TL: DR – – https://github.com/vtexan/emcdotnext-minecraft

As you may recall back in my OSCON Blog post, Brian Verkley (@BVerkley) and I had the pleasure of sitting through a really interesting talk from Julia Ferraioli with Google. She discussed running Java type apps like Minecraft in containers. Java Apps are probably one of the most prevalent type apps inside enterprises so if you can take something like Minecraft and run it in a container, you can run anything.  During Julia’s talk, she pointed out that the one hurdle for an application like Minecraft is that the world needs to be persistent.  In other words, when I kill the container and recreate it, I need to be able to recover the world I was in.  She said that a lot of advancement was being made in the community but at this point, she hasn’t looked into it. This is where Brian and I stepped in.  We decided to take her demo and add the persistency she was missing utilizing an Open Source project that the EMC {CODE} Team produced called “REX-Ray” along with ScaleIO simply because we work for EMC and wanted to use something super portable and easy to deploy on laptops. 

The process was pretty interesting, first I had to learn how to play the game   You know, so I can really understand the ins and outs of it !  The good news is Verkley is a freaking savant with Minecraft!!  He’s been playing with his kids for the last 5 years !  After a week of solid playing, I felt like I really started to understand it.  I did rage quit a few times but I suffered through and now enjoy playing the game, especially since we have a lot of the team’s kids playing in this world together !  This project became mission critical overnight HAHA !  We are currently hosting an EC2 Instance of Ubuntu/Minecraft on AWS in an effort to help us get comfortable with running apps in the cloud !

Special thanks to Jonas Rosland (@JonasRosland) for helping us pull this all together ! In an effort to make the setup easy, we utilized EMC {CODE}’s Vagrant Package of ScaleIO and REX-Ray and he was able to make some changes to the repo for our demo ! 

Normally I would give you a screen shot, by ever loving screen shot install guide (stay tuned for future blog posts on how to demo all of this).  I do these mostly because I have a bad memory so documenting it was more for me, than you   Well because this project will change pretty often, I’m going to document everything in the project repo itself.  As everyone should for projects like these !  So head over to https://github.com/vtexan/emcdotnext-minecraft and start checking it out.

If you have questions/comments head to the Community Slack group over at http://community.emccode.com and post the questions inside the #EMC channel.  If you aren’t familiar with the EMC Code Community Slack channel you really should take the time to check it out.  It’s open to anyone, you don’t need to be an EMC customer, in fact most questions are not EMC specific !  They have really cool channels around Docker, Python and even GeekParent channel where parents talk family tech stuff !  If you have any questions around this Minecraft demo, ask them there and one of us on the team will answer them ASAP! Also, Feel free to fork it/clone it and contribute to the documentation! 

Thanks,

Tommyt – @vTexan

As you may recall, I moved into a new focus in January of this year.  It’s REALLY outside of my comfort zone from a focus perspective.  The Cloud Native Apps team I belong to is really not focused on “storage” or even a particular OS/Hypervisor like I’ve done in the past.  It’s geared towards the fundamental change we are seeing in the datacenter to the move to Cloud Native Application development. With this new endeavor is an opportunity to immerse myself in this new world.  I’ve been doing a lot of this with online tutorials, hands on labs and just generally “Oh crap, I think I broke this now I have to fix it” mentality ! FUN ! The other way is to attend conferences.  In this case, I was given an opportunity to attend RedisConf in San Francisco.  I’d like to thank @MattCowger (my boss) for getting this ticket and passing it on to me.   Also huge thanks to Ashley McNamara (@AshleyMcNamara),  the only person I somewhat knew here at this conference. She took me under her wing and helped me navigate this new world to me !  THANKS !

So, first things first, what is Redis and where does it fit in the world?   I’m some what familiar with solutions like Cassandra and MongoDB, and I’ve played around and installed MariaDB in the past so I get that whole “noSQL, non relational database” thing.  Those types of solutions are built to hold information for long term type applications and are based on the DynamoDB whitepaper.   Redis is a distributed, in memory database cache or sometimes they position it as a high speed message broker. It’s a Key Value Store more than a wide column store like Cassandra.   It sits above those types of solutions and is 100% laser focused on being fast. Think of it for rapidly changing data ala stock prices, analytics, real time data collection or real time communication.  I think I heard them mention it in line with things like memcacheD.

