Swordfish – A Standard by Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet

Whether it’s the IEEE, the ISO or any other, we live in a world governed by standards. This has the positive impact in allowing interoperability of devices and elements, but at the same time has the unfortunate side effect of hampering the development of new technologies which conflict with those standards, even if their adoption would ultimately provide a better outcome for everyone!

At the same time, many organisations (read: vendors) opt out of these standards and introduce their own. This is great for the vendor as it is tailored to their requirements and products, but it doesn’t help the customer or their lowly sysadmin who has to then implement a load of additional tooling to manage these products. Take S3 as an example; AWS took one look at what was out there in the market, decided that none of the standards met their requirements, so wrote their own!

The key seems to me to be finding a balance, where you implement a standard, but make it extensible, such that individual vendors can add additional data or functionality over and above the baseline. This means that you can always support the “lowest common denominator” for everyone.

So what is Swordfish?

Funnily enough, the folk from SNIA (The Storage Networking Industry Association) have implemented precisely this with one of their latest standards releases, Swordfish. Specifically, this defines the standards for APIs used to manage storage devices in a consistent fashion, regardless of vendor or indeed storage class (for example software based hyper-converged solutions are supported by it, as well as block, file, object, etc!).standardsThey have achieved this by taking the existing SMI-S standards and refactoring them into a simplified model which is client, not vendor oriented, and based on a REST API model, JSON (the current industry favourite for almost all data interchange) and OData. Not only that, but they have achieved this and agreed the standards with their many members in less than 12 months. By comparison to your average RFC from the IEEE that’s lightning fast! 😮

Now this is not to say that your typical vendor is going to throw out everything they have today, but if they begin to run these APIs in parallel, I could see this eventually becoming the defacto standard for all storage management. In addition, SNIA have confirmed that if 2-3 or more vendors have a requirement for the same additional fields (which they will initially have to implement via extensions), then SNIA will ratify them within weeks. Truly an agile methodology for standards!

The Tekhead Take

This seems to me to be a pragmatic approach to a difficult problem. Keeping vendors happy, whilst trying to make life easier for storage consumers and administrators by bringing storage management into the twenty-first century!

Despite being a relatively dry subject matter, I was actually quite interested and impressed with this innovation! People will still need dedicated local storage for many years to come, and these standards will help to enable them to manage storage in a more consistent fashion. Who knows, it may even promote more competition!

Want to Know More?

I was fortunate enough to meet the team from SNIA last year at their Colorado HQ, with Storage Field Day 13. One of the speakers (industry veteran Rob Peglar) also recently appeared as a guest on the Storage Unpacked podcast – an episode well worth a listen too!

Anyway, you can catch the session here:

SNIA Presents at Storage Field Day 13

SNIA have published a load of information on the standards here:

http://snia.org/swordfish

Finally, some of the other SFD13 delegates had their own thoughts on the session and standards as a whole. You can find them here:

Disclaimer/Disclosure: My flights, accommodation, meals, etc, at Storage Field Day 13 were provided by Tech Field Day, but there was no expectation or request for me to write about any of the vendors products or services and I was not compensated in any way for my time at the event.

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Counting Clouds and Operating VMware – Another Awesome Open TechCast Guest!

On day two of VMworld Barcelona 2017, our team of intrepid podcasters were able to catch up with Chief Operating Officer of Customer Operations, Sanjay Poonen, for a chat about life, careers, cloud architecture, VMware strategy and the startup space!

It was a great conversation and clear to see how passionate Sanjay is about the organisation, but more importantly, the people around him. He ended the podcast with a few nuggets of career advice which I think are well worth taking on board for anyone, regardless of seniority or time in the industry. The episode is well worthwhile a listen for this alone!Sanjay Poonen Career Advice

Once again, Kev, Ather, Amit and myself were there in person, with Gareth remotely dialled in from the UK via Zoom, albeit via a rather dodgy wifi connection at our end!

