Introduction to RackN
Transcript
[Music] hey how's going to ski Towson from the CTO visor comm with another CTO dose right here from interrupts ITX 2018 and beautiful Las Vegas Nevada and I have the CEO of rackin Robert Hirschfeld Robert how's it going great so I can call you rob right we're friends I invited you all the way from Austin to talk to Interop so I figured last minute I guess I guess that means that we're officially friends and we spent a whole hour running together this morning almost six miles
man that we had to brave the Vegas treat so as an appreciation for you coming all the way to talk about Interop the talk--i Interop about composable we're not going to talk about that we're going to talk about racking all right so help me wrap my head around what is racking and what value do you add to the enterprise so racking right software okay it automates bare metal infrastructure so what we do is we finally fix the making servers easy to manage problem so our goal
is ultimately that a server physical server should be as easy to manage as a virtual machine so this isn't a new concept per se and matter of fact companies much bigger than yours are betting big on this Oracle cloud infrastructure is betting big on bare metal servers and the ability to consume servers bare metal as easily as they you would just consumer ec2 instance right we are software companies exactly we've created a product anybody can run it we don't require you to use our hardware or
our spec or anything like that we take Legacy gear stuff that's already deployed and then we help on to make that better so there's the promise of this I've had vendor after vendor I remember back in 2010 Dale coming one side and showing me OpenManage and this companies that Faye had bought and how I could automate provisioning and one of the first things first areas where this fell down was like state I'm like okay once I once I this how do I know what's being the
band deployed and when it's changed and then how that impacts my ability to manage that infrastructure afterwards I was that dealt when they bought the companies that were doing this right there's this huge interest in automating machines right right and the difference is we take a DevOps API driven approach so everything we do is designed to be part of a workflow work with other tools be part of that system and the vendor tools especially from the hardware vendors are really like how do I set the
BIOS how do I configure the machine which you have to do right but that's really not what people are trying to accomplish when they're looking at cloud like infrastructure what they want to do is they want to say I have a process that starts in my CIC pipeline generates an image deploy that image before you do that patch the BIOS scrub the disk so you crypt the data right setup my my networking the way I want work through all those steps and then deliver a server
so what let me give you a practical example where I would think my mindset in the enterprise is that I just buy kubernetes and I'm we're moving to a cloud native infrastructure anyway and all of my developers are going to consume containers directly why do I need something like racking you still need infrastructure so right you know you could do all that work in the cloud uh-huh that would be great if when you get to a certain scale or if you need a certain amount of
control or you're at an edge infrastructure and it's it's you know locked in a data center in the environment then you actually have to have something manage the infrastructure so kubernetes if I'm extracting the way my answer period I just don't operate the infrastructure then that's fine I can go out and do that but if you're developers don't and or and or the infrastructures been abstracted away from me period and I'm consuming kubernetes as a servers or whatever the whatever the model but if I have
to manage infrastructure after deploy knows and clusters etc I have to have a pretty stable underlaid so you guys are all about the underlay we are entirely it's not its underlay is exactly the right word and and stable is a funny word here's what you have to have is a consistent reliable underway right cannot be stable what you might actually find is that in building that underlay the firmware has to get patched the operating system has to get past the docker infrastructure has to get patched
the control infrastructures that you build around kubernetes sucide cars the administrative the scanning things all those are certificates all that stuff is actually very dynamic still and so if you build kubernetes like we used to build VMware clusters assuming you would never patch it then you're not really in a cloud native architecture cloud native assumes that I'm constantly evolving all of the stack of my infrastructure see I CD from bottom from the infrastructure all we up through the application and we saw a cry right inspector
right and and those aren't the last bugs we're gonna find exactly and so as hardware's coming you know hardware's going through actually a lot more innovation than people realize operating systems are still turning we find bugs everywhere in the stack you what you want to do is you want to isolate your developers from that you want to give that somebody somewhere cares about the infrastructure either you outsource it but if you have to own it or you want to own it what we're trying to do
is make it as painless as possible so you don't need a team of people you can actually shrink your infrastructure investments and still get really high quality infrastructures so Rob if someone wanted to engage you guys who do they have to talk to do I have to fill out some form and some sales guy give you go yeah yeah so actually our model is very self service driven did Rivera's are is sort of the open source part that's our product then we build layers on top
of that mm-hmm and we actually encourage people to just download and try it so our goal is that you can go to digital rebar rebar dot digital is the website or portal rock n dot IO is sort of our self-service portal you can do the demo on your laptop you can get some servers from a company called packet packet net or you can rent their metal and you go through the experience it takes a couple minutes to download most people are actually fully operational in under
an hour installing kubernetes they're doing something like that you've made it really simple and then if they like it get involved in our community call us work with us right take we help them take it to the next level but we believe infrastructure can be simple and so we let the product do the talking so Rob I really appreciate you one first jumping in and interrupts and giving a great overview of composable you you are a skeptic yeah now that's that's perfectly fine can people find
you on Twitter social media how do we find you I am very active on Twitter so I'm vehicle Zhi CLE so vehicle is easy going back to my electric car days it's zero and ok so if you want to think about it that way so I'm very active on Twitter we actually run a podcast called latest shiny I've been on it you've been on it we talked to great guests and talk about edge infrastructure and DevOps and CI CD and all sorts of great stuff with
that so people should check check that out backend obviously for the company just have fun we love to chat it up and we're not very vendor II love to let you talk tech that's why I actually this presenter interrupts great she'll fill if you guys have been trouble interrupt a lot of great changes you can visit Interop at Interop calm or Interop ITX now is the new brand calm until then talk to you next CTO DOS you can follow me on the web at CTO of
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