devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Category: IT as Code

Nerdio Unfurls Management Tools for WVD on Azure

Nerdio has launched a management tool that makes it easier to provision large numbers of virtual desktops on the Microsoft Azure public cloud.

Company CEO Vadim Vladimirskiy said that now that Microsoft is finally encouraging organizations to embrace desktop virtualization in the form of its Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) service, there is a need for tools to manage all those desktops.

Nerdio Manager for WVD fills that gap by providing support for, among other things, dynamic host pools that automatically grow and shrink depending on workload and desktop images that can be employed across thousands of users.

Vladimirskiy said Nerdio Manager for WVD runs natively on Azure, which among other things allows all the data it collects to remain within the geo-boundaries of the selected Azure region. No additions to an Azure subscription are required to store that data, he noted.

Fresh off raising an additional $8 million in funding, Nerdio is riding the coattails of a relatively newfound enthusiasm at Microsoft for virtual desktops. While the concept of a virtual desktop has been around for the better part of two decades, Microsoft has only been encouraging IT organizations to embrace virtual desktops since the WVD Service became available on Azure in the last several months. Previously, Windows licensing restrictions tended to make virtual desktops less economically attractive.

Rather than organizations relying on Citrix or VMware for virtual desktops, Microsoft is now making a case for employing its Azure cloud service to subscribe to virtual desktops as a less complicated alternative that also supports both Windows 10 and Windows 7. That means IT teams that embrace Windows 7 on Azure will be supported by Microsoft.

It’s not clear to what degree Windows desktops will move into the cloud now that Microsoft has embraced the concept. In addition, it’s also worth noting that rivals such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) now provide similar desktop virtualization services. What is clear is many fewer instances of Windows will be running locally as more organizations determine it might be easier for them to manage Windows desktops via the cloud than on each individual machine. At the same time, many organizations are also looking at ways to more easily enable remote computing to help limit potential employee exposure to the COVID-19 virus.

Whatever the path forward, it’s not likely large enterprise IT organizations will make the jump to WVD or any other cloud service all at once. IT administrators may find themselves managing a hybrid desktop computing environment for many years to come. There are also, of course, organizations operating in highly regulated industries where virtual desktops running on a public cloud are simply not an option.

Nevertheless, it’s apparent the time when IT administrators had to spend time visiting individual desktop machines is coming to an end. The management of both virtual desktops and physical endpoints is becoming more automated with each passing day. The only real question is what degree of automation can be achieved based on where the desktop actually resides.

— Mike Vizard

March 11, 2020
Survey Finds IT More Challenging to Manage Than Ever

A survey of 415 IT executives published today shows IT teams are struggling to keep up as the number of platforms that need to be managed continues to expand rapidly.

Conducted by Propeller Insights on behalf of Volterra, a provider of a distributed computing platform, the survey finds 97% are planning to distribute workloads across two or more clouds. The top three reasons cited for adopting multiple clouds were the need to maximize availability and reliability (63%), meeting regulatory and compliance requirements (47%), and leveraging best-of-breed services from each provider (42%).

At the same time, the survey finds 70% of survey respondents said it’s “very important” to have a consistent operational experience between the edge and public and private clouds.

The survey, however, also makes it clear IT leaders understand that achieving the goal will be a significant challenge. The top issues identified when employing multiple clouds are establishing secure and reliable connectivity between providers (60%), employing different support and consulting processes (54%) and navigating different platform services (53%).

The rise of edge computing is going to further exacerbate those challenges. The survey finds the difficulty in managing apps across multiple edge locations (44%) and an inability to accommodate the IT infrastructure needed to host and operate at the edge (38%) as the two major edge computing issues identified by survey respondents. In terms of specific technical challenges identified, integrating cloud-native workflows such as automation, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and performance management (69%) and trouble installing a full set of application infrastructure spanning compute, storage and network and security (67%) top the list of issues.