It was developed by Salvatore Sanfilippo, also known as @antirez who works for RedisLabs the official keeper of opensource and enterprise version of Redis.  In one of the keynote session we heard from Tim Savage (@TimJSavage) of Armakuni who talked about how they used Redis to support the wildly popular UK based Comic Relief telethon.  Imagine having to setup a solution that essentially will only be used for about 7 hours a year, during a live broadcast with upwards of 250+ donation/credit card transactions a second.  Holy Cow !!  Talk about pressure! You can’t afford a second of downtime or to be slow! He talked in a little detail about how they used Cloud Foundry in addition to AWS to build out the resilient infrastructure necessary to support these 7 hours of fun. My hope is he will publish his presentation and I’ll reference it here.  I know for sure RedisConf recorded it and it should be posted soon.  I’ll post the link for that as well.

Things I learned about:

Redis Sentinel provides High Availability for Redis.  It does monitoring, notifications, automatic failover and acts like a configuration provider, essentially the source of authority for service discovery. At a high level Sentinel main focus is to be the canary in the coal mine relative to failures inside the distributed Redis system.  Its responsible for detecting and then restarting failed nodes. It uses multiple sentinel instances to determine when a node is having a bad day (you need at least 3 to start).   I also picked up on some sort of issue related to Sentinel and Docker Swarm.  Sounded to me like “clustering, inside clustering” is not fun to deal with and there seems to be some work arounds that I heard about from Bill Anderson from Rackspace talk about during his keynote.  I hope he publishes his preso as well!  If so, I’ll link to it here.  More info can be found here specific to Sentinel: http://redis.io/topics/sentinel 

Redis Modules (RedisModules.com ) , this is an open market and hub so to speak for those in the Redis community that want to add extensions to the Redis solution.  Some of the examples that RedisLabs created where things like Redisearch, which is a high performance full text search engine as well as an Image processing module called graphicsmagick.  They really would like to see the community create more modules to help further add value.

Redis is expanding beyond just “in memory” and looking at Redis on NVMe SSD.  I could have sworn I was at a storage conference during these discussions.  It was a lot around the differences in speed, response time and cost associated with running in memory, on SATA and on SSD type solutions.  The key take away was the cost of NVMe type solutions, coupled with the performance acceptability being too overwhelming for the community to ignore.  There was more than a few sessions to just talk about how to make that happen.  There doesn’t appear to be any sort of direct ability to do this today in Redis, I did see a lot of referencing to running Redis in conjunction with  RockDB in their testing.  I need to read up more on that, but the key take away from me is they are exploring ways of using Flash technology to help drive some costs out of running Redis without compromising performance.  Stay tuned for that.

Database Sharding – I know very little about databases so Sharding might be a known thing to like everyone on the planet but me .  I clearly need to read up on it more.  I sort of get the gist of it, when a database needs to be broken into smaller parts to easily manage, or because you are running into limits around memory, CPU etc sharding is used to deal with that.  Different Databases deal with sharding differently.  I also giggle every time I hear it, I have a 5th grade sense of humor I suppose !

On a side note, as I sat through RedisConf I started trying to compare where Redis is, and where Cassandra/MongoDB are.  In some ways, I see Redis trying to move closer towards the Cassandra world but not too close.  They still are VERY much focused on being fast and from what I can tell in listening to Salvatore, he’s still very much focused on “Fast” being the key tenet driving Redis.  On the other side, I’m seeing Cassandra and Mongo working towards getting closer to the main tenet of Redis in regard to front end caching.  Should be interesting to see how these solutions sort of head in the same direction over the next few years. 

Another interesting tid-bit that has ZERO to do with Redis.  I was blown away by the number of laptop screens I saw with Slack open on it.  In years past, I would expect to see Twitter, Facebook – but when I would walk into a session there would be lots of Slack windows open !  Pretty cool – I love me some Slack !

Welp – my head officially hurts but I feel like I’ve learned a TON this week.  VERY productive ! 

@vTexan

Last week Brian Verkley (@bverkley) and I had the extreme pleasure of presenting at the 2016 EMC World in Las Vegas.  We were part of “Code and Modern Operations” Track.  Our discussion was around 12 Factor App development as it relates to Cloud Native Apps.  We took the audience made up mostly of Operations people and took them through the 12 factors as it relates to what the developers are using, and related it back to how operations can help.  We are both looking forward to taking this presentation on the road to an EMC Forum near you !

