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Oct
22ndHello Again : My life up to this point
This post is a catch-up for all the stuff I should have written about but didn’t in the last few weeks. For those that don’t know, I recently moved from EMC over to VMware into a brand new kind of role. Right now I am caught in the trifecta of learning a new company, meeting new teams, and trying to help bootstrap my own with recruiting and design work. Which results in my blog getting a lack of attention. But, all that is going to change. My new mission with this blog is to just start dumping from my brain a combination of what I am playing with and what I have discovered along the way. I am working on tools and special things for the cloud community at large. But these will take a bit of time to see the light of day. So my new post will be titled: “Nick’s Distractions” – and will be a summary of mildly interesting topics that distracted me somehow during my week. So here is my first catch-up: Project Razor: Razor has exploded way bigger than I expected. Funny how solving personal problems can result in public acceptance. The current forks are over 50+ and watchers are almost 200 on the github repo(https://github.com/puppetlabs/Razor). This is just awesome, as I had always envisioned Razor as being truly powerful when it becomes a part of an open community that contributes 99.99% of the code and design. Now for the updates: 1. I was lucky [...]
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May
21stLex Parsimoniae : Cloud Provisioning with a Razor
Blogging has been very difficult for me over the last 4 months. My move to the Office of the CTO within EMC changed much of what I did and left me searching for content I could write about. Most of what I was dealing with on a daily basis was either too early to mention or too secret to reveal. Today, this changes with the release of a project I have spent the majority of my days and nights working on this year. Without long-worded wind up I am proud to announce the release of Razor, a cloud-provisioning tool to change the way we look at provisioning hardware for cloud stacks. Razor is a software application, which is a combination of Ruby (main logic) and Node.js (API, Image Service) for rapidly provisioning operating systems and hypervisors for BOTH physical and virtual servers. It is designed to make standing up the base substrate underneath cloud deployments both simple and transactional. Now at this point, many of you are thinking: “Great, another *cloud* provisioning tool.” And I don’t blame you at all. So what makes Razor different than many other tools out there like Cobbler, Dell’s Crowbar, or other deployment services? Just about everything. The real answer to that question is related to the reason this project is named Razor. We based much of our design theory after Ockham’s razor. It is based on the belief that OS/hypervisor deployment should be simple, succinct, and incredibly flexible. Many products out there try to [...]
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Feb
27thGuest Spot : The Cloudcast(.NET)
Last night I was lucky enough to be a guest on the Cloudcast(.NET) with cloud experts Brian Gracely and Aaron Delp. We covered the trip to VMware PEX, CloudConnect, and a little bit on DevOps (when I would stay on topic). Brian & Aaron’s podcast has quickly become the best source for interesting discussions related to Cloud. You can hear the latest episode here: CloudCast Episode 33 .nick
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Jan
4thThe late recap post : AKA Top 7 things I learned in 20112011 was a banner year for me in accomplishing great things and learning new lessons. To recap my 2011 I thought I would share: Top 7 Things I Learned in 2011 1. I must be doing something right This is the obligatory stats part of my list. Comparing 2011 to 2010 I doubled my visits, unique visitors, and pageviews. Time on site went up about 33% per visit which may just be because I cleaned up the look and made it easier to find stuff. The most interesting thing is my traffic has been much higher in the last half of this year. It is yet to be seen if I can keep this up in 2012.
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Mar
18thExcited about EMCWorld 2011? : Show it off
I was working on something completely different when I realized some of the code/graphics I had put together would look quite cool as a screensaver. So if you are a fan of the cloud, a fan of EMC, or even just a fan of slick multi-monitor screensavers; give my new EMCWorld 2011 screensaver a shot. Couple of details: It is hardware accelerated. I can’t guarantee the frame rate on weaker graphics chips. All mine are beefy. It is multi-monitor capable. Looks great on my 3 monitors. Works is all the resolutions I could try. You can have different resolutions on different monitors also. Each monitor gets a different randomized effect which looks quite cool. Reminds you every once in a while about EMCWorld 2011 being the place where Big Data and Cloud are going to meet. I don’t have a Mac version yet and probably won’t since I don’t own a Mac (I know, my team shuns me for this…) Video: EMCWorld 2011 Screensaverfrom Nicholas Weaver on Vimeo. And the download: EMCWorld 2011 UBER Screensaver Installation Instructions: Download Unzip Right click as an Administrator and click ‘Install’ Open up Screensaver settings and select ‘EMCWorld 2011’ Disclaimer: This screensaver is neither endorsed nor supported by anyone at EMC. It is solely the product of me, an overactive and slightly strange geek. Comments rock my world. Thanks .nick
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Jan
15thFistful of Cloud : Interactive Cloud Demo
This project start to finish was just over one week. I had a three day birthday weekend where I did the bulk of the work and then spent evenings till early AM finishing this up. And without a doubt this was the most fun to create. Really this blog post is a really a *video* blog post so without further ado I present:
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