As far as lifecycle management at the edge is concerned, the two biggest long-term issues identified are the lack of resources or time to keep applications and infrastructure up to date (37%) and managing silos of distributed clusters (26%).

Mark Weiner, chief marketing officer for Volterra, said the survey makes it clear there soon will come a day when IT organizations will need to centralize the management of an increasingly extended enterprise. IT organizations may have adopted public clouds aggressively, yet 70% to 80% of all workloads still run in an on-premises IT environment. At the same time, the number of workloads that will be distributed to edge computing platforms is set to explode. The survey identifies the primary reasons more workloads will be deployed on the edge as the need to control and analyze data locally (54%) and the amount of latency experienced when sending edge data to public cloud-based apps (47%).

Ultimately, the goal is to have a hybrid cloud computing environment through which the management of IT is as centralized as possible. While the cost of deploying workloads in a public cloud is comparatively inexpensive, it turns out the total cost of IT continues to increase as IT teams find themselves managing more distributed platforms than ever. It may be a while before IT teams have the tools and processes in place to rein in those costs. However, at this point, it’s more a question of how and when that goal will be accomplished, not if.

— Mike Vizard

March 9, 2020
Zoho Offers Free SaaS Apps to Combat Coronavirus Spread

Zoho today announced it is making available for free a bundle of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications dubbed Remotely through July 1.

Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist for Zoho, said Remotely is a humanitarian gesture to help mitigate the impact of a global coronavirus epidemic. Remotely comprises a set of productivity and collaboration applications that users can access in as little as five minutes.

Included in Remotely are productivity, collaboration and project management applications as well as tools that automate the migration of data into the Zoho cloud platform.

Vergesna said Remotely also addresses cybersecurity concerns by enabling IT teams to apply security controls to the data that employees are allowed to access. Of course, IT organizations in many cases would still need to make sure the network connections being employed to access SaaS applications are secure.

Now that many local governments are recommending that organizations allow employees to work from home to help limit the spread of the coronavirus outbreak, many IT administrators are scrambling to provide remote access to applications at scale. It’s one thing to provide access to a small number of employees who might travel intermittently, but it’s quite another to support an entire remote workforce for some unknown period of time.

Vergesna, however, said that at this point the challenges associated with making that transition have a lot more to do with overcoming cultural issues than they do the technology. Much of the transition to Zoho SaaS applications has been automated, he said.

It remains to be seen to what degree the coronavirus outbreak might accelerate the transition to cloud applications. Many IT administrators are still managing local instances of Windows servers to deliver applications because the time and effort to migrate to SaaS applications have been substantial. Making those on-premises applications available remotely at scale is not only challenging from a technical perspective, but it’s also expensive.

Of course, Zoho is far from being the only provider of SaaS productivity and collaboration applications. However, it remains to be seen whether other providers will follow Zoho’s lead. The hope each of these vendors has is that once the coronavirus crisis passes many of the organizations that take advantage of their software to enable employees to work from home will start paying to use that software.

In the meantime, the economic impact of the coronavirus is likely to be staggering. Conferences are being canceled and face-to-face business meetings are being shifted online. It’s hard to say how many of those meetings are likely to stay there for good. At the very least, many more end users are about out to discover just how rich SaaS application environments have become. In many cases, IT teams will stitch together workflows across a range of SaaS applications using application programming interfaces (APIs). The challenge they will face is acquiring the programming skills required to construct those workflows.

— Mike Vizard

March 6, 2020
Mission Makes AWS Expertise Available for Free

Mission, a provider of managed services for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, this week announced it will make its cloud optimization expertise available free of charge for any IT organization that acquires AWS licenses through it.

Alex Beal, director of product for Mission, said as cloud sprawl continues to be an issue, many internal IT teams simply don’t have the expertise required to rein in those costs. However, rather than charge extra for the expertise Mission will now make its tools and consultants available for free under the auspices of the Mission Cloud Foundation service to any organization that employs Mission to acquire AWS licenses, he said, noting every Cloud Foundation customer will get access to a designated Mission Cloud Analyst who will provide regular account reviews and guidance on implementing best practices.

