https://it20.info/ Recent content on IT 2.0 Hugo -- gohugo.io Copyright © 2008–2018, Steve Francia and the Hugo Authors; all rights reserved. Wed, 18 Feb 2026 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2026/02/adding-kiro-support-to-backlog-md-using-backlog-md/ Wed, 18 Feb 2026 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2026/02/adding-kiro-support-to-backlog-md-using-backlog-md/ I had Backlog.md on my radar for a while, but I never ended up using it. Today I decided to give it a try. Backlog.md is one of those tools in the galaxy of spec driven development. While it's "agent agnostic", its documentation and utilities assume a set of specific agents (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.). I decided to use Backlog.md to add Kiro explicit support to Backlog.md. The goal wasn't to add Kiro. https://it20.info/2026/02/using-the-ralph-wiggum-loop-to-execute-kiro-specs/ Fri, 13 Feb 2026 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2026/02/using-the-ralph-wiggum-loop-to-execute-kiro-specs/ This blog post assumes you are somewhat familiar with Kiro specs driven development (if you are not, this is a great read) and the Ralph Wiggum loop (if you are not, this is another great read). When I think about Kiro specs driven development, I think about a two phases approach: the authoring phase and the execution phase. Kiro manages for you both phases inside the IDE. It includes an intuitive authoring wizard that allows you to craft the specs for the goal at hand, and it also includes an integrated execution flow to implement the specs you have defined. https://it20.info/2021/01/on-the-importance-of-the-feedback-loop-in-spec-driven-development/ Tue, 20 Jan 2026 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2021/01/on-the-importance-of-the-feedback-loop-in-spec-driven-development/ This is a short and unstructured blog post on some experiments I have been running using Kiro spec-driven development. I thought I'd share my random notes and observations. Last week I prompted the Kiro IDE spec engine with the following: I want you to look at the following doc pages and create a web application (using a framework of your choice) to create a kiro cli custom agent UI. This UI should be able to read an existing custom agent file and it should be able to create a new one from scratch. https://it20.info/2025/12/specs-intent-and-the-source-of-truth/ Thu, 18 Dec 2025 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2025/12/specs-intent-and-the-source-of-truth/ The world is changing. Fast. I have been working in the generative AI coding tool space for about 3 years now. And it feels 70. I often joke about the fact that one year in generative AI is like three dog years and twenty-nine EC2 years. So, that checks out. A couple of months ago, I have participated in a series of events (public and private) where I talked about my experience in these last 3 years and where I see this industry going. https://it20.info/2025/09/using-kiro-specs-to-build-iac-out-of-a-shell-script/ Mon, 15 Sep 2025 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2025/09/using-kiro-specs-to-build-iac-out-of-a-shell-script/ In this post, I am continuing my Kiro experiments to produce better specs outcomes. I am doing so using my demo app repository (https://github.com/aws-containers/votingapp). This is the same application I have used in my previous blog post Using Q CLI to validate the implementation of Kiros specs. For background, when I built this application I was in a bit of a rush and I did not have time to build a proper IaC setup for the pre-requsites of its deployment (including the DynamoDB table and its initialization). https://it20.info/2025/09/using-q-cli-to-validate-the-implementation-of-kiro-specs/ Tue, 02 Sep 2025 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2025/09/using-q-cli-to-validate-the-implementation-of-kiro-specs/ Many of us have one or more litmus tests for assessing the capabilities and workflows of generative AI code assistants. Simon Willison has his "Pelican on a bike". (One of) mine is asking a gen AI coding tool to perform this task: 1Create a new Flask route in a dedicated web page at the following path: "/votes". 2This page should be password protected. 3The page will show a table (in a grid format) with the four restaurants and the vote for each restaurant. https://it20.info/2024/12/amazon-q-developer-in-the-ide-cheat-sheet/ Sun, 08 Dec 2024 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2024/12/amazon-q-developer-in-the-ide-cheat-sheet/ At re:Invent 2024 the Amazon Q Developer team has introduced a number of additional capabilities. Many of them are available in the IDE (one of Q Developer's primary consumption "channels"). One of the challenges I have noticed is that people are often confused by what they can do in the IDE, what capabilities they can use, how and where they can trigger those capabilities, and many more. Below you can find a cheat sheet for a bird's eye view of all the ways you can use Amazon Q Developer