This has taken way longer than I had hoped   I wanted to post my April 2016 Austin VMUG Conference Lunchtime keynote.  I’ve posted it to Slideshare and you can link to it from here

In my last blog post (New Year with a new focus)  I mentioned that I’m on a new journey – one that requires me to roll up my sleeves and  get comfortable being uncomfortable in this new world of Cloud Native Apps.  For those of you playing along at home, I thought I would outline some of the training materials I’m using.  These are in no certain order, but are things I’ve done, or in the process of doing. Please note, future blog posts will include more training materials etc.

The first thing I’ll point out is I’m not alone on my journey and a great pair of EMC’ers created a podcast just for this type of endeavor.  Brian Carpenter (@InTheDC) and Brent Piatti (@BrentPiatti) have a Podcast called “TheHotAisle” which is “Uniquely focused on delivering content for the next generation of Systems Engineers while giving customers and partners equal access to the journey”.  This has been a FANTASTIC Podcast.  They have covered Steve Francia of Docker, all the way to Andrew Clay Shafer with Pivotal and Mitchell Hashimoto of Vagrant.  They have also taken a deep dive into the flash technology world with Rob Peglar (@peglarr), VP of Advanced Engineering with Micron, one of the 4 global manufacturers of NAND technology.  Their podcast is definitely a MUST LISTEN as they cover an incredible amount of great content along with very knowledgeable guests.

Another MUST listen to Podcast is from our friends Aaron Delp (@aarondelp) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely).  The Cloudcast Podcast is the gold standard for everything Cloud Computing, DevOPS, AppDev you name it. These guys are incredible and their podcast is amazing.  Most of the time they run about 30ish minutes so you can listen to them on your drive into work.  If you are even remotely interested in Cloud Native Apps/DevOps etc, go and subscribe to their podcast.

When I think about online learning, I always think about PluralSight.com and their incredible catalog of content.  One of the things that grabbed my attention right out of the box was a course created and delivered by Nigel Poulton (@nigelpoulton) called “Docker & Containers: The Big Picture.  It takes you through an introduction of Docker, and then dives deeper into where containers might fit, how they are different than a Virtual Machine and various other things about the Docker ecosystem.   It’s a solid 2 hour overview of the solution.  Even if you feel like you understand containers, or Docker, it’s well worth the 2 hours of hearing insight from Nigel. 

In this new Cloud Native Apps focus, I wanted to start getting comfortable with some of the Operational (the Ops in DevOps) solutions in the market today.  Docker seems to be all the rage, so I figured this would be a great place to start.  I reached out to a good friend of mine Harish Jayakumar (@harish_jkumar) who happens to be a Solutions architect at Docker.  He suggested getting my feet wet with their free Docker-Toolbox and pointed me to: https://www.docker.com/docker-toolbox – it’s STUPID simple and is a great way to get an early win on installing and setting up Docker.  Docker-Toolbox can be installed on your Macbook Pro (or Air if you want) and it includes Docker Client, Docker Machine, Docker Copose, Docker Kitematic (gui) and it sets up and installs VirtualBox (Sorry VMware friends ).  It even has you run your very first container called Hello-World to show you that everything installed and is running well! 

In addition to Nigel’s Course, Docker has an incredible Self-Paced Training site that I’ve been using as well.  It’s located here: https://training.docker.com/self-paced-training.  I’ve since moved on from using Docker on my Laptop (it’s still installed) and converted one of my ESX Hosts from back in my VDI days to bare metal Ubuntu and followed the install process outlined in the Self-Paced guide to get Docker installed and running. It’s also reminded me how badly my Linux skills have degraded ! 

Guess what, at some point you are going to run into some sort of issue, it’s inevitable and the quickest way to this moving from being fun, to “forget this crap, I’m quitting” is having a support system you can lean on to help you through these.  For me, I have some kick ass friends that live and breathe this stuff.  In addition to my boss Matt Cowger (@mcowger), I’m also really good friends with former vSpecialist Jonas Rosland (@jonasrosland) who frankly has probably forgotten more about containers and new application development than I will ever learn.  The great news is both of these guys, and a ton of others like to hang out in the EMC Code Slack Channel located here: Community.emccode.com .  Do yourself a favor and go sign up and join.  They have all sorts of channels dedicated to various different topics and lots of super friendly people to help answer your questions!

So, this should get you started for a little while.  I have a ton of other things I’m using and I’ll blog about those in the future. 

Over 5 years ago I left a storage startup to move to EMC to be a vSpecialist.  Probably one of the most Pivotal (pun intended) moves I’ve ever made.  The numerous opportunities afforded to me here at EMC has been crazy.  I went from being a vSpecialist individual contributor, to a vSpecialist Manager to then managing a diverse group of PreSales specialists and it was awesome.  Last year I was promoted (?? ) to a Marketing Director in a new group started up by Aaron Chaisson, focused on EMC II messaging.  The idea was to bring in individuals from the field with extensive PreSales field experience to shape and deliver the new EMC messaging.  This was fun and frustrating all at the same time.    

