Happy new year and welcome to Random Short Take #50. Sure, it seems like I’ve done a lot of these recently, and they should probably be newsletters, not blog posts. But whatever. A few players have worn 50 in the NBA including father and son Greg and Cole Anthony. My pick is David Robinson though. Let’s get random.
I was interested to read about the Pi 400 when it was first announced, so it was good to be able to read Preston’s review of the device here. There’s also a useful initial impressions post here.
Speaking of data protection, Zerto announced some good news from the Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice. You can read more about that here. I’m a big fan of Zerto, and I’d like to see the company successfully navigate whatever is gong on with it at the moment.
I’m a fan of Rancher, and Longhorn, and thought this news item on what Longhorn is doing at the edge was pretty neat.
Working with VMware Cloud Foundation and need to do some bundle updates offline? This article might be helpful.
The Ringer recently published a list of 50 best cult movies that you can read here. Gleaming the Cube was notable for its absence, but these things can’t always be 100% correct.
I was fortunate enough to attend Storage Field Day 21 recently. I’ll be sharing some thoughts on that over the next few weeks, but in the meantime you can read Georgina’s wrap-up of the event here.
Rancher Labs recently announced version 2.5 of its platform. I had the opportunity to catch up with co-founder and CEO Sheng Liang about the release and other things that Rancher has been up to and thought I’d share some of my notes here.
Introducing Rancher Labs 2.5
Liang described Rancher as a way for organisations to “[f]ocus on enriching their own apps, rather than trying to be a day 1, day 2 K8s outfit”. With that thinking in mind, the new features in 2.5 are as follows:
Rancher now installs everywhere – on EKS, OpenShift, whatever – and they’ve removed a bunch of dependencies. Rancher 2.5 can now be installed on any CNCF-certified Kubernetes cluster, eliminating the need to set up a separate Kubernetes cluster before installing Rancher. The new lightweight installation experience is useful for users who already have access to a cloud-managed Kubernetes service like EKS.
Enhanced management for EKS. Rancher Labs was a launch partner for EKS and used to treat it like a dumb distribution. The management architecture has been revamped with improved lifecycle management for EKS. It now uses the native EKS way of doing various things and only adds value where it’s not already present.
Managing edge clusters. Liang described K3s as “almost the goto distribution for edge computing (5G, IoT, ATMs, etc)”. When you get into some of these scenarios, the scale of operations is becoming pretty big. You need to re-think multi-cluster management when you have that in place. Rancher has introduced a GitOps framework to do that. “GitOps at scale” – created its own GitOp framework to accommodate the required scale.
K8s has plenty of traction in government and high security environments, hence the development of RKE Government Edition.
Other Notes
Liang mentioned that Longhorn uptake (made generally available in May 2020) has been great, with over 10000 active deployments (not just downloads) in the wild now. He noted that persistent storage with K8s has been hard to do, and Longhorn has gone some way to improving that experience. K3s is now a CNCF Sandbox project, not just a Rancher project, and this has certainly helped with its popularity as well. He also mentioned the acquisition by SUSE was continuing to progress, and expected it would be closed in Q4, 2020.
Thoughts and Further Reading
Longtime readers of this blog will know that my background is fairly well entrenched in infrastructure as opposed to cloud-native technologies. Liang understands this, and always does a pretty good job of translating some of the concepts he talks about with me back into infrastructure terms. The world continues to change, though, and the popularity of Kubernetes and solutions like Rancher Labs highlights that it’s no longer a simple conversation about LUNs, CPUs, network throughput and which server I’ll use to host my application. Organisations are looking for effective ways to get the most out of their technology investment, and Kubernetes can provide an extremely effective way of deploying and running containerised applications in an agile and efficient fashion. That said, the bar for entry into the cloud-native world can still be considered pretty high, particularly when you need to do things at large scale. This is where I think platforms like the one from Rancher Labs make so much sense. I may have described some elements of cloud-native architecture as a bin fire previously, but I think the progress that Rancher is making demonstrates just how far we’ve come. I know that VMware and Kubernetes has little in common, but it strikes me that we’re seeing the same development progress that we saw 15 years ago with VMware (and ESX in particular). I remember at the time that VMware seemed like a whole bunch of weird to many infrastructure folks, and it wasn’t until much later that these same people were happily using VMware in every part of the data centre. I suspect that the adoption of Kubernetes (and useful management frameworks for it) will be a bit quicker than that, but it’s going to be heavily reliant on solutions like this to broaden the appeal of what’s a very useful (but nonetheless challenging) container deployment and management ecosystem.
If you’re in the APAC region, Rancher is hosting a webinar in a friendly timezone later this month. You can get more details on that here. And if you’re on US Eastern time, there’s the “Computing on the Edge with Kubernetes” one day event that’s worth checking out.
Welcome to Random Short Take #43. A few players have worn 43 in the NBA, including Frank Brickowski, but my favourite from this list is Red Kerr (more for his commentary chops than his game, I think). Let’s get random.
Mike Wilson has published Part 2 of his VMware VCP 2020 Study Guide and it’s a ripper. Check it out here. I try to duck and weave when it comes to certification exams nowadays, but these kind of resources are invaluable.
It’s been a while since I had stick time with Data Domain OS, but Preston’s article on password hardening was very useful.
Mr Foskett bought a cloud, of sorts. Read more about that here. Anyone who knows Stephen knows that he’s all about what’s happening in the industry, but I do enjoy reading about these home projects as well.