in the IDE that I put together on the fly. https://it20.info/2024/11/aws-cloudformation-and-generative-ai/ Mon, 25 Nov 2024 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2024/11/aws-cloudformation-and-generative-ai/ The CloudFormation team has been on a roll in the last 12 months. Among many releases, they introduced Git stack management, up to 40% faster deployments, stack visualization with Infrastructure Composer, adjustable timeouts and last week the team has introduced the timeline view for deployments. Being a very visual person the last one picked my curiosity and I gave my Yelb test application a try. And I really liked how they have been able to turn a very dry (and honestly cryptic) list of events into a very intuitive graphical view that makes more intuitive to get a sense of the time it takes to deploy a resource as well as a sense of the dependencies among them. https://it20.info/2024/10/diy-personalization-for-amazon-q-developer/ Mon, 30 Sep 2024 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2024/10/diy-personalization-for-amazon-q-developer/ It's pretty clear (to me) that Generative AI assistants users are coming to expect a certain level of personalization to their needs. For example, I was talking to Johannes Koch (an AWS Hero) and he told me "I get distracted by too much verbosity (explanation) of Q coming “after” the initial code generation." But I have heard distinct opposite feedback that Q should be more verbose and "useful" when explaining how-to workflows to users that are not experienced in a specific topic. https://it20.info/2024/8/embracing-amazon-q-developer-failures/ Tue, 20 Aug 2024 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2024/8/embracing-amazon-q-developer-failures/ Amazon Q Developer is what pays my bill and the generative AI-based code assistant I use more regularly. From what I am reading and hearing, the rant in this post may apply to other generative AI-based tools and experiences. I have, for a long time, been saying that using generative AI is like driving a car. You can let it crash into a wall (and making fun of the car on Twitter) or you can drive it to get to the beach. https://it20.info/2024/5/a-framework-to-adopt-generative-ai-assistants-for-builders/ Tue, 28 May 2024 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2024/5/a-framework-to-adopt-generative-ai-assistants-for-builders/ Last week I was in Istanbul for the local Community Day, where I talked about Generative AI assistants (e.g. Amazon Q Developer). One of the concepts I talked about is a framework for how to think about adopting these assistants. This framework tries to address common questions people have around the topic: are these assistants useful? can we trust them? will they replace us? and so forth. Farrah captured a picture of my slide and I committed to write a blog to (try to) walk people through what I have in mind. https://it20.info/2024/3/using-the-amazon-q-feature-development-capability-to-produce-documentation/ Tue, 05 Mar 2024 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2024/3/using-the-amazon-q-feature-development-capability-to-produce-documentation/ I have long been saying that generative AI english-to-code capabilities (that is, the ability for an assistant to produce code based on a prompt) are overrated - but very useful - while the code-to-english generative AI capabilities (that is, the ability to explain a piece of code) are underrated (and likely even more useful). I am obviously exaggerating to make a point, but I do believe that there is an incredible amount of untapped value that can be created by developers using generative AI that goes beyond the notion of producing code. https://it20.info/2024/2/an-example-of-the-importance-of-prompt-engineering/ Tue, 20 Feb 2024 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2024/2/an-example-of-the-importance-of-prompt-engineering/ If you have been deep into generative AI, you probably heard about the notion of "prompt engineering". In a nutshell, it's the science that masters how to interact with Large Language Models (LLMs), how to "ask for things". I found this to be a good learning and reference resource. In this post I wanted to share a basic example of how important prompt engineering is based on a real-life experience. https://it20.info/2024/2/english-as-a-programming-language-is-almost-here/ Sun, 18 Feb 2024 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2024/2/english-as-a-programming-language-is-almost-here/ Last week Darren Shepherd, CTO at Acorn, announced on Twitter his last crazy OSS project: GPTscript. I paid attention because I always say that, if you want to know what people will be doing 3 years from now, you have to watch what Darren, Shannon and Sheng are building today. They have an industry track record for this. When I saw the tweet I skimmed through the README and this was my first reaction: Over the weekend I sat down to figure out where I could fit half day of experiments to play with it and figure out what this crew was