Mission can provide the free service because it acquires licenses from AWS at a lower cost. Effectively, AWS is paying for the services being provided by Mission, said Beal.

As more workloads move into the public cloud, IT teams are struggling to navigate a complex mix of service levels from AWS that range from spot pricing options to reserved instances that can be licensed for specific periods of time at a deep discount. However, determining which workloads lend themselves best to various AWS pricing options can be challenging to determine, especially for developers who spin up virtual machines without consulting with internal IT teams. Collectively, organizations are wasting millions of dollars each year because of suboptimal usage of public cloud resources. Beal estimated that the average IT organization is wasting about $5,000 a year on cloud infrastructure resources that could be better allocated to other IT initiatives.

Beal said Mission will work with those internal IT teams to identify unused resources and rightsizing candidates, set up budget alerts and recommend better options for specific types of workloads using a combination of monitoring tools from third parties such as CloudHealth and one developed by Mission. Those monitoring tools are also employed to enforce budget constraints and run security checks.

Mission Cloud Foundation also includes tools to reallocate charges, reference purchase order numbers and set up automated custom reports.

Most IT organizations could develop much of this expertise on their own. However, Beal said most IT teams also have better things to do with their time that add more value to their organization. Instead of acquiring licenses direct from AWS, Mission is making a case for an alternative approach that provides a level of service and support that AWS generally only provides to Global 2000 customers.

Other managed services providers (MSPs) may or may not also provide tools and expertise free of charge. Savvy IT teams, however, may soon force the issue. After all, while public cloud represents the most widely employed form of IT infrastructure as code, from a cost perspective it’s also clear public clouds can also quite easily become too much of a good thing.

— Mike Vizard

March 5, 2020
Quest Software Expands MDM Cloud Reach

Quest Software today extended the reach of its mobile device management (MDM) service to provide more granular control over mobile devices and applications in addition to being able to track their location.

Capabilities being added to the KACE Cloud MDM service include support for a “Kiosk Mode” for Android devices that allows administrators to lock down a device and limit activity to a specific application or task, as well as a Disallowed Apps feature that brings the same level of blacklisting capability to Android devices that currently exists for Apple iOS devices.

Quest Software has also added file encryption tools for MacOS devices and extended the multi-tenant capabilities of cloud service to enable profiles to be applied within Apple Business Manager or Apple School Manager.

Jody Evans, product manager for KACE Cloud MDM at Quest Software, said the latest updates to the service are intended to make it easier for IT teams to manage a broad range of mobile computing devices using a cloud service they don’t have to deploy and manage.

Longer-term, the goal for most IT teams will be to unify endpoint management as much as possible relying on cloud services. In the meantime, most organizations will continue to rely on a mix of cloud services and local appliances to manage endpoints, said Evans.

It’s not clear to what degree or at what rate IT organizations are unifying the management of endpoints. Internal IT teams tend to manage desktops and laptops. Mobile computing devices such as tablets and smartphones, however, are often managed via portals provided by telecommunications carriers or managed service providers (MSPs).

Competition across the IT systems management category is naturally fierce. The KACE product line has been around since 2003, when the company developed appliances to automate the management of Windows desktops. In 2010, Dell acquired KACE Networks and in 2012 it acquired Quest Software, which, along with KACE Networks and SonicWall, became part of Dell Software. At roughly the same time, VMware, also part of Dell, had also been expanding its reach into the realm of MDM via acquisitions.

To help raise the cash needed to take Dell private, Quest Software and SonicWall were formally separated into two separate companies that were sold to venture capital firms. The KACE product line remained with Quest Software. Since then, Quest Software has been gradually rolling out instances of its portfolio that are delivered as a cloud service.