Speaking of clouds, Rancher was named “A Leader” in multi-cloud container development platforms by an independent research firm. You can read the press release here.
Datadobi had a good story to share about what it did with UMass Memorial Health Care. You can read the story here.
Steve O has done way too much work understanding how to change the default theme in Veeam Enterprise Manager 10 and documenting the process so you don’t need to work it out. Read about the process here.
Described by Rancher Labs as “an enterprise-grade, cloud-native container storage solution”, Longhorn has been in development for around 6 years, in beta for a year, and is now generally available. It’s comprised of around 40k lines of Golang code, and each volume is a set of independent micro-services, orchestrated by Kubernetes.
Liang described this to me as “enterprise-grade distributed block storage for K8S”, and the features certainly seem to line up with those expectations. There’s support for:
Thin-provisioning, snapshots, backup, and restore
Non-disruptive volume expansion
Cross-cluster disaster recovery volume with defined RTO and RPO
Live upgrade of Longhorn software without impacting running volumes
Full-featured Kubernetes CLI integration and standalone UI
From a licensing perspective, Longhorn is free to download and use, and customers looking for support can purchase a premium support model with the same SLAs provided through Rancher Support Services. There are no licensing fees, and node-based subscription pricing keeps costs to a minimum.
Use Cases
Why would you use it?
Bare metal workloads
Edge persistent
Geo-replicated storage for Amazon EKS
Application backup and disaster recovery
Thoughts
One of the barriers to entry when moving from traditional infrastructure to cloud-native is that concepts seem slightly different to the comfortable slippers you may have been used to in enterprise infrastructure land. The neat thing about Longhorn is that it leverages a lot of the same concepts you’ll see in traditional storage deployments to deliver resilient and scalable persistent storage for Kubernetes.
This doesn’t mean that Rancher Labs is trying to compete with traditional storage vendors like Pure Storage and NetApp when it comes to delivering persistent storage for cloud workloads. Liang acknowledges that these shops can offer more storage features than Longhorn can. There seems to be nonetheless a requirement for this kind of accessible and robust solution. Plus it’s 100% open source.
Rancher Labs already has a good story to tell when it comes to making Kubernetes management a whole lot simpler. The addition of Longhorn simply improves that story further. If you’re feeling curious about Longhorn and would like to know more, this website has a lot of useful information.
Welcome to Random Short Take #38. Not a huge amount of players have worn 38 in the NBA, and I’m not going to pretend I was ever a Kwame Brown fan. Although it did seem like he had a tough time of it. Anyway let’s get random.
Ransomware is the new hotness. Or, rather, protecting storage systems from ransomware is the new hotness. My man Chin-Fah had a writeup on that here. It’s not a matter of if, but rather when you’ll run into a problem. It’s been interesting to see the various approaches being taken by the storage vendors and the data protection companies.
This was a great article from Alastair on some of the differences between networking with AWS and VMC on AWS. As someone who works for a VMware Cloud Provider, I can confirm that NSX (T or V, I don’t care) has a whole slew of capabilities and whole slew of integration challenges.
Are you Zoomed out? I am. Even when you think the problem can’t be the network, it might just be the network (I hope my friends in networking appreciate that it’s not always the storage). John Nicholson posted a typically comprehensive overview of how your bandwidth might be one of the things keeping you from demonstrating excellent radio voice on those seemingly endless meetings you’re doing at the moment. It could also be that you’re using crap audio devices too, but I think John’s going to cover that in the future.
Scale Computing has a good story to tell about what it’s been doing with a large school district in the U.S. Read more about that here.
This is one of those promotions aimed at my friends in Northern America more than folks based where I am, but I’m always happy to talk about deals on data protection. StorCentric has launched its “Retrospect Dads & Grads Promotion” offering a free 90-Day subscription license for every Retrospect Backup product. You can read more about that here.
Pure//Accelerate Online was this week, and Max did a nice write-up on Pure Storage File Services over at Gestalt IT.
Rancher Labsrecently announced the general availability of Longhorn (a cloud-native container storage solution). I’m looking forward to digging in to this a bit more over the next little while.
Welcome to Random Short Take #34. Some really good players have worn 34 in the NBA, including Ray Allen and Sir Charles. This one, though, goes out to my favourite enforcer, Charles Oakley. If it feels like it’s only been a week since the last post, that’s because it has.
April Fool’s is always a bit of a trying time, what with a lot of the world being a few timezones removed from where I live. Invariably I stop checking news sites for a few days to be sure. Backblaze recognised that these are strange times, and decided to have some fun with their releases, rather than trying to fool people outright. I found the post on Catblaze Cloud Backup inspiring.
VMware vSphere 7 recently went GA. Here’s a handy article covering what it means for VMware cloud providers.
Speaking of VMware things, John Nicholson wrote a great article on SMB and vSAN (I can’t bring myself to write CIFS, even when I know why it’s being referred to that way).
Scale is infinite, until it isn’t. Azure had some minor issues recently, and Keith Townsend shared some thoughts on the situation.
StorMagic recently announced that it has acquired KeyNexus. It also announced the availability of SvKMS, a key management system for edge, DC, and cloud solutions.
Joey D’Antoni, in collaboration with DH2i, is delivering a webinar titled “Overcoming the HA/DR and Networking Challenges of SQL Server on Linux”. It’s being held on Wednesday 15th April at 11am Pacific Time. If that timezone works for you, you can find out more and register here.
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