Tag Archives: Personal

Anything personal that might not necessarily be tech related

Oct Recap: It’s Been a Trip

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I have recently been doing a lot of travel for work. I know that for some, this amount of travel is routine, but for myself, it has been pretty awesome. In the month of October, I have visited 2 places I have never been to before. But before I start with the picture show and going into the cool thing that I saw, I think I need to start out with how all this happened.

The adventure first started out with an acceptance of a speaking proposal at ContainerCon EU 2016 in Berlin. Yes, you read that right! I was pretty dang stoked to be selected to speak at the event and also to help lead the Apache Mesos Hands-on Lab at the Open Source Storage Summit. The experience was unbelievable and was also a big validation on some of the things that I have been working on; namely a ScaleIO Framework for Apache Mesos which just so happened to be announced at the conference. I was definitely a little nervous about the date/time of my speaking session, last day and last time slot, but the turn out was still fantastic! For those that are interested, my talk focused around Software Defined Storage and Container Schedulers. You can view my slide deck on GitHub here.

CC Berlin

Now on to the fun stuff! Before heading to the conference, a few of my coworkers and I stopped in Munich. I got to check out a bunch of stuff ranging from museums talking about World War 2 to sampling local cuisine (as in eating a lot of freaking sausages). Nothing was cooler though than going to the original Oktoberfest in a legit beer tent. The place was freaking amazing and although I am not a beer fan, I partook in drinking and had a blast.

Interesting side note, Oktoberfest isn’t technically an event… it’s actually a place. Mind Blown! When we picked up our tickets, we asked the concierge “How can we get to Oktoberfest?” They looked at us like we were complete mouth-breathers and smiled. They explained and pointed out where Oktoberfest actually was on the map, explained significance of the area where Oktoberfest takes place, and just told us we could get into any cab and say “Take us to Oktoberfest!”. We found that super funny… a little too much, but it was epic!

Oktoberfest in Munich

We then all took a train from Munich to Berlin, did the conference thing, and then hopped back home. We kicked back for less than a week and flew to Hawaii for work. Yes, that isn’t joke. And also not a joke, I have never been to Hawaii even though I live in the Los Angeles area which is just a small jump over the ocean. Our team, {code} by Dell EMC, was actually sponsoring the World Drone Racing Championships in Hawaii. Super cool! In all seriousness though, drones are emerging into a multi-multi-billion (yes, with a B) dollar industry with commercial applications like performing land surveys and the amount of data being collected by these drones is growing exponentially which is where Dell EMC comes in. Putting the business stuff aside for a second, after having tried it first hand using my Inductrix beginner drone with a cam and the Marvel Vision FPV Googles, flying drones is pretty cool!

Drones

What’s up next? I will be continuing the work that I have been doing on the ScaleIO Framework and will undoubtedly have additional surprises in store hopefully fairly soon! (With a blog post to accompany it!) If you happened to miss the launch of the ScaleIO Framework, you can find more information including a demo on the official {code} by Dell EMC blog.

LinuxCon ContainerCon Japan: Extended Edition

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My recap of LinuxCon ContainerCon Japan just went live on the EMC {code} Blog and it talks about some of the things that happened at the conference as well as talks about some key takeaways. I definitely encourage you to go and take a look at the article. This happens to be my first blog post on the official EMC {code} Blog. Yay!

On to the Fun Stuff

It has been some time since I have been to Japan, but going back was a lot of fun. Below is a not so serious look at Japan outside of the seriousness of the conference.

Walking through one of Japan’s many multi-story electronic stores, I found a $1300 Rice Cooker. Yes, that amount isn’t a typo. I hope that thing washes my car too for that price.

The $1300 Rice Cooker

We found this Okinawan restaurant and found this guy parked outside.

Dragon Holding Some Sake

And in that bar, I got an opportunity to try Habushu which is a Japanese Liquor made with a snake in the bottle (picture below). Yes, there is a snake inside. No joke. Habushu is named after the habu snake, Trimeresurus flavoviridis, which belongs to the pit viper family and is closely related to the rattlesnake and copperhead. (according to wikipedia)

Habushu Liquor

On our last night, we visited the world famous Golden Gai in Shinjuku. It is roughly six alleys connected together that has over 200 tiny shanty-style bars. Each bar is large enough to hold 5-8 people max with most of the ones we saw being about the size of a 5ft x 7ft room.

