Category Archives: Conferences

Dell EMC World 2017 – Las Vegas, NV

It looks like that time of year again as we are just days away from Dell EMC World 2017. The {code} team will once again be in attendance and presenting some interesting sessions (16 in total), a Hands-On Lab (ran through it myself and it’s great!), and various materials at the show. The buffet (Yes, we are in Vegas after all!) of information we have lined up is pretty dang awesome! You can find more information about the stuff {code} has going on in our official {code} at Dell EMC World page.

Demos, Demos, Demos

What I wanted to talk about today were the two sessions that I will be presenting at Dell EMC World. The first session called Demos Demos Demos! Containers & {code} is happening on Wednesday, May 10 at 1:30 PM in room Zeno 4602. I will be co-presenting with Travis Rhoden and Vladimir Vivien. Just like the title says this session will have a few slides to set up what is going on and talk about who we are… then it’s nothing but live demos. I think this will be a pretty amazing session that captures what is hot in the container and scheduler space but at the same time, will give you some practical and real-world information to take home with you. Definitely, check this out!

ScaleIO Framework

The second session I will be presenting solo. It’s called Managing ScaleIO As Software On Mesos and is occurring on Thursday, May 11 at 11:30 AM in room Zeno 4602. I floated this idea last year during a session at (the then) EMC World 2016 where I thought it would be cool to be able to treat storage just as another piece of software. Well now its one year later and that idea is a reality now and we are going to talk about and demonstrate the ScaleIO Framework in this session. Many other container schedulers have implementations of this pattern and this concept will change the way how we consume software in the future.

Have fun, but not too much fun!

If you are heading down to Dell EMC World this year, stop by the sessions the {code} team will be presenting at and if you have any questions, feel free to linger around after the presentations to chat. I think this is going to be an awesome conference, do check out some of the social networking opportunities available to connect with some new people, and as always enjoy the show and have fun (but not too much… it’s Vegas after all)!

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Applications that Fix Themselves

I know that in my last blog post I said I would be talking (and probably announcing) the FaultSet functionality planned for the next release of the ScaleIO Framework. As all things in the world of technology and software, things don’t always go as planned. So today I am here to talk about some stuff relating to the Framework that will be in my speaking session entitled How Container Schedulers and Software Defined Storage will Change the Cloud at SCaLE 15x this Saturday March 4th at 3pm in Ballroom F of the Pasadena Convention Center.

SCaLE 15x Logo

This new functionality at face value seems straight forward but the implications start to open the doors to next level thought kinda stuff. Ok ok ok. I may have oversold that a little, but the idea itself is still pretty cool and I am super excited to talk about here.

Just make it happen. I don’t care how!

Just this week, I released the ScaleIO Framework version 0.3.1 which has a functionality preview **cough** experimental **cough** for a couple of features that I think is cool. The first feature, although not as interesting, will probably be the most useful immediately to people that want use ScaleIO but was turned off from the installation instructions… starting from a bare Mesos cluster, you can provision the entire ScaleIO storage platform in an highly available 3-node configuration from scratch and have all the storage integrations, like REX-Ray and mesos-module-dvdi, installed automatically.

Easy Street

In case you missed it… without having to know anything about ScaleIO, you can deploy an entirely software-based storage platform that will give your Mesos workloads the ability to persist application data seamlessly, that is globally accessible, and make your apps highly available. This abstracts the complexities of the entire storage platform and transforms it into a simple service where you can simply consume storage from. As far as any user is concerned, the storage platform natively came with Mesos and the first app you deploy can consume ScaleIO volumes from day one. If you want more details on how to make that happen, please check out the documentation.

The Sky is Falling!! Do Something?!?!

I think the second functionality preview **cough** experimental **cough** in the 0.3.1 release has perhaps the most compelling story but may be less useful in practice (at least for now). I have always been fascinated by this idea that applications, when they run into trouble, can go and fix themselves. We often call this self-remediation. In reality, that has always been a pipe dream but there is some really cool infrastructure in the form of Mesos Frameworks that make this idea a possibility.

It's not going to happen

So this second feature comes from my days as both a storage and backup user… where I get the dreaded storage array is full notification. This typically entails getting another expander shelf for your storage array (if you are lucky enough to have expansion capability), populate disks in the expansion bay, and then configure the array to accept this new raw capacity. In the age of Clouds and DevOps, anything is possible and provisioning new resource is only as far as an API call away.

Anything is possible

The idea is that as our ScaleIO storage pool starts to approach full, we can provision more raw disks in the form of EBS volumes to contribute to the storage pool. Since we exist in the cloud or in this case AWS that is only an API call away. That is exactly idea behind this feature… to live in a world where applications can self-remediate and fix themselves. Sounds cool yea?!?! If you are interested in more information about this feature, I urge you to check out the user guide, try it out, provide input and feedback! And if you happen to be at SCaLE 15x this week, I will be doing this exact demo live! BONUS: You can watch that video demo that was performed at SCaLE here:

Where to go next…

So I hope the FaultSet functionality is just around the corner along with the support for CoreOS, or what they are now calling Container Linux, since a lot of the stuff coming out of Mesos and DC/OS is now based on that platform. Let us know if you want more surrounding Mesos and the ScaleIO Framework by hitting me up in our {code} community slack channel #mesos. Additionally, if you are in the Los Angeles area this week, I would highly recommend stopping by SCaLE 15x in Pasadena, catch some of the sessions, and stop by the {code} booth in the expo hall to continue the conversation.

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Getting Ready for EMC World 2016

We are getting closer and closer to EMC World 2016. I have to admit, its approaching crazy fast. This will be my first time attending EMC World. Seems odd saying that as I have attended many conferences in my career, but never the one my company throws. This time its going to be a different conference going experience as I will be presenting two sessions in the “Code and Modern Operations” track this year. I am very excited for this opportunity to talk about things that are interesting to me and I hope that are of interest to others out there in the open source community.

Apache Mesos

The first session is Introduction To Mesos & Mesosphere. This is basically an Apache Mesos 101 type session with a focus on the company, Mesosphere, whom pushes the direction of Mesos. I will be co-presenting this session with Somik Behera from Mesosphere. For those that haven’t heard about Mesos or looking to learn more about it, this is a excellent session outlining why Mesos is among the best workload schedulers in the datacenter and why its the preferred choice among companies looking to scale their applications. You can catch us both Monday morning (May 2) at 8:30am. Yes, you read that right. Going to be difficult for people to drag themselves out of bed that early in the morning… this is Las Vegas after all. Hope you all can make it!

Deep Dive

My second session is Deep Dive With Mesos & Persistent Storage For Applications. After getting some time to digest the information in my previous Mesos 101 session, this will dive into some of the internals of Mesos as we explore Mesos Frameworks and 2 layer scheduling. We will discuss what 2 layer scheduling means and how external storage can enhance the story around applications leveraging Frameworks. For the architects, operators, and consumers of Mesos, this session is packed with things you need to know in order to make your applications function efficiently and be highly available in order to avoid the train wreck. Ultimately the goal of talk is to enable you to put things on autopilot so you don’t need to manage the application.

Train Wreck

If you haven’t purchases tickets for EMC World, I would highly recommend you do as soon as possible. The EMC {code} team has a huge presence this year as we have our own booth along with our own session track, Code and Modern Operations, which I eluded to earlier. The {code} team collectively has 21 sessions at the conference this year talking about everything from Docker, managing larger open source communities, Mesos, and contributing to open source just to name a few. I will have a follow up blog post just before EMC World highlighting some of the other sessions you might want to check out. Catch you all later!

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