up to and, since I had half an hour to spare, I started to look around. https://it20.info/2023/08/building-a-generative-ai-application-using-aws-step-functions/ Mon, 28 Aug 2023 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2023/08/building-a-generative-ai-application-using-aws-step-functions/ The original title of this blog post was "Building a Generative AI application to fight WhatsApp vocal messages". I hate WhatsApp vocal messages, and I am not hiding it: As I try to experiment more with what the good Gen AI can do for this world, I thought I'd start by solving a use case that have been bothering me since WhatsApp introduced vocal messages support. The tweet describes the process I took to turn a vocal message into a polished, to the point, and concise text message. https://it20.info/2023/6/generative-ai-and-the-march-towards-the-democratization-of-it/ Tue, 22 Aug 2023 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2023/6/generative-ai-and-the-march-towards-the-democratization-of-it/ I have worked in IT for almost 30 years and I have experienced first-hand tectonic shifts in this industry. Some of them have been more profound and impacting than others. Given my recent re-focus on Generative AI, I am going to go through my experience trying to imagine the implications of Gen AI and its potential impact with a focus on the IT democratization process we have appreciated in the last 3 decades. https://it20.info/2023/6/the-dark-zone-between-the-magic-genai-experience-and-the-large-language-model/ Sun, 18 Jun 2023 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2023/6/the-dark-zone-between-the-magic-genai-experience-and-the-large-language-model/ In the last few months, the "generative AI" discussions have been dominated by LLMs (or Large Language Models). We ended up short-cutting the (magical) experience you can get and the models that make it possible... as if there was nothing in between. I am going to argue that there is a ton in between (that is not being talked about a lot on Twitter). I am calling this space "Mordor", not because it's "bad" but because it's a dark zone, unknown to the "average user Joe" and it's rarely talked about. https://it20.info/2023/06/taking-a-turn-in-my-career/ Mon, 12 Jun 2023 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2023/06/taking-a-turn-in-my-career/ I spent the last 30-ish years of my professional life working on what I generally refer to as "compute systems abstractions". I started in 1994 at IBM working on "the PC" (Personal Computer) almost by chance and I specialized, over the years, on physical servers, operating systems, hardware virtualization, containers and functions. I can pin almost all these transitions to "aha moment" I had. For example, I vividly remember when, in October 2001, I met the lead IBM xSeries 440 engineer in Kirkland (WA) and he told me: https://it20.info/2023/03/implementing-the-aws-elastic-beanstalk-worker-environment-pattern-with-amazon-ecs/ Tue, 28 Mar 2023 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2023/03/implementing-the-aws-elastic-beanstalk-worker-environment-pattern-with-amazon-ecs/ In the last few months, I have talked to a couple of Beanstalk customers that wanted to explore ways to modernize their deployments. They like Beanstalk but they see the value of moving to a more container-native deployment to intercept more modern development tool-chains. This did not surprise me. Beanstalk customers have already been vocal about finding ways to leverage container-centric services to apply a strangler pattern approach for their Beanstalk environments. https://it20.info/2023/03/configuring-a-timeout-for-amazon-ecs-tasks/ Mon, 20 Mar 2023 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2023/03/configuring-a-timeout-for-amazon-ecs-tasks/ I know, I am boring. Some people relax doing Sudoku. I relax writing Step Functions state machines. Not that I am any good, I just enjoy doing it (I am that weird). As I was searching for my next Sudoku state machine challenge, I bumped into this Amazon ECS roadmap request to introduce support for tasks timeouts. The request is actually fairly legit. You may need to make sure jobs launched via the runTask API do not go rogue, and you want to be able to configure the infrastructure in a way, no matter what happens, that a given task can't run for more than a certain configurable amount of time. https://it20.info/2023/02/using-aws-application-composer-to-build-a-serviceful-application/ Mon, 27 Feb 2023 05:22:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2023/02/using-aws-application-composer-to-build-a-serviceful-application/ In (virtual) part 1 of this blog post (yes it has a different title) I have shown how to use a combination of AWS Step Functions and Amazon EventBridge to modify the behaviour of Amazon ECS and virtually adding a new feature that doesn't exist in the product itself. Ok this may sound a big hyperbolic, and it probably is, but go back to (virtual) part 1 to get more