Archive

Archive for the ‘Containers’ Category

AWS re:Invent 2018: The Day 3 Buzz

November 29th, 2018 No comments

20181127_004442894_iOS

Into Day 3 of the conference which is when more of the announcements start rolling in!


Andy Jassy Keynote

As I’ve settled into Vegas time zone, this felt like an early wake up to make it in time to the keynote as there was going to be a queue. It would be far more sensible to stay in a hotel or other venue and watch remotely but feeling the reactions in the room for the announcements seems more interesting.

The keynote was streamed to some big spaces in the other conference venues and a good change this year was also streaming it to many more of the breakout sessions rooms all across the venues so you had more chance of seeing the keynote without queuing like crazy.

AWS has made so many announcements in the build-up to re:Invent one wonders whether they’re trying to hit a particular release number to flash onto the big screen! A quick way to see the list of announcements is to look at AWS What’s New 2018:

CEO Andy Jassy as usual was master of disclosure.

I had no intention of live blogging the keynote, far too much information and others who are quicker typists!

There was a DELUGE of announcements, some recaps from the few weeks and many new…I needed to take stock a few times, pause and try to make sense of it all.

I blogged about separately: AWS re:Invent 2018: Andy Jassey Keynote Thoughts

Read more…

AWS re:Invent 2017: What’s New in Serverless – SRV305

December 1st, 2017 No comments

Tim Wagner the AWS Serverless GM and Jeet Kaul from FICO

This session was about new things in serverless.

Tim reiterated how mazing Lambda is coming, its even inside a camera which was announced in the keynote as well as the top memory size being doubled to 3Gb which also doubled the CPU power.

2017-11-30 15.18.52Magic!

There was a mini magic show which was apparently a nod to something they did last year.

The idea is to show disappearing servers, as there are more and more serverless offerings, this means more and more disappearing servers.

Serverless Application Repository.

It’s worth looking at the recently announces Serverless Application Repository, its a marketplace of serverless functions published by AWS and others.

Read more…

Serverless, Show Me the Servers! – A UK VMUG 2017 Presentation

November 16th, 2017 No comments

I was happy to be asked to present at the National UK VMUG about Serverless. I had done the closing keynote last year so pretty relieved that I was at least invited back!

The presentation was similar to the London VMUG presentation I had done in July although updated as the Serverless ecosystem is moving at breakneck speed.

Changes of note since July are the addition of the new and momentum gathering OpenFaas framework, Azure Functions now available in the wild with Azure Stack, AWS adding more Lambda functionality particularly with its announcement that traffic shifting is coming soon for canary releases and blue/green routing. Iron.io bought by Oracle and VMware shutting down Photon Platform and shifting direction to Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC).

AWS Re:Invent is in less that 2 week’s time so I’m sure there will be plenty more to talk about!

Here are the slides:

Presentation Summary:

I went though some of the public cloud examples like Amazon Lambda, Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions. There are also Kubernetes based options you can deploy yourself like Fission, Kubeless and Funktion as well as cross container platforms such as Apache OpenWhisk, IronFunctions and the new and exciting OpenFaaS. I spent time going through what events are, why they are so critical to understanding serverless and gave some examples. How much it costs was covered, the differences between PaaS and containers. Listed the benefits and currently many disadvantages as its very new.

I also talked about how Ops is changing and doesn’t mean Ops goes away, just evolves. As it was a VMware user group I went through two connections to VMware, the kinds of things you could use serverless for to manage a VMware environment as well as the VMware cloud native story and using Pivotal Container Service the new Kubernetes based container runtime from VMware as your private serverless hosting platform.

Functional billing was highlighted as probably the most important future benefit for serverless, being able to track the cost of every single function call you make which can very easily highlight the inefficiencies you have and the benefit of being now able to have business costings matching up to IT costings.

Looking into the future there’s lots that needs to evolve but perhaps this is the time to decide whether you skip PaaS and containers for some things that have event triggers and go straight to serverless?

Joining the CloudInsiders Podcast to talk all about Serverless

November 15th, 2017 No comments

I was thrilled to be asked recently to join the CloudInsiders podcast to talk about Serverless. I was joined by Chan Ekanayake and we had a wide ranging discussion on what Serverless is, use cases, pros and cons and much more. It’s worth a listen if you’re trying to get your head around what its all about.

Thanks for having me.