This year I’ve been afforded another fantastic opportunity that was too good to pass up.  Just like the other roles I’ve had here at EMC, this is yet another career milestone and an opportunity to get comfortable, being uncomfortable (one of my favorite expressions). Similar to my move last year, this year a new group is being formed under Aaron focused on Cloud Native Apps and what solutions EMC has to help in this new Platform 3 world.  This team is being put together by Matt Cowger (@mcowger ), who is not only a really good friend of mine (this should be fun ) but one of the smartest, and humble people I know!  He wrote about these changes in his recent blog post “A New team for a New Application”

This doesn’t come without a slew of reservations  for Matt and myself.  I’m a Storage and Virtualization guy. It’s been my life these last 15+ years and I consider it my comfort zone. Cloud Native Apps represents a somewhat unknown to me.  Don’t get me wrong, I get the value of DevOps. I get the value of Containers and Micro Segmentation but just from the outside looking in.  Sure, I’ve read “The New Kingmakers” and “The Phoenix Project” but that was mostly from an interest perspective. In my new role, I’ll be living and consuming these books differently. I’m pretty excited because I fundamentally believe this is change is going to happen quickly!

I write this blog post for a couple of reasons.  It’s a career change and you might be interested in that.  Secondly, I’m going to guess that most of my readers/friends are like me.  We have a Storage and Virtualization background but recognize that the world is changing and Cloud Native Apps seems to be the buzz word phrase of the day.  We are seeing more and more interest in things like Docker and Rocket. We are hearing more and more about Automation and Orchestration; DevOps and Agile development.  I sort of feel like the Operations side of the house (my background) needs to get a little more up to speed with the Developers side  

So my plan is to post more about my journey.  What sorts of things am I doing to help bridge the Operations side of my background with the Developer side.  I plan on jumping in with both feet and documenting the hell out of this process.  What training am I doing, what sorts of stuff am I doing in my home lab, what podcasts and books am I reading etc.  I plan to immerse myself in this process.  I also hope that as I go down this journey, if you know of training tools, blog posts, podcast that I might be missing you’ll let me know in the comments section!  If nothing more, I’m pretty confident there are a LOT of people like me in this industry wanting to make sure we don’t miss this new wave !

So with that said – LET’S DO THIS!!!!

@vTexan <—follow me on twitter for real time training fun  

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it hundreds of times. If you don’t like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less and that is no truer yesterday than it is today and tomorrow. The amount of change IT is going through is incredible. If you aren’t always trying to figure out how to disrupt yourself then someone else will. So this Dell thing is a big indication of what I think some of the change will look like over the next 18 to 24 months. I’m far from Nostradamus because this feels very much like some of the other consolidations we’ve seen in other industries. Case in point, Grocery Store Brands.

In the Grocery Store Band picture above, you can see a ton of brands you are familiar with and the amount of consolidation that has been taken place over the years.  It’s crazy! 

Let’s take a look at the consolidation in the banking industry:

So it’s inevitable that IT would go through the same consolidation. Why Dell? Why now? I don’t have the luxury of sitting in the executive’s offices at either of these companies and I know as much information as anyone else that can use Google, but I have my theories and figured I’d lay them out here.  Again, I’m a nobody here at EMC, this is just my opinion based on my 18+ years of being in IT.

EMC has a pretty broad portfolio. Gone are the days of being a 1 hammer selling company. Golden hammers are cute and everything, but in this day and age customer want more than just a single hammer to help solve their issues. So as you look at the portfolio EMC carries you start to see a couple of things stand out. First, if we look at some of our flagship products you find things like Avamar, XtremIO, Isilon, VNX, Elastic Cloud Server (ECS, our Object Storage solution) in addition to some of our converged infrastructure components like VSPEX Blue and VxRack you start to see a lot of products that use servers as their controllers. I used to joke that EMC was slowly becoming a server company and I’ve heard Chad mention on more than a few occasions that our customers inquired about buying some of our nodes as just white box servers. The problem is we have to OEM these from contract manufactures and then deal with things like final assembly and stocking parts in the various depots around the world. So a company like Dell that has an incredible server manufacturing process could add an incredible amount of value to us.