context. https://it20.info/2023/02/automating-stable-fqdn-for-public-amazon-ecs-tasks/ Mon, 27 Feb 2023 05:21:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2023/02/automating-stable-fqdn-for-public-amazon-ecs-tasks/ In an effort to dive deeper into event driven architectures, I have lately been experimenting with AWS Step Functions as I have documented in this blog post where I have refactored the application logic of my demo application Yelb into a set of state machines. As I wanted to dive deeper into Amazon EventBridge, I was looking for a proper project to gets my hands dirty. I decided to take a challenge after looking at this ECS feature request on the public AWS containers roadmap where users are asking for a way to have a reliable public DNS for a single Amazon ECS task without needing to have a load balancer in front of it (for costs reason). https://it20.info/2022/12/using-aws-step-functions-to-mitigate-code-liability/ Mon, 12 Dec 2022 01:00:00 +0000 https://it20.info/2022/12/using-aws-step-functions-to-mitigate-code-liability/ Code is a liability. That’s not only the code you write but also (and predominantly!) the code that you need to operationalize for your own business logic to work. In this blog post I would like to demonstrate how it is possible to reduce, for relatively simple use cases, that liability by many orders of magnitude. Background At re:Invent 2021 I presented a session whose title was You have a container image: Now what? https://it20.info/2022/12/updating-the-yelb-ruby-lambda-functions-and-the-s3-static-website-template/ Mon, 12 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://it20.info/2022/12/updating-the-yelb-ruby-lambda-functions-and-the-s3-static-website-template/ Yelb is the demo application I use to experiment with and learn technologies. A few years ago I have refactored the yelb-appserver component to work with Lambda and the yelb-ui component to be hosted on S3. At the time of this writing, this folder in the Yelb repository describes the architecture for this deployment model. Note that I am far from happy with the deployment mechanism I have right now. It's basically a shell script that deploys a Cloud Formation template (which contains the DDB tables as well as the Lambda functions) and that clones a source S3 bucket with the JavaScript for the user interface into a target bucket. https://it20.info/2021/11/submitting-an-aws-batch-job-from-aws-api-gateway/ Fri, 12 Nov 2021 16:00:00 +0000 https://it20.info/2021/11/submitting-an-aws-batch-job-from-aws-api-gateway/ I have lately invested a lot of time keeping an eye on StackOverflow because there is a ton to learn in terms of how AWS customers are using our products. I do have all sort of filters setup and I reguarly spend a good chunk of my day there. A couple of days ago I bumped into this question that intrigued me a lot. First, because I did not even know you could trigger API calls to all those services from API Gateway (I do remember and have used the Lambda integration though) and I wanted to learn more. https://it20.info/2021/11/running-the-stock-nginx-container-image-with-aws-lambda/ Sat, 06 Nov 2021 16:00:00 +0000 https://it20.info/2021/11/running-the-stock-nginx-container-image-with-aws-lambda/ Part of my job at AWS is to explore the art of possible. A few weeks ago I came across an open source project called re:Web. What intrigued me about re:Web is that it allows a traditional container image (wrapping a traditional “web service” application) to be repurposed and deployed to AWS Lambda. The idea for this blog was sparked by an issue that Aidan Steele opened on the re:Web project. https://it20.info/2020/02/my-first-cdk-experience-under-the-hood/ Wed, 05 Feb 2020 10:47:48 +0000 https://it20.info/2020/02/my-first-cdk-experience-under-the-hood/ A few weeks ago I have published an AWS Fargate related project in GitHub called Fargatecount. I won’t bore you with the details of what it does (you can read it on the repository). In a nutshell, it runs a container as a scheduled Fargate task that in turn runs a script that queries ECS and EKS to collect the number of total Fargate tasks running in the account in that region and pushes a metric to CloudWatch. https://it20.info/2019/09/securing-credentials-using-aws-secrets-manager-with-aws-fargate/ Sat, 21 Sep 2019 21:57:01 +0000 https://it20.info/2019/09/securing-credentials-using-aws-secrets-manager-with-aws-fargate/ This article was originally posted on the AWS compute blog. I am re-posting here for the convenience of the readers of my personal blog. Cloud security at AWS is the highest priority and the work that the Containers team is doing is a testament to that. A month ago, the team introduced an integration between AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store with AWS Fargate tasks. Now, Fargate customers can easily consume secrets securely and parameters transparently from their own task definitions. https://it20.info/2019/03/deployment-pipeline-of-a-containerized-application-using-aws-services/ Thu, 14 Mar 2019 13:36:19 +0000 