Golden Gai in Shinjuku

Last but not least, when you are tried of eating conference bento boxes everyday and you need a change… you get KFC. That also isn’t a joke either. By the way, KFC is waaaaay better in Japan than in the states. Just saying!

KFC

Looking Back at EMC World 2016

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Wow! How quickly a week can go by. Like many of you, EMC World 2016 was my first time in attendance and it also happen to be the first time I have been given the opportunity to be a presenter for a larger audience. I though the experience exceeded my expectations and based on some of the preliminary numbers and feedback that we have been getting on the sessions the EMC {code} team had presented, a good number of you agree the sessions content and presentations were of value to you. Thanks again for attending the sessions and providing your feedback.

Couldn’t make it this year?

For those that couldn’t make it out this year, a number of people in {code} have starting posting the materials and slide decks for our sessions. Official EMC World slide decks should be posted in the coming weeks, but there have been a large number of requests to get a hold of the material ASAP and many of us on the team have been happy to oblige. As for my sessions, you can find the materials below.

Introduction To Mesos & Mesosphere

Here is the session material for Introduction To Mesos & Mesosphere (Monday May 2 at 8:30) which just as the title says is a Apache Mesos 101 type session.

You can download the “Introduction To Mesos & Mesosphere” powerpoint presentation HERE. The video of the demonstration used at the end of the session highlighting Mesos using persistent external storage can be found on YouTube below:

The source code for the MVC Web Application written in Golang can be found in my GitHub repo. The two projects used in demo were RestServer and RestClient.

To launch the MVC Application with external persistent storage, you first need to have each of your Mesos Agent/Slave nodes running Mesos DNS and configured for persistent external storage using this Guide. Once you have those prerequisites in your Mesos Cluster, you can find the Marathon JSON files to launch tasks here. To start up the application, perform the following:

Start PostgreSQL:
curl -k -XPOST -d @postgres-mvc.json -H "Content-Type: application/json" YourMarathonIP:8080/v2/apps

Start RestServer:
curl -k -XPOST -d @restapi.json -H "Content-Type: application/json" YourMarathonIP:8080/v2/apps

Start RestClient:
curl -k -XPOST -d @ui.json -H "Content-Type: application/json" YourMarathonIP:8080/v2/apps

Deep Dive With Mesos & Persistent Storage For Applications

Here is the session material for Deep Dive With Mesos & Persistent Storage For Applications (Tuesday May 3 at 3:00) which covered the importance of Apache Mesos Frameworks and the powerful capabilities that 2 layer scheduling provides in your Datacenter and Mesos cluster.

You can download the “Deep Dive With Mesos & Persistent Storage For Applications” powerpoint presentation HERE. The video of the demonstration used at the end of the session highlighting the Elastic Search Mesos Framework using persistent external storage can be found on YouTube below:

To launch the Elastic Search Framework with external persistent storage, you first need to have at least a 3 Agent/Slave nodes in your Mesos cluster and each of your Mesos Agent/Slave nodes configured for persistent external storage using this Guide. To start the ElasticSearch scheduler, you can find the Marathon JSON files to launch task here. To start up the Scheduler, perform the following:

Start ElasticSearch Scheduler:
curl -k -XPOST -d @elasticsearch.json -H "Content-Type: application/json" YourMarathonIP:8080/v2/apps

If you want to run some of the advanced ElasticSearch functionality used in the demo, you can find additional information in this file here.

What’s Next…

After recharging for a bit, we have already started on our post-EMC World plans and deliverables. Hopefully this will bring a forth a bunch of interesting ideas and projects for the community. To keep up to date with the things that I will be working on, please follow me on Twitter at @dvonthenen. If anyone has any questions about the EMC World presentations, you can always catch me on the {code} Community Slack channel.