In this article we will look at providing an automation platform for edge computing. Generally I would say edge computing is about moving data-handling away from centralized systems, towards local sources of data capture. An edge can be a remote office, server, laptop, tablet, smartphone or IoT anything endpoint. Edge computing is really just taking distributed computing one step further and removing the requirement to have always-connected network segments.
Andi Presenting at Ansible Roadshow in June 2019
Andi and I in the lounge on our way back from a sales kickoff in 2016
It has been a few weeks since I learned of the tragic passing of my friend, colleague and mentor Andreas Neeb. I am just now able to gather my thoughts, in an attempt to pass on the lessons I learned from one of the truly great, Red Hatters. First I would like to remember how Andi and I became colleagues and friends.
Volume snapshots are the ability to create snapshots of persistent volumes in kubernetes using the container storage interface (csi) driver. The csi driver allows storage solutions to integrate into kubernetes and expose their technologies. Snapshots of course, have been and are a key technology when discussing data workloads because they enable backup/restore seamlessly, on-demand and in a split second. Even though volume snapshots are in the alpha stage, several storage providers already have integrations, including one that is very interesting, Ceph RDB.
In this article we start a new journey, automated infrastructure in the on-premise datacenter. We will deploy OpenShift 4.2 on OpenStack. As I am sure you are aware, OpenShift is Red Hat’s enterprise kubernetes platform. Kubernetes is of course the brains but by itself is not a platform. OpenShift brings with kubernetes, monitoring, aggregate logging, container registry, security, automated deployment/upgrade, developer experience, huge middleware tooling built around JBoss, serverless frameworks, ISTIO (service mesh), CI/CD integration and the key word “ENTERPRISE“.
In this article we will focus on installing and configuring OpenStack Stein using RDO and the packstack installer. RDO is a community platform around Red Hat’s Enterprise OpenStack Distribution. It allows you to test the latest OpenStack capabilities on a stable platform such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or CentOS. This guide will take you through setting up Hetzner root server, preparing environment for OpenStack, installing the OpenStack Stein release, adding a floating ip subnet through OVS, configuring networking, security groups, flavors, images and are other OpenStack related services. The outcome is a working OpenStack environment based on the Stein release that you can use as a baseline for testing your applications using OpenStack capabilities. The installation will create an all-in-one deployment however you can use this guide to create a multi-node deployment as well.
In this article I will explain how to create your own custom RHEL 8 image for hetzner root servers. Hetzner offers new and used physical servers on a per/month basis (https://www.hetzner.de/sb). They offer extremely competitive pricing. These servers are perfect for demo or lab environments where you are operating your own platform and want it running 24/7!
Hetzner unfortunately does not offer RHEL images however, does provide a means for bringing your own image. A colleague of mine, Ingo Boernig, already shared a blog on how to do this for RHEL 7.5. This article with cover RHEL 8.0.
Over the last few years CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) thanks to new technologies has become a lot easier. It should no longer be a major thorn in the side of developers. Many are moving to cloud platforms which has CI/CD built-in (Azure DevOps for example), others are using Kubernetes which clearly reduces a lot of the complexity around CI/CD. Still at many organizations I see Jenkins or other complex and often homegrown tooling. I certainly recognize this tooling was needed but in 2019 there are better, more streamlined options. Now I get it, our butler Jenkins has served us well, for many years, he has become part of our family. But just like the famous Butler, Alfred from Batman, he has gotten old and likely it is time to look into retirement.
In this article we will discuss and demonstrate how to use Ansible Tower and GitHub for CI/CD.
A video presentation and demonstration is available at following URL: https://youtu.be/lyk-CRVXs8I