https://it20.info/2019/03/deployment-pipeline-of-a-containerized-application-using-aws-services/ A few days ago, at Incontro DevOps Italia (IDI) 2019 I did a breakout session about the topic in subject. I decided to use the 30-ish minutes I had available to share a bit of context re the need for deployment automation and then I did a short demo (well, as short as a CI/CD demo could be) that was aimed at showing the individual pieces (namely the build and deploy phases) independently and then how to wrap them up together in a pipeline. https://it20.info/2019/02/moving-to-a-new-role-at-aws/ Mon, 18 Feb 2019 16:58:54 +0000 https://it20.info/2019/02/moving-to-a-new-role-at-aws/ At Amazon we work backwards from customer needs and this is embodied in everything we do. When we release a new product or service we start from the “press release and FAQ” and work backwards from there to develop what we intend to build for our customers. I am sketching this post in early December (2018) on a train heading to Rome just a few days prior to interviewing for a new role at AWS. https://it20.info/2018/06/compute-abstractions-on-aws/ Tue, 12 Jun 2018 14:47:07 +0000 https://it20.info/2018/06/compute-abstractions-on-aws/ When I joined AWS last year, I was trying to find a way to explain, in the easiest way possible, all the options the platform offers to our users from a compute perspective. There are of course many ways to peal this onion and I wanted to create a “visual story” that was easy for me to tell. I ended up drafting an animated slide that I have presented at many customers meetings and public events. https://it20.info/2018/05/my-first-6-months-at-aws/ Tue, 08 May 2018 08:41:02 +0000 https://it20.info/2018/05/my-first-6-months-at-aws/ As you may have heard, late last year I joined Amazon Web Services. I have recently turned 6 months at AWS (or 180 x Day1) and that is often a good point to pause and reflect. Also, I have got so many people asking me how I am doing here that I thought a public blog post would scale better than many 1:1 interactions. The TL/DR version of it is: it is exactly as I have envisioned before joining; I didn’t have any major surprise; my due diligence was accurate (i. https://it20.info/2018/04/aws-identity-and-access-management-introduction-to-resources-access-control/ Thu, 05 Apr 2018 14:32:08 +0000 https://it20.info/2018/04/aws-identity-and-access-management-introduction-to-resources-access-control/ This is my first blog post as an AWS employee. I have spent the last 6+ months learning new things (IAM being one of them) and I figured I could (and should) share some of these learnings with my followers. I hope it can smooth the learning curve when you transition from a data center centric view of the world to a cloud centric view of the world. This blog post doesn’t add new information that can’t be found in the AWS official documentation. https://it20.info/2017/09/so-long-vmware-hello-aws/ Wed, 27 Sep 2017 19:12:46 +0000 https://it20.info/2017/09/so-long-vmware-hello-aws/ I have an awesome job, an awesome manager and I work for one of the best companies around. Yet, Friday September 29th 2017 is my last day at VMware. On Monday October 2nd I will join Amazon Web Services as a Principal Solutions Architect. This was not a decision I took lightly. This blog post (in its original draft) was 7 pages long. I intended to explain, at a certain level of details, the thought process I went through to take this decision. https://it20.info/2017/09/vmware-cloud-on-aws-vs-azure-stack/ Mon, 18 Sep 2017 13:28:53 +0000 https://it20.info/2017/09/vmware-cloud-on-aws-vs-azure-stack/ Introduction VMware, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are in the middle of some interesting technology and services roll out that have the potential of moving the needle in cloud adoption (spoiler alert: whatever cloud means). VMware is coming from a very strong (almost exclusive) marketshare in the on-prem data center virtualization space. AWS is the 800-pounds cloud gorilla and Microsoft is one of the biggest contenders in the same public cloud space. https://it20.info/2017/07/a-data-center-provisioning-horror-story/ Wed, 26 Jul 2017 12:21:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2017/07/a-data-center-provisioning-horror-story/ Yesterday I noted a tweet from Frank Denneman: I guess he was asking this in the context of the VMWonAWS cloud offering and how, with said service, you could provision vSphere capacity without having to “acquire server hardware”. This reminded me of an anecdote I often use in talks to describe some of the data center provisioning and optimization horror stories. This won’t answer Frank’s question specifically but it offers a broader view of how awful (and off rail) it could quickly get inside a data center. https://it20.info/2017/07/yelb-yet-another-sample-app/ Fri, 21 Jul 2017 11:57:00 +0000 https://it20.info/2017/07/yelb-yet-another-sample-app/ Another pet project I have spent cycles on as of late is an open source sample application