Welcome to Random Short Take #51. A few players have worn 51 in the NBA including Lawrence Funderburke (I remember the Ohio State team wearing grey Nikes on TV and thinking that was a really cool sneaker colour – something I haven’t been able to shake over 25 years later). My pick is Boban Marjanović though. Let’s get random.
Folks don’t seem to spend much time making sure the fundamentals are sound, particularly when it comes to security. This article from Jess provides a handy list of things you should be thinking about, and doing, when it comes to securing your information systems. As she points out, it’s just a starting point, but I think it should be seen as a bare minimum / entry level set of requirements that you could wrap around most environments out in the wild.
Could there be a new version of AIX on the horizon? Do I care? Not really. But I do sometimes yearn for the “simpler” times I spent working on a myriad of proprietary open systems, particularly when it came to storage array support.
StorCentric recently announced Nexsan Assureon Cloud Edition. You can read the press release here.
Speaking of press releases, Zerto continues to grow its portfolio of cloud protection technology. You can read more on that here.
Spectro Cloud has been busy recently, and announced supporting for management of existing Kubernetes deployments. The news on that can be found here.
Are you a data hoarder? I am. This article won’t help you quit data, but it will help you understand some of the things you can do to protect your data.
So you’ve found yourself with a publicly facing vCenter? Check out this VMware security advisory, and get patching ASAP. vCenter is the only thing you need to be patching either, but hopefully you knew that already.
John Birmingham is one of my favourite writers. Not just for his novels with lots of things going bang, but also for his blog posts about food. And things of that nature.
Speaking of data protection software releases and enhancements, we’ve barely recovered from the excitement of Veeam v10 being released and Anthony is already talking about v11. More on that here.
Speaking of Veeam, Rhys posted a very detailed article on setting up a Veeam backup repository on NFS using a Pure Storage FlashBlade environment.
Sticking with the data protection theme, I penned a piece over at Gestalt IT for Druva talking about OneDrive protection and why it’s important.
OpenDrives has some new gear available – you can read more about that here.
The nice folks at Spectro Cloud recently announced that its first product is generally available. You can read the press release here.
Wiliam Lam put out a great article on passing through the integrated GPU on Apple Mac minis with ESXi 7.
Spectro Cloudlaunched in March. I recently had the opportunity to speak to Tenry Fu (CEO) and Tina Nolte (VP, Products) about the launch, and what Spectro Cloud is, and thought I’d share some notes here.
The Problem?
I was going to start this article by saying that Kubernetes in the enterprise is a bin fire, but that’s too harsh (and entirely unfair on the folks who are doing it well). There is, however, a frequent compromise being made between ease of use, control, and visibility.
[image courtesy of Spectro Cloud]
According to Fu, the way that enterprises consume Kubernetes shouldn’t just be on the left or the right side of the diagram. There is a way to do both.
The Solution?
According to the team, Spectro Cloud is “a SaaS platform that gives Enterprises control over Kubernetes infrastructure stack integrations, consistently and at scale”. What does that mean though? Well, you get access to the “table stakes” SaaS management, including:
Managed Kubernetes experience;
Multi-cluster and environment management; and
Enterprise features.
Profile-Based Management
You also get some cool stuff that heavily leverages profile-based management, including infrastructure stack modelling and lifecycle management that can be done based on integration policies. In short, you build cluster profiles and then apply them to your infrastructure. The cluster profile usually describes the OS flavour and version, Kubernetes version, storage configuration, networking drivers, and so on. The Pallet orchestrator then ensures these profiles are used to maintain the desired cluster state. There are also security-hardened profiles available out of the box.
If you’re a VMware-based cloud user, the appliance (deployed from an OVA file) sits in your on-premises VMware cloud environment and communicates with the Spectro Cloud SaaS offering over TLS, and the cloud properties are dynamically propagated.
Licensing
The solution is licensed on the number of worker node cores under management. This is tiered based on the number of cores and it follows a simple model: More cores and a longer commitment equals a bigger discount.
The Differentiator?
Current Kubernetes deployment options vary in their complexity and maturity. You can take the DIY path, but you might find that this option is difficult to maintain at scale. There are packaged options available, such as VMware Tanzu, but you might find that multi-cluster management is not always a focus. The managed Kubernetes option (such as those offered by Google and AWS) has its appeal to the enterprise crowd, but those offerings are normally quite restricted in terms of technology offerings and available versions.
Why does Spectro Cloud have appeal as a solution then? Because you get control over the integrations you might want to use with your infrastructure, but also get the warm and fuzzy feeling of leveraging a managed service experience.
Thoughts
I’m no great fan of complexity for complexity’s sake, particularly when it comes to enterprise IT deployments. That said, there are always reasons why things get complicated in the enterprise. Requirements come from all parts of the business, legacy applications need to be fed and watered, rules and regulations seem to be in place simply to make things difficult. Enterprise application owners crave solutions like Kubernetes because there’s some hope that they, too, can deliver modern applications if only they used some modern application deployment and management constructs. Unfortunately, Kubernetes can be a real pain in the rear to get right, particularly at scale. And if enterprise has taught us anything, it’s that most enterprise shops are struggling to do the basics well, let alone the needlessly complicated stuff.
Solutions like the one from Spectro Cloud aren’t a silver bullet for enterprise organisations looking to modernise the way applications are deployed, scaled, and managed. But something like Spectro Cloud certainly has great appeal given the inherent difficulties you’re likely to experience if you’re coming at this from a standing start. Sure, if you’re a mature Kubernetes shop, chances are slim that you really need something like this. But if you’re still new to it, or are finding that the managed offerings don’t give you the flexibility you might need, then something like Spectro Cloud could be just what you’re looking for.
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