Listen to the episode here: Serverless: Viva la revolución

The whole CloudInsiders podcast series is certainly worth subscribing to via iTunes or Stitcher.

Cloud Field Day 2 Preview: Platform9

July 20th, 2017 No comments

Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Platform9 is a regular Tech Field Day presenter and I am lucky to be able to heard from them directly when I attended Virtualisation Field Day 4 in 2015 when it was just starting

The company was founded in 2013 by some clever VMware people who wanted to create a company to provide managed cloud infrastructure with two important distinctions. They wanted their offerings to be SaaS managed and wanted it to use open source software.

It’s first product was a cloud managed OpenStack. OpenStack was (is?) hellishly complicated to set up and manage yourself so Platform9 stepped in and offered a cloud managed OpenStack which would run on-premises. Platform9 would take all the hassle away of deploying and upgrading OpenStack and you could spend your time using your OpenStack private cloud rather than managing it.

As the cloud landscape evolved and containers became the next big thing, Platform9 added a managed Kubernetes option. Kubernetes is also difficult to set up so Platform9 came to the rescue. Clouds don’t stand still and Platform9 now has an alpha version of its own Serverless offering called Fission (plenty to say about this).

Platform9 is a cloud infrastructure management company following the current cloud trajectory in what seems like an ideal evolving portfolio: Managed servers, then managed containers then managed Serverless.

The company has had a recent fund injection of $22m with a mix of existing a new investors to bring the total capital raised to date to £36.5m, a helpful war chest. It currently manages 200 enterprise clouds worldwide.

Hybrid Cloud

Read more…

Cloud Field Day 2 Preview: Accelerite

July 20th, 2017 No comments

Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Accelerite is a company I surprisingly haven’t heard of before and it is also new to Tech Field Day.

Founded in 2012 it is a wholly owned business of Persistent Systems and is a software house that aims to “Simplify and Secure the Enterprise Infrastructure”. Accelerite says there is a proliferation of devices and clouds that enterprises need to manage and secure.

CloudPlatform

I hadn’t realised that it was Accelerite that bought CloudPlatform from Citrix in March 2016. CloudPlatform was Citrix’s Apache CloudStack based platform, an open source cloud management platform and was at a time a possible alternative to OpenStack. It didn’t seem to get much traction in terms of numbers although tere are some massive deployments and it was seen as more enterprise ready. OpenStack seemed to get the buzz and won the marketing battle but has itself struggled with adoption due to complexity & feature bloat. Cries of OpenStack is dead are overblown, it is used in very large telcos and service providers, is being simplified and streamlined and will possible then creep back into enterprises who want an open source private linux of the cloud. AWS and Azure have of course been courting the same enterprises with their public cloud offerings. It remains to be seen how much time and effort enterprises are going to expend to what end to create what at least Wikibon is terming the True Private Cloud when public cloud is very tantalising and growing in features way above IaaS.

Accelerite’s CloudPlatform has multi-hypervisor support with its own hypervisor or you can choose from VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, KVM, or Hyper-V. There is bare metal provisioning as well with a particular use case highlighted of high performance computing applications. It can use traditional storage or hyper-converged.

Read more…

VMworld EU 2015 Buzz: VMware Video Game Container System

October 30th, 2015 No comments

Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld Europe 2015 coverage:

VMware Video Game Container System

I then spent some time at the fascinating VMware Video Game Container System. This is basically a demo of running MS-DOS in a linux container and then launching the awesome DOS Prince of Persia game within that container. Seriously impressive technology.

You can see the demo:

I spent time with Ben Corrie (the guy in the demo) who was the guy to worked it all out and put the demo together. He developed Project Bonneville which is running containers as VMs which is something I’ve spent a fare amount of time exploring at VMworld. Ben gave me a great overview of Bonneville and explained how docker and the container host and ESXi interact. I discovered that the stripped down VM appliance which is the base of the system is extremely light weight without even the docker client installed. As it is not on Linux but rather ESXi means you can run any VM that ESXi can run, hence being able to run Windows MS-DOS!

Why MS-DOS?:

We chose MS-DOS 6.22 partly for nostalgia, and partly because it neatly encapsulates a simple legacy OS. In 48 hours, we were able to use a vanilla Docker client to pull a Lemmings image from a Docker repository and run it natively in a 32MB VM via a Docker run command. The image was built using a Dockerfile, layered on top of FAT16 scratch and DOS 6.22 OS images with TTY and graphics exported back to the client

Read more…