Tag Archives: kubernetes

Paradigm shift of Dev to Storage Ops

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[ Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies presented at the event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views ]

A funny photo (below) came up on my Facebook feed a couple of weeks back. In an honest way, it depicted how a developer would think (or the lack of thinking) about the storage infrastructure designs and models for the applications and workloads. This also reminded me of how DBAs used to diss storage engineers. “I don’t care about storage, as long as it is RAID 10“. That was aeons ago 😉

The world of developers and the world of infrastructure people are vastly different. Since cloud computing birthed, both worlds have collided and programmable infrastructure-as-code (IAC) have become part and parcel of cloud native applications. Of course, there is no denying that there is friction.

Welcome to DevOps!

The Kubernetes factor

Containerized applications are quickly defining the cloud native applications landscape. The container orchestration machinery has one dominant engine – Kubernetes.

In the world of software development and delivery, DevOps has taken a liking to containers. Containers make it easier to host and manage life-cycle of web applications inside the portable environment. It packages up application code other dependencies into building blocks to deliver consistency, efficiency, and productivity. To scale to a multi-applications, multi-cloud with th0usands and even tens of thousands of microservices in containers, the Kubernetes factor comes into play. Kubernetes handles tasks like auto-scaling, rolling deployment, computer resource, volume storage and much, much more, and it is designed to run on bare metal, in the data center, public cloud or even a hybrid cloud.

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Hybrid is the new Black

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It is hard for enterprise to let IT go, isn’t it?

For years, we have seen the cloud computing juggernaut unrelenting in getting enterprises to put their IT into public clouds. Some of the biggest banks have put their faith into public cloud service providers. Close to home, Singapore United Overseas Bank (UOB) is one that has jumped into the bandwagon, signing up for VMware Cloud on AWS. But none will come bigger than the US government Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) project, where AWS and Azure are the last 2 bidders for the USD10 billion contract.

Confidence or lack of it

Those 2 cited examples should be big enough to usher enterprises to confidently embrace public cloud services, but many enterprises have been holding back. What gives?

In the past, it was a matter of confidence and the FUDs (fears, uncertainties, doubts). News about security breaches, massive blackouts have been widely spread and amplified to sensationalize the effects and consequences of cloud services. But then again, we get the same thing in poorly managed data centers in enterprises and government agencies, often with much less fanfare. We shrug our shoulder and say “Oh well!“.

The lack of confidence factor, I think, has been overthrown. The “Cloud First” strategy in enterprises in recent years speaks volume of the growing and maturing confidence in cloud services. The poor performance and high latency reasons, which were once an Achilles heel of cloud services, are diminishing. HPC-as-a-Service is becoming real.

The confidence in cloud services is strong. Then why is on-premises IT suddenly is a cool thing again? Why is hybrid cloud getting all the attention now?

Hybrid is coming back

Even AWS wants on-premises IT. Its Outposts offering outlines its ambition. A couple of years earlier, the Azure Stack was already made beachhead on-premises in its partnership with many server vendors. VMware, is in both on-premises and the public clouds. It has strong business and technology integration with AWS and Azure. IBM Cloud, Big Blue is thinking hybrid as well. 2 months ago, Dell jumped too, announcing Dell Technologies Cloud with plenty of a razzmatazz, using all the right moves with its strong on-premises infrastructure portfolio and its crown jewel of the federation, VMware. Continue reading →

Minio – the minimalist object storage technology

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The Marie Kondo Konmari fever is sweeping the world. Her decluttering and organizing the home methods are leading to a new way of life – Minimalism.

Complicated Storage Experience

Storage technology and its architecture are complex. We layer upon layer of abstraction and virtualization into storage design until at some stage, choke points lead to performance degradation, and management becomes difficult.

I recalled a particular training I attended back in 2006. I just joined Hitachi Data Systems for the Shell GUSto project. I was in Baltimore for the Hitachi NAS course. This was not their HNAS (their BlueArc acquisition) but their home grown NAS based on Linux. In the training, we were setting up NFS service. There were 36 steps required to setup and provision NFS and if there was a misstep, you start from the first command again. Coming from NetApp at the time, it was horrendous. NetApp ONTAP NFS setup and provisioning probably took 3 commands, and this Hitachi NAS setup and configuration was so much more complex. In the end, the experience was just unworldly for me.

Introducing Minio to my world, to Malaysia

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Pondering Redhat’s future with IBM

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I woke up yesterday morning with a shocker of a news. IBM announced that they were buying Redhat for USD34 billion. Never in my mind that Redhat would sell but I guess that USD190.00 per share was too tempting. Redhat (RHT) was trading at USD116.68 on the previous Friday’s close.

Redhat is one of my favourite technology companies. I love their Linux development and progress, and I use a lot of Fedora and CentOS in my hobbies. I started with Redhat back in 2000, when I became obsessed to get my RHCE (Redhat Certified Engineer). I recalled on almost every weekend (Saturday and Sunday) back in 2002 when I was in the office, learning Redhat, and hacking scripts to be really good at it. I got certified with RHCE 4 with a 96% passing mark, and I was very proud of my certification.

One of my regrets was not joining Redhat in 2006. I was offered the job as an SE by Josep Garcia, and the very first position in Malaysia. Instead, I took up the Hitachi Data Systems job to helm the project implementation and delivery for the Shell GUSto project. It might have turned out differently if I did.

The IBM acquisition of Redhat left a poignant feeling in me. In many ways, Redhat has been the shining star of Linux. They are the only significant one left leading the charge of open source. They are the largest contributors to the Openstack projects and continue to support the project strongly whilst early protagonists like HPE, Cisco and Intel have reduced their support. They are of course, the perennial top 3 contributors to the Linux kernel since the very early days. And Redhat continues to contribute to projects such as containers and Kubernetes and made that commitment deeper with their recent acquisition of CoreOS a few months back.

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Cloud silos after eliminating silos

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I love cloud computing. I love the economics and the agility of the cloud and how it changed IT forever. The cloud has solved some of the headaches of IT, notably the silos in operations, the silos in development and the silos in infrastructure.

The virtualization and abstraction of rigid infrastructures and on-premise operations have given birth to X-as-a-Service and Cloud Services. Along with this, comes cloud orchestration, cloud automation, policies, DevOps and plenty more. IT responds well to this and thus, public clouds services like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platforms are dominating the landscape. Other cloud vendors like Rackspace, SoftLayer, Alibaba Cloud are following the leaders pack offering public, private, hybrid and specialized services as well.

In this pile, we can now see the certain “camps” emerging. Many love Azure Stack and many adore AWS Lambda. Google just had their summit here in Malaysia yesterday, appealing to a green field and looking for new adopters. What we are seeing is we have customers and end users adopting various public cloud services providers, their services, their ecosystem, their tools, their libraries and so on. We also know that many customers and end users having several applications on AWS, and some on Azure and perhaps looking for better deals with another cloud vendor. Multi-cloud is becoming flavour of the season, and that word keeps appearing in presentations and conversations.

Yes, multi-cloud is a good thing. Customers and end users would love it because they can get the most bang for their buck, if only … it wasn’t so complicated. There aren’t many “multi-cloud” platforms out there yet. Continue reading →