At the same time, however, ITSM is being transformed by the rise of DevOps. While most endpoints are still managed using service desks based on ITIL frameworks that typically rely on job tickets to manage tasks, many of the mobile applications that reside on those platforms are being managed using DevOps processes to deliver a richer end user experience faster. It’s not at all clear to what degree the management of endpoints using ITIL processes and mobile applications using DevOps processes will converge.

In the meantime, reliance on mobile applications and devices continues to increase. Many end users now spend more time on tablets and smartphones than they do in front of traditional desktop systems. The challenge IT teams now face is determining the best way to manage an IT endpoint landscape that has never been more diverse or complex.

— Mike Vizard

March 3, 2020
Lenovo Looks to Automate Edge Computing

Lenovo is extending its IT automation framework for provisioning IT infrastructure out to edge computing platforms.

Charles Ferland, vice president and general manager for networking and communications service providers at Lenovo Data Center Group, said the Lenovo Open Cloud Automation (LOC-A) framework provides a single pane of glass through which IT teams can not only provision IT infrastructure but also invoke other frameworks to automate, for example, the deployment of virtual machines on top of that IT infrastructure.

Ferland said while there are plenty of frameworks for automating the deployment of virtual machines, many IT teams will spend weeks manually provisioning IT infrastructure. LOC-A provides a mechanism to reduce the time and effort required to minutes. However, rather than completely reinvent the IT automation wheel, Lenovo decided to also integrate LOC-A with frameworks such as Ansible, Puppet and Chef, he said, noting that approach makes it possible for IT teams to adopt LOC-A without having to replace any of the IT automation frameworks they already might have in place.

LOC-A can also be extended to edge computing platforms other than ones provided by Lenovo, he added.

Beyond simply reducing the amount of time required to provision IT infrastructure, Ferland noted LOC-A also serves to reduce errors that typically occur when IT teams manually provision IT infrastructure. In many cases, those configuration errors can lead to cybersecurity issues later. Of course, many IT teams have developed custom scripts to automate the provisioning of IT infrastructure. However, most of those scripts don’t scale and are poorly documented, noted Ferland. When a member of the IT team that wrote the script leaves the company, often the IT team left behind must develop another script. In many cases, IT personnel view the scripts they develop as a tool that belongs to them rather than the company that hired them. Ferland said the primary goal is to provide a scalable IT automation framework that helps IT teams further advance the adoption of best DevOps practices.

Ferland said Lenovo developed LOC-A to provide a cloud-like experience for on-premises IT infrastructure that is similar to what IT teams experience when provisioning IT infrastructure on a public cloud computing platform. LOC-A is currently being employed by telecommunications carriers including T-Systems.

It’s no coincidence Lenovo’s decision to extend LOC-A to the edge comes at a time when carriers are creating 5G networks that require applications to be processed in real-time as close to where data is created. Those edge computing platforms are going to be deployed in, for example, locations that IT teams are not going to be able to physically reach easily.

It’s unclear to what degree IT automation frameworks might induce IT teams to standardize on IT infrastructure at the edge. Lenovo, however, clearly views providing this capability as a means to differentiate its platforms at a time when there is currently very little standardization at the edge. The challenge, of course, is the less standardization at the edge there is, the more difficult it becomes to manage.

— Mike Vizard

March 3, 2020
OpsRamp Adds Recommendation Engine to AIOps Platform

OpsRamp added a recommendation engine to its artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) platform that makes use of predictive analytics to suggest potential actions to either improve performance or avert downtime.

The OpsRamp Winter 2020 Release also adds 19 cloud monitoring integrations for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), along with dynamic topology maps for Azure and GCP. OpsRamp currently provides integrations with more than 120 different cloud services.

Finally, OpsRamp has added an ability to detect seasonality patterns that would otherwise generate alerts, an Alert Stats widget that makes it easier to keep track of raw alerts, synthetic monitoring and agentless discovery and monitoring of Windows Server instances.

