Posts tagged Kubernetes
#ChefConf22 - 2023 Roadmap {Not Your Mother’s Chef}

The first session I attended at ChefConf 2022 was the roadmap session with Prashanth Nanjundappa, VP of Product Management Progress Chef.

You can watch the session yourself at the link below.

https://prgress.co/3ARHT6N


Prashanth was joined by his colleagues to review the progress they have made over the last year and their plans for the year ahead.

Presenting alongside Prashanth was:-

Stephen Blankenship - Principal Product Manager - Infra, Desktop and Application Delivery

Sharan Rayakar - Principal Product Manager - Compliance and Security

Nischal Reddy - Principal Product Manager - Platform and Cloud

Looking Back

Over the last year, it was discussed how there had been a focus on making the products easier to use as well as ensuring they deliver quicker time to value.

To this end the following features have been worked upon or improved over the last year.

  1. Flexible deployment models

    1. On-Premises

    2. Chef SaaS

    3. Marketplace Deployments (Azure and AWS)

    4. High-Availability Deployment Models

  2. Automation of Infra Views

    1. Allowing users to undertake increased management tasks from the UI rather than just the command interface. This makes the product easier to use and to pick up for inexperienced users whilst advanced users can continue to use the command interface.

  3. Data Feed

    1. Send Chef Client Run and Compliance Scan data to 3rd party tools like IT Asset Management and Config management solutions.

      1. Webhook Integrations

        1. ServiceNow

        2. Splunk

        3. ELK

        4. Custom

      2. Storage Integrations

        1. Amazon S3

        2. minio

  4. IoT and Edge Management

    1. Using Chef Habitat to manage all applications and dependencies across and IoT estate.

      1. This has been proven to save management time and increase efficiencies.

  5. Chef Cloud Security - Chef CSPM

    1. Chef Cloud Security allows users to assess their cloud infrastructures in AWS, Azure and GCP against up-to-date best practise and compliance guidelines.

    2. Container orchestration platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes are also supported.

  6. New Audit and Remediation Content for Chef Compliance

    1. A large amount of new audit and remediation content has been added to Chef Compliance, allowing support for new and updated OS’s and Apps.

Looking Forward

As the session turned to look at the roadmap there was a discussion regarding how Progress had engaged with their users and the Chef community to decide upon the roadmap items. The highest voted requests were, Easy upgrades, support for scheduling push jobs, integration with IT operational support systems, support for agentless models and the ability to manage container environments.

Based upon this feedback the forward-looking roadmap is going to focus on the following three areas 1. Ease of Use and Upgrades, 2. Job Orchestration and 3. Hybrid Cloud and SaaS. It was explained how moving forward they are going to take a platform approach building a unified and extendable Enterprise Automation Platform.

Key messages from the roadmap included

  • General Availability of Chef SaaS at the beginning of 2023

  • Persona-related insights to be added to Compliance and Security, allowing users to identify relevant insights quickly and to remediate as required.

  • Chef CPSM will have improved flows with fewer clicks allowing quicker time to value across an increasing number of cloud resources.

  • The Chef Client will support rolling updates and centralised management with the ability to support two client versions simultaneously for cookbook compatibility.

  • Job Orchestration Service - Will have a push-centric model with granular control allowing jobs to be run on a reoccurring basis with exception supported. It will also support jobs to be run based upon conditions.

  • Workstation will have the introduction of a frequent actions UI

    • Based upon user research, it will enable new team members and non “Chef experts” to be productive in Chef faster.

Watch the session: https://prgress.co/3ARHT6N

Conclusion

It was interesting to hear directly from the people managing the products, learning what had been implemented over the last year and the direction of the products moving forward. I was impressed by how the product roadmap had been driven by direct feedback from the users and the community.

It was clear there is a big focus on ease of use and value to the users. I particularly like the sound of the SaaS platform for ease of adoption, the persona-based insights, and the ability to check cloud infrastructure compliance quickly and easily.

You can watch the session yourself at the link below.

https://prgress.co/3ARHT6N

Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Progress to create content covering ChefConf22. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Progress.

F5 NGINX Sprint 2.0 Day 1 Part 2, Announcements and Exec Q&A

As described in my earlier blog post I have been attending F5 NGINX Sprint this week, this blog post focuses on the second half of the initial day which looked at the announcements, commitments as well as a Q&A with Gus Robertson and Rob Whiteley.

During the first day of the conference, there were three commitments and three (and one bonus!) announcements.