What value do we possible bring to Dell? Well, we fill some holes in their portfolio they are currently filling with OEM agreements. It only takes a quick Google search to see that Dell has OEM agreements with quite a few storage companies. In my humble opinion, it just makes a ton of sense to take a company like EMC whose products are becoming more and more software defined and merge it with a company that has the server platform well established and respected. 

As was discussed on the Joe Tucci and Michael Dell analyst call, the new Dell Enterprise company will be based in Hopkinton and will merge the EMC II team with the Server/Storage and Networking solutions from Dell. This new division will allow us to get some incredible economies of scale from a server/controller perspective while at the same time giving Dell Enterprises access to the number 1 leading product lines like XtremIO, VNX, ScaleIO and our Data Protection solutions.  It seems like the perfect match.

Time will tell if this deal goes through to completion.  The deal is currently in the “Go Shop” me phase which encourages EMC to discuss these sorts of options with other institutions.  At the end of those 60 days it sounds like it’ll take a couple of quarters to work itself out.  Either way, these next 6 months are going to be a ton of fun!

Like I said – my prediction is this won’t be the last acquisition/merger that will happen in our industry.  It’ll be fun to speculate on who the next ones will be!

This is my ElReg style title   You like ?!?! HAHA

<tap tap tap> is this blog still on?  

What an amazing time to be in the technology sector and information infrastructure as a whole.  So many things going on, so many opportunities and so much information to consume.  It can sometimes be overwhelming to say the least.  So what does this all mean?  Communities are a great place to help bridge all of these type of things.  With that said, and with GREAT Texas Pride Gina Minks (@GMinks) , Scott Hanson (@CiscoServerGeek) and I (@vTexan) would like to announce the Techxans Slack Team open to all Texans (near and far)   All you need to do is download the Slack app, and then point it to techxans.slack.com and register. 

We have a few rules – mostly around “Just be cool, and don’t be a jerk” – other than that, we’ll see how this goes. 

HOWTO Setup and Install:

In order to get access to this slack group, we will need you to tweet with the hashtag #Techxans and we can reach out to you to get you access (its based on an email invite so send that to us in twitter as well) – you can also send us your email address and we can send you a direct link. 

For those of you that are unaware of Slack allow me to help you through a few things. 

1.First go and download Slack and then hit the + Symbol to add your slack team.  It should look like this:

2. Now just enter in your email credentials  and create a password and click signin

3.  So Gina, Scott and I have setup some channels so make sure you click the Add Channel and subscribe to them.  We broke them out by city but we’ve also created some Texas wide ones as

Look forward to seeing ya’ll on Slack !!

@vTexan

I had the absolute pleasure of delivering the lunch keynote at the April 7th VMware UserGroup Conference in Austin.  I always enjoy presenting and love it even more when I can be vendor neutral and talk about things that are passionate to me.  This presentation is focused on disruption, which interestingly enough is something I talk a lot about at EMC when presenting to customers.  I don’t mean disruption as in a product, but really around disrupting how we’ve always done things.  I also lay out some things to consider when going down an Automation/Orchestration journey. 

Hope you enjoy the presentation !

http://www.slideshare.net/ttrogden/slideshelf

@vTexan

TL:DR – go sign up and participate in the VMware Virtual User Group Meeting <-LINK

Do you have an active VMUG in your city?  If not, do you wish you did?  When was the last time you were able to attend one?   Here is a FANTASTIC opportunity for you to participate in a “Virtual VMware User Group” meeting.  It’s going to be on Feb 17th 2015, from 9:30am to 5:30pm (cst) and will be based on the VMUG Conference style.  Chris Wolf, VMware Chief Technology Officer for the America’s will be the keynote speaker.  In addition to Chris’s keynote, there will be really cool breakout sessions with lots of great content as well as virtual vendor booths that will allow you to virtually walk around and ask questions.  As usual, EMC vSpecialists will be available in the EMC booth! 

What I’m really excited about is being asked to present on EMC’s Hybrid Cloud during our 11:00am to 11:45am (cst) session.  I’m a HUGE community fan and I LOVE the opportunity to give back to a community that has helped me both personally and professionally over the years.  During my session I’ll be taking you through our VMware and EMC powered Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution and why I think Service Catalogs are so important.  We will also have various vSpecialists in attendance during my session to answer any and all of your questions. 

Either way, I can’t tell you how excited I am about this event.  We need more of these, your attendance and active participation will go a long way in securing that these are done again, and regularly so if you can find time, please attend.

With that said – click here to register and support the Virtual VMUG !

Thanks,

@vTexan