Bhanu Singh, senior vice president of engineering and DevOps at OpsRamp, said as IT continues to become more complex resistance to AI within the ranks of IT staffs is declining. Organizations realize that IT specialists are an expensive resource, so they need to maximize the capabilities of IT generalists as much as possible, he said. OpsQ Recommend Mode adds a predictive analytics module to the company software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for managing IT that provides explainable and transparent analytical recommendations to help the average IT administrator head off issues that would require a specialist to solve later, said Singh.

That visibility is critical because it still leaves the decision about what to automate in the hands of the IT administrator. However, as OpsRamp continues to learn the nuances of the IT environment, the more confidence IT administrators will have in the recommendations being surfaced, he said.

It takes about 24 to 48 hours for the OpsRamp platform to learn enough about an IT environment to start surfacing recommendations, Singh noted, adding because OpsRamp is a SaaS platform, setting up the platform requires minimal effort.

To some degree an increased reliance on AI among IT professionals is inevitable. AI may never eliminate the need for IT personnel, but many of the mind-numbing rote tasks that IT administrators perform today soon will be automated. The challenge that creates, however, is the IT staff needs to be able to manage IT at a higher level, which means many entry-level jobs in the IT sector may no longer be required. The challenge then becomes finding IT professionals who have the right level of skills, when many of the entry-level jobs for which they have been trained no longer exist.

In the meantime, a race is clearly on to infuse IT management platforms with machine learning algorithms. Startups such as OpsRamp are looking to supplant legacy IT platforms that were designed for a previous era of IT. However, the providers of those platforms are clearly investing heavily in AI as part of their ongoing modernization efforts. Each IT organization will need to decide for themselves to what degree the rise of AI warrants switching management platforms.

Regardless of the platform selected, however, the one thing IT teams can count on is that AI platforms are only going to get smarter as they continue to evolve.

— Mike Vizard

March 2, 2020
Challenges with the Rapid Adoption of Cloud-Native Technologies

To keep pace with the ever-changing digital landscape, today’s enterprises are trying to move to the cloud as fast as possible. As more and more companies move toward implementing cloud native and open source technologies to enable agility and increased time-to-value, the operational impacts to the business can be significant. While these challenges can cause serious setbacks and complexity, if an organization addresses them from the very beginning as part of its cloud strategy, it can overcome any trial.

The following are top challenges enterprises may face when rapidly adopting cloud native technologies.

Intense Competition and Market Pressure

As businesses fight to keep their competitive edge, they are feeling significant pressure to adopt new initiatives to achieve greater business velocity. New initiatives such as data analytics, data science and cloud computing are being leveraged by organizations to gain an advantage while disrupting how businesses have traditionally been performed.

Lack of Maturity and Interoperability of Many Open Source Technologies

Understanding the cloud landscape is a critical component for kicking off any digital transformation project, but the state of each technology varies significantly. Because so many of these technologies are open source, getting a true understanding of maturity can be challenging. Some solutions are in very early stages with low commercial adoption and support, while other solutions are at a later stage and much more mature.

Unfortunately, most of these technologies were not built to ensure interoperability from the beginning and the efforts of jamming together multiple disparate solutions from the cloud native landscape is complex and rife with challenges. This is why it is imperative that modern organizations ensure its solutions are enterprise-grade, ready to scale and nearly fool-proof to challenges.

No Clear Best Practices or Architectural Standards

Because many of these new technologies lack maturity, the right information and proper documentation is scattered and difficult to distill. How can developers trust if an application is safe to include in their implementation if they are unsure whether documentation is correct and up-to-date? Since many of these open source technologies do not have well-defined best practices or architectural standards, implementing these solutions can be a huge business risk.

Limited Choices for Leveraging External Domain Expertise and Support

In order to ensure that organizations’ Day 2 operations go smoothly, they need the right expertise to provide guidance and support. Unfortunately, because so many of these technologies are new, there is a very limited pool of talent—both internally and externally—organizations can pull from. Organizations need the right technical support and services to operate and scale effectively, and with limited options available, the complexities of long term success can be a huge barrier.

