Technology

Amazon Web Services uses Systems Manager Documents to define actions that should be taken on your instances. This could be a wide variety of actions including updating the operating system, copying files such as logs to another destination or re-configuring your applications. These documents are written in Javascript Object Notation (JSON) and are stored within AWS for use with theother Simple Systems Manager (SSM) services such as the Automation Service or Run command. ...

Generally speaking, when you deploy infrastructure through code, or run deployment scripts you’ll need to have a certain amount of configuration data. Much of your code will have install routines but what about the configuration information that is specific to your environment? Things such as license keys, service accounts, passwords, or connection strings are commonly needed when connecting multiple services together. So how do you code that exactly? Do you pass the strings in at runtime as a parameter and then hope to remember those each time you execute code? Do you bake those strings into the code and then realize that you’ve got sensitive information stored in your deployment scripts? ...

We focus a lot of time talking about public cloud and provisioning. Infrastructure as code has changed the way in which we can deploy our workloads and how our teams are structured. We’re even allowing other teams to deploy their own workloads through our cloud management portals. But some things haven’t changed all that much. When I mention ServiceNow the first things that come to your mind are probably “Change Ticketing”, “CMDB”, or “Asset Management”. While ServiceNow certainly does all of those things, the real purpose of ServiceNow is to streamline operations. Many people who work in the enterprise probably think of ServiceNow as something that just gets in their way. No one wants to stop what they’re doing to enter a change ticket, wait for an approval or update a configuration item once deploying new servers, it’s a pain. But ServiceNow really is meant to speed up the operations process. ...

Recently, I was fortunate enough to attend Cloud Field Day 2, out in Silicon Valley. Cloud Field Day 2 brought a group of industry thought leaders together to speak with companies about their cloud products and stories. I was a little surprised to hear a reoccurring theme from some of the product vendors, which was: customers being so worried about being trapped by a public cloud vendor. Is It True? Based on my cloud consulting job, I can say that yes, many times customers are a bit worried about being locked in by a public cloud vendor. But most times this isn’t a crippling fear of being locked in, just a concern that they’d like to mitigate against if possible. But it’s like most things in the industry, you pick a valued partner and move forward with a strategy that makes sense for the business based on the information you know right now and a bet against the future. When virtualization was a new thing, I don’t recall that many conversations about making sure that both vSphere and Hyper-V were both in use in the data center so that lock-in could be prevented. We picked the partner that we saw had the most promise, capabilities, and price and built our solutions on top of those technologies. It’s still like that today, where you’ll pick a hardware vendor and attempt to prevent having multiple vendors because it increases the complexity of your services. You wouldn’t want to hire more people so that you can support two platforms, you’d want to hire the right employees to operate your corporate vision. ...

It is a pretty fair assumption that the Netapp company that you’re currently familiar with will be a much different company within the next five years. I say this because there isn’t much of a choice for anything else. Where is Netapp? When I say Netapp, my guess is the first thing that you think about is a good ole’ storage array that’s been sitting in a data center. Netapp has been around for a pretty long time, and pre-dates virtualization. The storage array has had a pretty good run in the data center and provides all the capabilities that enterprises have been looking for in a storage array. The write anywhere file layout (WAFL) introduced a very performant file system and RAID DP (Dual Parity) are part of the legacy of Netapp. Unfortunately, the legacy of Netapp has started to make them feel like a “legacy” company over the past few years. ...

In today’s world, if you can get an Internet connection, you can go anywhere and connect to any service that is publicly available. No restrictions are imposed and you can use the entire amount of bandwidth you purchased from your Internet service provider. This is the world under Net Neutrality. To illustrate this point further take the following example. If you purchase a 25Mbps circuit from Comcast or AT&T, you can use all of that bandwidth, assuming the service on the other end is also providing 25Mbps or better. ...

HPE recently announced that they were getting deeper into the cloud game bin introducing their Nimble Cloud Volumes (NCV) solution. Now while this sounds a lot like a storage array function, it’s really its own separate cloud that is focused only on storage. The idea behind it is that storage in both AWS and Azure isn’t great for enterprises and they want a better option to connect to their EC2 instances or Azure VMs. ...

I had high expectations for the sessions being presented during Cloud Field Day 2 hosted by GestaltIT in Silicon Valley during the week of June 26th-28th. The first of the sessions presented was from a company that I hadn’t heard of before called Nirmata. I had no idea what the company did, but after the session I found out the name is an Indo-Aryan word meaning Architect or Director which makes a lot of sense considering what they do. ...

Tech Field Day will be presenting Cloud Field Day 2 on July 26th through the 28th in Silicon Valley. If you have the time, please join in on the fun and watch the live stream right here. The schedule will consist of nine great companies all explaining the ins and outs of their solutions and it’ll get real geeky. The schedule is found below and all times are Pacific US. So be sure to do the conversions. ...

Deploying security patches to servers is almost as much fun as managing backup jobs. But everyone has to do it, including companies that have moved their infrastructure to AWS. As we’ve learned with previous posts, Amazon EC2 Systems Manager allows us to use some native AWS tools for management of our EC2 instances, and patch management is no exception. EC2 Systems Manager allows you to do patch compliance where you can set a baseline and then based on a defined maintenance window a scheduled scan and deployment can be initiated on those EC2 instances. This assumes that you’ve already installed the SSM Agent and setup the basic IAM permissions for the instances to communicate with the Systems Manager service. The details can be found in the previous post. ...