called Yelb (thanks to my partner in crime chief developer Andrea Siviero for initiating me to the mysteries of Angular2). This is the link to the Yelb repo on GitHub. I am trying to be fairly verbose in the README files in the repo so I am not going to repeat myself here. Someone said GitHub repos are the new blog posts in the DevOps and cloud era. https://it20.info/2017/07/project-harbor-makes-an-entry-into-rancher/ Thu, 20 Jul 2017 09:03:45 +0000 https://it20.info/2017/07/project-harbor-makes-an-entry-into-rancher/ This article was originally posted on the VMware Cloud Native corporate blog. I am re-posting here for the convenience of the readers of my personal blog. Early this year I challenged myself with a pet project to create a Rancher catalog entry for Project Harbor (a VMware-started open sourced enterprise container registry). This is something that I have been working on, off and on in my spare time. I originally envisioned this to be a private catalog entry. https://it20.info/2017/06/hashidays-2017-london-a-personal-report/ Thu, 22 Jun 2017 10:06:55 +0000 https://it20.info/2017/06/hashidays-2017-london-a-personal-report/ I have lately started a tradition of copying/pasting reports of events I attend for the community to be able to read them. As always, they are organized as a mix of (personal) thoughts that, as such, are always questionable …. as well as raw notes that I took during the keynotes and breakout sessions. You can find/read previous reports at these links: Kubecon – 2017 – Berlin Dockercon - 2016 - Seattle Serverlessconf – 2016 – New York Note some of these reports have private comments meant to be internal considerations to be shared with my team. https://it20.info/2017/04/kubecon-2017-berlin-a-personal-report/ Mon, 03 Apr 2017 13:48:58 +0000 https://it20.info/2017/04/kubecon-2017-berlin-a-personal-report/ Following the establishing best practices of ‘open sourcing’ my trip reports of conferences I attend, I am copying and pasting hereafter my raw comments related to the recent Kubecon EMEA 2017 trip. I have done something similar for Dockercon 2016 and Serverlessconf 2016 last year and given the feedbacks I had received, this is something worthwhile apparently. As always: these reports contains some facts (hopefully I did get those right) plus personal opinions and interpretations. https://it20.info/2017/03/docker-containerd-explained-in-plain-words/ Thu, 16 Mar 2017 15:15:24 +0000 https://it20.info/2017/03/docker-containerd-explained-in-plain-words/ This articlewas originally posted on theVMware Cloud Native corporate blog. I am re-posting here for the convenience of the readers of my personal blog. I have been frequently asked “what’s [Docker]Containerd?” The short answer I gave may be of benefit for the larger community so I am turning this into a short blog post. I hope the condensed format is useful. Background: What’s the Problem Docker started a technology (Docker Engine) that allows you to package and run your application in a Linux container on a single host. https://it20.info/2017/01/automating-vsphere-integrated-containers-deployments/ Tue, 10 Jan 2017 15:04:30 +0000 https://it20.info/2017/01/automating-vsphere-integrated-containers-deployments/ In the second half of 2016 I had an opportunity to focus (almost) exclusively on vSphere Integrated Containers all the way through its GA in early December. I had been working on VIC Engine and project Bonneville since 2015 but in H2 2016 I focused pretty much full-time on that and I had the pleasure to be involved in the discussions that led vSphere Integrated Containers to be what it is today. https://it20.info/2017/01/vmware-harbor-as-a-rancher-catalog-entry/ Mon, 09 Jan 2017 10:23:51 +0000 https://it20.info/2017/01/vmware-harbor-as-a-rancher-catalog-entry/ In the last few months I have been looking at Rancher (an open source container management product) as a way to learn more about Docker containers and understand better the ecosystem around them. One of the things that appealed me about Rancher is the notion of an extensible catalog of application and infrastructure services. There is an official catalog tier called Library (maintained and built by Rancher the company), there is a “community” catalog tier called Community (maintained by Rancher the company but built and supported by the Rancher community) and then there is a “private” tier (where you can add your own private catalog entries that you own and maintain). https://it20.info/2016/06/dockercon-2016-seattle-a-personal-report/ Wed, 29 Jun 2016 12:34:14 +0000 https://it20.info/2016/06/dockercon-2016-seattle-a-personal-report/ A few weeks ago I shared on my blog a cleaned up conference report from Serverlessconf 2016. Given the relatively good success of the experiment (some good feedback at “no cost” for me – copy and paste FTW!) I decided to take another shot. This time I am sharing a report from Dockercon 2016 (in Seattle). This has been similarly polished by deleting comments that were not supposed to be “public”. https://it20.info/2016/06/serverlessconf-2016-new-york-city-a-personal-report/ Tue, 07 Jun 2016 09:53:05 +0000 https://it20.info/2016/06/serverlessconf-2016-new-york-city-a-personal-report/ Warning: social media experiment ahead. Two weeks ago I attended Serverlessconf in NYC. I’d like to thank the organization (Stan and the acloud.guru crew) for the tremendous job (and for inviting me to attend). I originally wanted to write a (proper) blog post but then I figured that: I have already written much of what I wanted to say in an “internal report” that I shared with my team I don’t really have time these days to write a (proper) blog post The “internal report” doesn’t really have much of “internal” / confidential stuff anyway (just a few comments). https://it20.info/2016/04/aws-lambda-a-few-years-of-advancement-and-we-are-back-to-stored-procedures/ Mon, 04 Apr 2016 16:38:00 +0000 https://it20.info/2016/04/aws-lambda-a-few-years-of-advancement-and-we-are-back-to-stored-procedures/ Serverless computing is the new buzzword. AWS describes Lambda (their implementation of Serverless) as the way how you’ll do things post containers. Go figure how behind you are if you are head down learning Docker thinking it’s “the next big thing”. Sorry. In order not to look too legacy, I decided to push on GitHub a small experiment I built last year: that is a super short and simple Python program (that can be run as a Lambda function) that I had used to record (in a DynamoDB table) the status of the vCloud Air login service. https://it20.info/2016/03/the-incestuous-relations-among-containers-orchestration-tools/ Tue, 29 Mar 2016 13:38:15 +0000 https://it20.info/2016/03/the-incestuous-relations-among-containers-orchestration-tools/ This is going to be a short and (somewhat) visual blog post where I want to discuss the absolute madness that is going on in “container land” (for lack of a better characterization). This time I am going to try to use quotes, tweets, slide screenshots as much as possible and avoid my usual boring text rants. I believe you can draw your own conclusions in the end (but I’ll give you a hint). https://it20.info/2016/03/sample-script-to-create-a-vdc-and-deploy-a-photon-docker-host-in-vcloud-air/ Wed, 09 Mar 2016 10:54:39 +0000 https://it20.info/2016/03/sample-script-to-create-a-vdc-and-deploy-a-photon-docker-host-in-vcloud-air/ Yesterday I bumped into a semi-draft of code I wrote a while back and that I have never checked in into GitHub. I spent a few hours to polish it, augmenting it with some Docker related stuff (so that it becomes "cool") and test it a bit. The result is in this repo. The code is based on the awesome vca-cli tool and it requires an account on vCloud Air (you can subscribe here and get $300 of free credit to play with). https://it20.info/2016/03/a-generic-and-highly-academic-discussion-around-multi-tenancy/ Mon, 07 Mar 2016 09:31:06 +0000 https://it20.info/2016/03/a-generic-and-highly-academic-discussion-around-multi-tenancy/ No doubt there is an explosion of complexity these days in IT. I have discussed it many times on this blog. The avalanche of new technologies that get released at a super fast pace is astonishing. And the confusion generated is very strong, the latest survey I came across 5 minutes ago confirms. Among the many many (many) challenges around this, in this blog post I want to focus on a slightly narrow angle of a much bigger picture: multi-tenancy and how all these technologies get “stacked up”. https://it20.info/2016/02/how-to-use-docker-machine-in-conjunction-with-the-vsphere-driver/ Wed, 17 Feb 2016 14:55:47 +0000 https://it20.info/2016/02/how-to-use-docker-machine-in-conjunction-with-the-vsphere-driver/ This article was originally posted on the VMware Cloud Native corporate blog. I am re-posting here for the convenience of the readers of my personal blog. As many of you know docker-machine is the client side tool that allows an individual on his/ her own workstation to fire up docker hosts either local or remote. Docker-machine supports a variety of “drivers” to accomplish this. Some of these drivers deploy locally (e. https://it20.info/2016/02/the-upside-down-economics-of-public-clouds/ Wed, 10 Feb 2016 15:38:56 +0000 https://it20.info/2016/02/the-upside-down-economics-of-public-clouds/ In the last few years we collectively spent an outrageous amount of time talking and arguing about the “per VM” cost of running workloads on-prem Vs. running workloads in a public cloud. While doing so, we forgot to take into account the elephant in the room: the (upside down) economics of (some) public clouds. The general vendor approach to “monetization strategy” Let’s take a step back. We live in a time where we tend to associate raw compute capacity as “commodity” and software / services that extract value from said capacity as “added-value”. https://it20.info/2016/01/why-docker-containers-and-docker-oss-docker-inc/ Tue, 26 Jan 2016 15:22:00 +0000 https://it20.info/2016/01/why-docker-containers-and-docker-oss-docker-inc/ You try to convey a concept