We were fortunate enough to sit down with both Sanjay and Pat Gelsinger at the event (find interview post here!). It’s great to see senior leadership at as huge an organisation as VMware taking the time out of their insane conference schedules to involve themselves in community initiatives, such as the Open TechCast!Sanjay Poonen and the Open TechCast crew!

Community engagement is one thing I think VMware continues to do better than most organisations in the industry. It’s probably (at least in part) VMworld continues to attract larger audiences every year, even when other public cloud vendors are taking such large chunks of attention and market share.

Finally, massive thanks again to Sanjay for taking the time to hang out with us! It was a blast!

If you want to catch this extra-special episode of the Open TechCast, you can tune in at:

https://www.opentechcast.com/ep7-a-bit-of-a-coo-a-quick-conflab-with-sanjay-poonen/

Make sure to subscribe to the show using your favourite pod-catcher of choice, and follow us at @OpenTechCast on Twitter, where we hope to continue our conversations well into the future!

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Open TechCast – The One with Pat Gelsinger

The title does kind of give it away, but the co-hosts of our humble little community podcast were fortunate to spend 40 minutes or so this week with VMware’s CEO, Pat Gelsinger.

We discussed Pat’s journey into to VMware, the difficulties of maintaining a healthy work/life balance, gender equality in the workplace, the transition from traditional licensing models, the future of SDDC and much, much more!

Needless to say, it’s been pretty difficult keeping this one under wraps, especially as we didn’t want to jinx it!

The Interview

Kev, Ather, Amit and myself were able to be there in person, but we also managed to dial in Gareth remotely from the UK via Zoom, for a full complement of co-hosts! At one point in the show we happened to be discussing Moore’s law, when Moore’s cousin Murphy decided to jump in unannounced!. Despite putting fresh new batteries into the recorder shortly before the interview, they gave up the ghost, mid-session!

Fortunately, our keen eyed co-host and sound man, Kev, spotted the issue and was able to avoid disaster! There were a nervous few minutes after the session when we were testing the recording for corruption, I can tell you! It just goes to show that no matter how much planning you do, unexpected events can still crop up!…

Anyway, massive thanks again to Pat for taking the time to hang out with us, and we very much look forward to a re-run next year if the opportunity arises! 🙂

How can I listen?!

If you want to catch this extra-special episode of the Open TechCast, you can tune in at:

https://www.opentechcast.com/ep6-life-technology-and-everything-with-pat-gelsinger/

We also have another very special guest coming up in our next episode, so make sure to subscribe to the show using your favourite pod catcher of choice, and follow us at @OpenTechCast on Twitter!

And finally… whatever you do, just keep an eye out for that Alan Renouf, he’ll be CEO before you know it…

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Docker – State of the Nation (aka Observations of a Brit)

It may surprise you to learn that Docker is actually quite old now (at least in Startup terms!), having released the first version of their very cool software in March 2013!

Throughout that time, Docker (the company) have moved at a fairly rapid pace in terms of feature and etween

ug releases, with an average of a point release about every quarter and minor releases every month (or more)!

Whilst sitting here awaiting my flight to VMworld Europe 2017, where there are MANY MANY MANY (MANY!) sessions on Docker, Photon, Kubernetes, etc on the session schedule, I am prompted to consider Docker’s rise to popularity, and finish off a post I begun a few months back after Tech Field Day 12!

Well come on Galbraith… get on with it then!

My experience in UK IT industry over the last (nearly) 15 years has taught me a few things, one of which is that whenever new technologies begin serious adoption in the US, it usually becomes popular in the UK within 2-3 years. That said, this number has been squeezed down a little in the past few years as companies move towards more agile development and deployment methods. Fail fast is becoming the mantra of many more organisations, though some people I speak to still wake up with night sweats at even the thought!

