Welcome to Technology Short Take #45. As usual, I’ve gathered a collection of links to various articles pertaining to data center-related technologies for your enjoyment. Here’s hoping you find something useful!
Networking
Cormac Hogan has a list of a few useful NSX troubleshooting tips.
If you’re not really a networking pro and need a “gentle” introduction to VXLAN, this post might be a good place to start.
Also along those lines—perhaps you’re a VMware administrator who wants to branch into networking with NSX, or you’re a networking guru who needs to learn more about how this NSX stuff works. vBrownBag has been running a VCP-NV series covering various objectives from the VCP-NV exam. Check them out—objective 1, objective 2, objective 3, and objective 4 have been posted so far.
Servers/Hardware
I’m going to go out on a limb and make a prediction: In a few years time (let’s say 3–5 years), Intel SGX (Software Guard Extensions) will be regarded as important if not more important than the virtualization extensions. What is Intel SGX, you ask? See here, here, and here for a breakdown of the SGX design objectives. Let’s be real—the ability for an application to protect itself (and its data) from rogue software (including a compromised or untrusted operating system) is huge.
Security
CloudFlare (disclaimer: I am a CloudFlare customer) recently announced Keyless SSL, a technique for allowing organizations to take advantage of SSL offloading without relinquishing control of private keys. CloudFlare followed that announcement with a nitty gritty technical details post that describes how it works. I’d recommend reading the technical post just to get a good education on how encryption and TLS work, even if you’re not a CloudFlare customer.
Cloud Computing/Cloud Management
William Lam spent some time working with some “new age” container cluster management tools (specifically, govmomi, govc CLI, and Kubernetes on vSphere) and documented his experience here and here. Excellent stuff!
YAKA (Yet Another Kubernetes Article), this time looking at Kubernetes on CoreOS on OpenStack. (How’s that for buzzword bingo?)
This analytical evaluation of Kubernetes might be helpful as well.
Stampede.io looks interesting; I got a chance to see it live at the recent DigitalOcean-CoreOS meetup in San Francisco. Here’s the Stampede.io announcement post.
Operating Systems/Applications
Trying to wrap your head around the concept of “microservices”? Here’s a write-up that attempts to provide an introduction to microservices. An earlier blog post on cloud native software is pretty good, too.
Here’s a very nice collection of links about Docker, ranging from how to use Docker to how to use the Docker API and how to containerize your application (just to name a few topics).
Here’a a great pair of articles (part 1 and part 2) on microservices and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). This is really good stuff, especially if you are trying to expand your boundaries learning about cloud application design patterns.
This article by CenturyLink Labs—which has been doing some nice stuff around Docker and containers—talks about how to containerize your legacy applications.
Here’s a decent write-up on comparing LXC and Docker. There are also some decent LXC-specific articles on the site as well (see the sidebar).
Service registration (and discovery) in a micro-service architecture can be challenging. Jeff Lindsay is attempting to help address some of the challenges with Registrator; more information is available here.
Unlike a lot of Docker-related blog posts, this post by RightScale on combining VMs and containers for better cloud portability is a well-written piece. The pros and cons of using containers are discussed fairly, without hype.
Single-process containers or multi-process containers? This site presents a convincing argument for multi-process containers; have a look.
Tired of hearing about containers yet? Oh, come on, you know you love them! You love them so much you want to run them on your OS X laptop. Well…read this post for all the gory details.
Storage
The storage aspect of Docker isn’t typically discussed in a lot of detail, other than perhaps focusing on the need for persistent storage via Docker volumes. However, this article from Red Hat does a great job (in my opinion) of exploring storage options for Docker containers and how these options affect performance and scalability. Looks like OverlayFS is the clear winner; it will be great when OverlayFS is in the upstream kernel and supported by Docker. (Oh, and if you’re interested in more details on the default device mapper backend, see here.)
This is a nice write-up on Riverbed SteelFusion, aka “Granite.”
Virtualization
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is similar to vCloud Air’s Disaster Recovery service, though obviously tailored toward Hyper-V and Windows Server (which is perfectly fine for organizations that are using Hyper-V and Windows Server). To help with the setup of ASR, the Azure team has a write-up on the networking infrastructure setup for Microsoft Azure as a DR site.
PowerCLI in the vSphere Web Client, eh? Interesting. See Alan Renouf’s post for full details.
PernixData recently released version 2.0 of FVP; Frank Denneman has all the details here.
That’s it for this time, but be sure to visit again for future episodes. Until then, feel free to start (or join in) a discussion in the comments below. All courteous comments are welcome!
This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.
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