These were as follows

Commitment 1

Increase open source development and encourage community contribution

Commitment 2

Continue to innovate the data plane of modern, cloud-native applications

Commitment 3

Create a clear and consistent open-source vs commercial demarcation

Announcement 1

NGINX is joining forces with the Kubernetes community

Announcement 2

NGINX will release new open-source projects at every layer of the delivery stack

Announcement 3

NGINX Modern Apps Reference Architecture

Bonus Announcement

NGINX unveiled a new interactive community experience that is now arriving.

Thoughts Regarding the Announcements and Commitments

The commitments and announcements were firmly focused on the community, whether that is the user community or the wider open source community. Learning about NGINX’s history it is clear that their commitment to open source and the community has been core to their business, now part of F5 they are wanting to renew this commitment and demonstrate how being part of F5 means they are able to dedicate more time, people and money to the community and open source programmes which undoubtedly would have been a concern for some after acquisition.

The Modern Apps Reference Architecture (MARA) is aimed to help people spin up a complete and fully operational microservices architecture quickly and easily. MARA integrates open source solutions from NGINX and partners that are pre-wired and preconfigured meaning it is fully production-ready. This means that DevOps teams can easily access MARA from the GitHub repo and deploy it in production with minimal frustration.

You can access the MARA GitHub Repo here.

Tech Field Day Q&A with Gus Robertson and Rob Whiteley

To finish the day I was lucky enough to be part of the Tech Field Day panel for the Q&A with Gus Robertson and Rob Whiteley. I highly recommend watching this session when available and I will update this post with the link. During this session, there were some great questions from the delegates looking at the technology, community, open-source commitment as well as the commercial model and why people should choose to opt for a paid commercial model at the appropriate time. I was particularly impressed with how NGINX has not only managed to appeal to the operation teams via their commercial offerings that meet day 2 needs around scale, performance and security as well as appealing to developers with the open-source offerings and community engagement.

I was particularly interested in the possibility of AI and ML services being developed in the future leveraging the position of the NGINX technologies in the data plane. They spoke about looking to leverage this position in the future in conjunction with AI and ML to offer, predictive analytics to help scale and grow or prevent issues but also to offer business insights regarding the customer journey based upon the insights they could see.

You can re-watch the sessions from NGINX Sprint 2.0 and find out more about the NGINX technologies at https://www.nginx.com

Scality & HPE #ARTESCA Launch - Part One

Yesterday Scality in collaboration with HPE launched their new ARTESCA Lightweight, cloud-native object storage product. The launch took place online with a collaboration between ActualTechMedia and Tech Field Day.

ARTESCA is designed for the core to the edge and offers a central point of management not just for your ARTESCA deployments but also for Scality RING and other compatible S3 storage technologies from the likes of AWS and Microsoft Azure.

ARTESCA is software built upon Kubernetes to modern cloud-native design principles allowing ease of scale from initial deployments during development through to moving into production. ARTESCA offers dual-level data protection and disaster recovery with distributed erasure codes and local repair codes for durability and fast disk rebuilds alongside integrated geo-replication for DR. .

You can see my tech doodle covering the ActualTechMedia presentation above and watch this space for some more thoughts and doodles from the event.

You can learn more about Scality ARTESCA here >> SCALITY ARTESCA | scality

and you can see more from HPE on Scality here >> HPE Object Based Storage for Scality Solutions | HPE

VMworld 2019 San Francisco - Day 1 General Session

VMworld is taking place in San Francisco, California this week, here are my thoughts from Mondays general session by VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger and COO Sanjay Poonen.

The initial general session of VMworld 2019 was used to further build upon the delivery of VMware’s vision of Any Cloud, Any Application, Any Device with Intrinsic Security. We saw big announcements and updates in terms of Any Cloud, Any Application, and Intrinsic Security but maybe short of details regarding the traditonal EUC business in the initial general session.

Further commentary to come shortly at DefineTomorrow.co.uk

VMworld Europe 2018 - Wednesday General Session

The second general session at VMworld 2018 in Barcelona focused on great conversations with VMware customers who have been using VMware technologies to meet their business needs. Most importantly their was an inspiring theme of how technology can and should be used for good. Martha Lane Fox founder of LastMinute.com closed the general session with the inspirational story of her life founding lastminute.com at 25 during the dot com boom before being involved in a life changing crash that involved her spending 2 years in hospital. Martha now dedicates her time to technology projects where she can drive change for good. 

My doodle is below.  

You can watch this general session at the following link =>  https://www.vmworld.com/en/europe/learning/general-sessions.html