The Complexity of Managing Ongoing Operations

Implementation is just the beginning, what really enables businesses to be successful with any digital transformation initiative is tackling ongoing Day 2 operations. This means ensuring that technologies work well together, the team understands how to leverage the technologies and organizations have an operational readiness plan for continued development and ongoing improvement. So many businesses focus their attention on what happens before production and as a result, success is not always achieved.

When beginning a cloud native journey, enterprises must be conscious of the inherent challenges rapid adoption poses. Competition, lack of maturity and best practices, limited choices and complexity can all complicate an enterprise’s journey to the cloud. Awareness of potential problems can help stop issues before they arise while easing the transition to the cloud.

— Tobi Knaup

March 2, 2020
Castles in the Cloud: How to Take Your Business Kingdom Off-Prem with Confidence
Cloud transformation requires migrating all or part of an organization’s virtual assets off-premises, typically to a public cloud. This enables greater efficiency and cost savings, among other benefits, but it brings heightened risk as well. At the same time, many organizations moving to the cloud don’t fully understand the implications in terms of security. Consequently, successful cloud migration requires a shift in mindset.

A Medieval Metaphor for Cloud Infrastructure

Think of your organization as a kingdom surrounded and protected by a castle. Traditionally, this castle would be outfitted with defensive layers designed to protect the residents, the royal family and the possessions within. Protection of the castle is straightforward. A moat surrounds the castle with drop bridges in and out at strategic points (firewalls).

In addition, guards are stationed at each entry point, conducting a thorough inspection of the people, carts and the content that they carry both in and out of the castle (IDS/IPS). The guards also check credentials at the gates and within the castle to ensure patrons are cleared for access and use of rooms and resources (IAM). The perimeter and interior walls are continuously checked for weaknesses that could introduce potential blind spots that are unguarded (vulnerability management).

The castle has a variety of rooms, each with its own function, content and worth. Each door has a lock (AV). Within each room and the correlative hallways exist guards who check credentials, monitor the people who enter and the contents they carry, etc. (behavioral detection and endpoints). In addition, multiple other measures are in place that bolster prevention, detection and response capabilities (DLP, deception, etc.). Information from all of these sources is noted in a central location by a scribe. Guards analyze the information, looking for additional indicators of potential threats to the kingdom (SIEM) and respond accordingly.

Comprehensively, protection of the kingdom requires an overall model and policies that accounts for new threats and tactics from rival kingdoms and thieves. Architecture of security measures are continuously updated and adaptable. In the event of an incident, the guards have designed and exercised a plan to respond.

Understanding the Three Different Models of Cloud

Clearly, this is a basic metaphor for the on-prem approach. Moving to the cloud introduces a new level of complexity to protection spread across three different models: Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS) or Software as a service (SaaS).

In the context of our castle analogy, let’s assume the castle has reached productive capacity. Neighboring rivals are creating competitive pressures, offering residents (who pay taxes) the possibility of a better life if they relocate. To keep residents happy, productivity requires expansion beyond castle walls. As production expands, neighboring kingdoms offer different models to achieve productivity. However, each model presents different levels of shared responsibility in protection (referred to as the Shared Responsibility Model).
- IaaS: In this model, the on-premises kingdom (kingdom A) decides to expand all operations to a neighboring castle (kingdom B). The castle itself and the moats are all controlled and provided by kingdom B. However, the infrastructure, moats, hallways, rooms, access lists, monitoring of activity and protection and usage of its contents are the responsibility of kingdom A.
- SaaS: Kingdom A decides to have blacksmithing conducted in a neighboring castle (kingdom B). The castle itself, the moats, infrastructure, hallways and blacksmithing room are all protected by kingdom B for a charge. Kingdom B’s responsibility is to control access to the room, but maintaining who’s on the access list to the room and the protection of its contents and usage are the responsibility of kingdom A.
- PaaS: Kingdom A decides to house and build military operations in a neighboring castle (kingdom B). Kingdom B is responsible for the basic controls, but the configuration and monitoring remain the responsibility of Kingdom A.
With this transformation, Kingdom A faces a more complex security landscape. Innovation and efficiency are critical to meeting the growing and changing demands of their kingdom, but not without additional risks. New operating models bring new risks and potential vulnerabilities to their system(s). Methodologies and processes used to secure their own kingdom do not necessarily work or apply to protecting their new partner kingdoms. Additionally, people–and experience–that understand these new complexities are harder to come by while the thieves and rival kingdoms discover vulnerabilities and weaknesses and begin to exploit and steal valuables that put the entire kingdom and its residents at risk.