The first time a customer asked me about Docker in the UK was over 3 years ago, yet in all that time, people I talk to outside of the social media bubble many of us live in have been virtually silent about it; that is until now. Docker is becoming a weekly conversation topic now with a lot of organisations I talk to, with a many people wanting to jump on board the band wagon. The switch from an operating system-centric view of the world, to a more application and service-oriented (or should that be microservice-oriented) view of the world is becoming far more prevalent in my experience.Docker Swarm

Drivers to Docker Adoption

So what is it about this Docker stuff which seems to be catching the attention of people I talk to? A few common themes I hear are:

Automation of code deployment pipelines (CI/CD) to increase business agility
I think this is probably the number one driver to Docker adoption for people I talk to. Automation of CI/CD pipelines has become so common now, it is almost becoming the norm. Yes, it is tricky to do this with more traditional applications, but it certainly isn’t impossible. Using containers as the delivery mechanism for your application provides very consistent and repeatable outcomes. I mean, you can even get Oracle DB in a container now?!?!

That said, once you dockerise your applications there are many further challenges you will run into, including something as simple as how to apply your current security tooling, policies and proceedures to these new environments.

Maturity of the platform
The Docker code base and third party ecosystem has finally reached a point of maturity where many of the networking and storage issues of the past are beginning to reduce to within acceptable risk boundaries.

Improved cross-industry support
Following this maturity model, a swathe of vendors have put their names behind the Docker ecosystem; from VMware to Openstack, AWS to Azure, Google to Cloud Foundary, everyone is getting on board! You no longer have to buy support direct from Docker (the company), but can instead get it from your cloud vendor, along with a managed orchestration tier too, such as Docker Swarm, Kubernetes or Mesos!

Because Cloud
Yes, you can Dockers your existing applications for use on premises, but many organisations I speak to are using Docker as a method to allow their developers to write code on premises, test in their dev environments on prom or in the cloud, then deploy in a consistent fashion to their brand spanking new Production cloud platforms. PaaS solutions such as Azure WebApps and AWS Elastic Beanstalk are becoming a good option for customers who just want to write code, but for those who want that little bit more control, Docker gives them flexibility and consistency.to the cloud

CIO/CTO CV Padding
I hate to play the cynic, but I think there is definitely a significant percentage of CIOs/CTOs who are doing “digital transformations through containerisation and cloud” specifically to pad out their CVs and help them get a better gig.

This is otherwise known as a “Resume-driven IT Strategy”!

I am aware of one CIO who deliberately went to a cloud platform, even though it was significantly more expensive than a traditional managed hosting solution of a similar spec, when their business case and steady workload drew few, if any discernible benefits from the use of cloud.
CIO CV Padding When I hear people refer to technologies such as VMware vSphere as “Legacy” it really drives home to me the shift we are all going through, yet again, in the industry. This is another reason though which CIOs/CTOs/Heads of IT tell me they want cloud and containers. That said, I still struggle to find a single person who doesn’t have at least one physical server in their infrastructure, so just like the mainframe before it, I don’t think the hypervisor is going away any time yet!

The Tekhead Take

As expected the lag of a couple of years from the US to the UK in adoption of containers was apparent, but now is most definitely the time! Despite both positive and negative reasons for integrating it, Docker has become the part of the information technology zeitgeist in the UK…

Want to Know More?

I was fortunate enough to meet with the product team from Docker at Tech Field Day 12 towards the end of last year. It was a really interesting session which covered many of the enterprise networking and security features recently introduced to the platform, along with Docker’s new support offerings. I highly recommend checking it out!

Docker Presents at Tech Field Day 12

Some of the other TFD12 delegates had their own thoughts on the session and Docker as a whole. You can find them here:

Disclaimer/Disclosure: My flights, accommodation, meals, etc, at Tech Field Day 12 were provided by Tech Field Day / Gestalt IT, but there was no expectation or request for me to write about any of the vendors products or services and I was not compensated in any way for my time at the event.

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