and so it’s quite speculative right now.

Finally, Florian Leibert of Mesosphere, Andrew Randall of Tigera, Ken Robertson of Apcera, and Amir Levy of Gigaspaces sat down with Jesse Proudman of IBM to discuss &8220;The Next Container Standard&8221;.

Jesse started off the discussion by talking about how rapidly OpenStack has developed, and how in two short years containers have penetrated the marketplace. He questioned why that might be.

Some of the participants suggested that a big reason for their uptake is that containers drive adoption and help with inefficiencies, so customers can easily see how dynamic this field is in providing for their requirements.

A number of participants felt that containers are another wonderful tool in getting the job done and they’ll see more innovations down the road. Florian pointed out that containers were around before Docker, but what docker has done is that it has allowed individuals to use containers on their own websites. Containers are just a part of an evolution.

As far as Cloud Foundry vs Mesos or Kubernetes, most of the participants agreed that standard orchestration has allowed us to take a step higher in the model and that an understanding of the underlying tools can be used together &8212; as long as you use the right models. Amir argued that there is no need to take one specific technology’s corner, and that there will always be new technologies around the corner, but whatever we see today will be different tomorrow.

Of course there&8217;s the question of whether these technologies are complementary or competitive. Florian argued that it came down to religion, and that over time companies will often evolve to be very similar to one another. But if it is a religious decision, then who was making that decision?

The panel agreed that it is often the developers themselves who make decisions, but that eventually companies will choose to deliberately use multiple platforms or they will make a decision to use just one.

Finally, Jesse asked the panel about how the wishes of companies for a strong ROI affects OpenStack, leading to a discussion about the importance of really strong use cases, and showing customers how OpenStack can improve speed or flexibility.
Coming up
So now we head into day 2 of the conference, where it&8217;s all about thought leadership, community, and user stories. Look for commentary from users such as Tapjoy and thought leadership from voices such as James Staten from Microsoft, Luke Kanies of Puppet, and Adrian Cockroft of Battery Ventures.

The post DAY 1- OPENSTACK DAYS SILICON VALLEY 2016 appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
Quelle: Mirantis