Protecting Your Castle in the Cloud Takes a Deep Understanding

Moving to the cloud is almost inevitable at this point, and it carries so much potential to accelerate business outcomes. It takes a different mindset to secure it than what we are used to as an industry–the landscape has been changed from a security perspective. By fully studying and understanding the differences, organizations can continue rapid and secure adoption of the cloud, while reaping the benefits that it promises to bring.

— Sean Blenkhorn
February 28, 2020
Rackn Extends Reach of IT-as-Code Framework

Rackn announced the Digital Rebar platform it created to automate the provisioning of bare-metal infrastructure now can be applied simultaneously across multiple physical sites.

Company CEO Rob Hirschfeld said Digital Rebar 4.3 makes it possible to manage IT infrastructure as code across highly distributed computing environments. Previously, IT organizations would have needed additional versions of Digital Rebar for each physical data center.

Hirschfeld also noted IT teams can also set up mirrors of data centers, now that Digital Rebar can be employed across multiple sites.

IT teams that adopt Digital Rebar can define workflows through which, for example, instances of virtual machines or Kubernetes can automatically be deployed on hundreds of thousands of servers in about an hour, said Hirschfeld.
Accomplishing that same task using manual processes would take most IT teams six months, he noted, adding IT teams can even use Digital Rebar to deploy instances Kubernetes on virtual machines at scale.

Hirschfeld noted many IT teams assume they need to have a layer of virtualization in place before they can start automating the management of their IT environment. Digital Rebar provides a framework around a common set of application programming interfaces (APIs) through which servers, storage and networking resources can be provisioned consistently. In addition, IT teams can set up a to manage IT infrastructure on an ongoing basis, including firmware and operating system updates and cluster configurations.

Digital Rebar doesn’t necessarily replace the need for frameworks such as OpenStack or VMware vSphere. However, it does provide a simpler mechanism for installing them. Alternatively, IT teams can employ Digital Rebar to deploy software such as Kubernetes on a bare-metal server.

Hirschfeld said Digital Rebar is designed to be deployed on-premises or in a public cloud rather than be accessed as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. That approach means IT teams operating in highly regulated industries can still take advantage of the framework, he said.

While the concept of IT as code has been around for a while, IT teams that are being asked to now manage IT at an unprecedented scale are turning to IT automation frameworks in larger numbers. Hirschfeld said Digital Rebar is now designed to replace other frameworks as much as it is to provide a complementary framework for specifically managing bare-metal infrastructure. In fact, Digital Rebar can be access vis Terraform or Ansible using a plug-in that Rackn makes available.

Rackn also plans to extend the reach of Digital Rebar out to edge computing platforms as well as endpoints based on, for example, Raspberry Pi platforms, he added.

Most IT teams will eventually wind up employing multiple IT automation frameworks in place of thousands of custom scripts that many IT professionals have developed themselves. The issue with most of those scripts is they don’t tend to scale especially well. In addition, they are usually poorly documented so when the author of the script leaves the organization the remaining IT staff wind up having to write another custom script because no one is quite sure how the script in place works. Whatever the path forward, the one thing that is certain is the days of being able to get by manually provisioning platforms is finally coming to a merciful end.

— Mike Vizard

February 27, 2020