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Jun
5thQuick Videos : Razor Webinar & MoreThis is just a quick post with some videos relevant to the Razor project. First off is the Puppet Webinar around Razor with live demo and Q & A. Puppet Razor Webinar Next is a couple videos generated using Gource to show the work on both the Razor project and the Razor Microkernel project. Just for fun but pretty cool stuff: .nick
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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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Dec
17thIT, Silos, Cloud, & You : What do you want to be when Cloud grows up?
Senior Developers, Network Admins, Virtualization Architect, Security folks, and more – in the world of skilled labor in IT there sometimes seem to be more common boxes we like to place people in than most other fields. These boxes exist partly due to the fact that the CFO/HR/recruiting folks need nicely written job descriptions to map resources and maybe a little bit because of how people assume these position – through the fires of a limited education systems and bootstrap-yanking from the bottom. Regardless of why, we organize skilled people into buckets in much the same way everyone else is world is either an accountant, attorney, marketing expert, business analyst, or any specialty therein.
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Nov
28thNow for something completely different : Ubuntu 11.10, KVM, & VLAN trunking
Sometimes the path to learn something means using very different tools along the way. In my case, I have been learning more on the developing virtual network world along with some of the new DevOps toolsets popping up. As part of this I have started using KVM as a hypervisor on an Ubuntu 11.10 platform in a portion of my home lab. I have learned quickly that getting something simple done in vSphere can be a bit of a chore in the KVM world. But on the flipside, KVM has been a fun learning experience in understanding virtualization in a more raw format. One of these challenges I have decided to share is a simple one. I was wanting to play with the Dell-created DevOps deployment tool: Crowbar. Crowbar is an wrapper for OpsCode Chef Server. While a pretty slick little utility to research in the cloud deployment and automation space; one glaring problem is it is designed to run on Dell PowerEdge servers. Since I don’t have PowerEdge servers lying around anymore I needed to run this in a virtual machine. This in itself isn’t a huge problem as a virtual machine can pretty much match most of the logical hardware pieces needed. But, the one problem I ran into was that Crowbar out of the box likes to have a couple interfaces with the ability to tag VLANs itself. In a bare-metal world connecting 802.1q trunk ports to a server is pretty common. And even in the VMware [...]
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Mar
26thDevOps & IT Skills : Guest Appearance on The Cloudcast (.net)
I had the privilege a little over a week ago of being a guest on the The Cloudcast (.net) podcast that is hosted by Aaron Delp and Brian Gracely. This is my first podcast appearance and was a real honor to be a part of it. I was interviewed on my past experience with Operations and Development processes alignment and the DevOps moment in IT today (see my post on my experiences here). I also was asked about the trend in skillsets within the Infrastructure world. Brian and Aaron have really put together a nice format for the show and go here to listen to my episode and more. .nick
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Sep
30thVision of a creator : The silent revolution in Technology
This post is going to do a couple things I don’t like to do. I am going to use myself as an example. I don’t mind sharing experiences or relaying what I care about. But, I find too much public self-reflection is vain and not much value to others. But I don’t know how else to write this without referring to my own personal experience and approach I have taken, unplanned as it was. So I ask your forgiveness early in this post. I am nothing special and hold no special wisdom or natural ability over you. I may or may not be looking simply from a different perspective. And the only way any solution is solved, improved, or discovered is through approaching from different angles and/or dumb luck.
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