but it’s only when something (else) happens that people have their “Aha moment”. Last year VMware introduced a project called Bonneville that later became vSphere Integrated Containers. Having recently moved to the VMware Cloud Native Application Business Unit, working on Bonneville and VIC has been one item of my charter. If you didn’t bother to check the blog posts linked above, in a nutshell, vSphere Integrated Containers is a technology that allows you to provision a VM while maintaining the Docker experience (API/CLI, images format, public registry, etc). https://it20.info/2016/01/how-is-your-shopping-experience-related-to-docker/ Tue, 19 Jan 2016 16:29:28 +0000 https://it20.info/2016/01/how-is-your-shopping-experience-related-to-docker/ A few days ago we had a great friend of mine over for dinner. He also happened to be my very first mentor at IBM (when I joined back in 1994) and one of the smartest guys I have ever met. A few years ago he decided to unplug from the IT industry and has only recently rejoined the mad-house. Since he was so smart, it only took him a few months to get up back to speed with new stuff he had lost track of. https://it20.info/2015/12/devops-for-dummies/ Tue, 15 Dec 2015 15:29:30 +0000 https://it20.info/2015/12/devops-for-dummies/ Last year I wrote a blog post whose title was "Cloud Native Applications for Dummies" that was apparently well received. On the same line, I'd like to do something similar for the average Joe when it comes to DevOps (whatever that means). The CNA post was about the taxonomy of a cloud application. This blog post is all about how organizations make that happen (operationally), if you will. If for Cloud Native Apps the mantra is the The Twelve-Factor App manifesto, for DevOps I had to pick something else. https://it20.info/2015/10/taking-a-new-challenge-cloud-native-apps-whatever-that-means/ Thu, 22 Oct 2015 19:36:52 +0000 https://it20.info/2015/10/taking-a-new-challenge-cloud-native-apps-whatever-that-means/ Two years ago I joined the VMware Cloud Services Business Unit working on vCloud Air because I sensed there was a shift going on in the industry. I referred to that change as a growing personal interest to learn more about how to consume IT Vs. how to build IT. I still very much stand behind that statement as I think, to make a parallel, it is more interesting to leverage electricity than it is to produce it. https://it20.info/2015/09/fog-io-and-vcloud-air/ Wed, 30 Sep 2015 14:49:02 +0000 https://it20.info/2015/09/fog-io-and-vcloud-air/ In the last few weeks I have seen some discussions and requests around using fog.io ("The Ruby cloud services library") in the context of vCloud Air. The short story is that it works just fine. The long story is below. If you are reading this post you may be interested in this combo (fog and vCloud Air) so I am not going to spend cycles explaining what fog is. You probably know it already. https://it20.info/2015/09/yet-another-cli-not-vcautils/ Wed, 09 Sep 2015 14:24:50 +0000 https://it20.info/2015/09/yet-another-cli-not-vcautils/ In the last year or so I have focused primarily on vCloud Air API and Automation. As a mere exercise I have been working on some code that I am making available today: https://github.com/mreferre/vcautils. In the README on Github you can read everything about it, so I am not going to repeat myself (too much) in this blog post. I just want to make it very clear that this tool is a toy, an experiment, a learning exercise and something I have been using when I was too bored to use a web browser REST plugin to navigate the API structure of vCloud Air. https://it20.info/2015/06/iaas-cloud-outages-get-over-it/ Wed, 24 Jun 2015 18:33:56 +0000 https://it20.info/2015/06/iaas-cloud-outages-get-over-it/ I have just heard of a massive outage that a localized IaaS Cloud Service Provider is experiencing: they have been down (at the time I am drafting this short blog post) 4 days and counting. When I get to publish this it may be they have been down 4 days or... god knows. Apparently the issue was due to a firmware bug in the technology stack they are using that caused an upgrade to bring the whole site to its knees. https://it20.info/2015/03/what-do-cloud-native-applications-have-to-do-with-cloud/ Tue, 10 Mar 2015 16:46:57 +0000 https://it20.info/2015/03/what-do-cloud-native-applications-have-to-do-with-cloud/ A few weeks ago I wrote a post whose title was Cloud Native Applications (for Dummies). While I don't want to claim that that was my masterpiece, I have received some positive feedbacks about it. So let's say we all agree on how a 'Cloud Native Applications' looks (or should look) like. There are two major events that triggered this follow up post. The first one is that I have very clear in my mind the moment when I wrote, in my previous post the following: "What’s missing from this picture (among many other things) is the scalability nature of these two domains. https://it20.info/2014/12/cloud-native-applications-for-dummies/ Wed, 10 Dec 2014 09:56:46 +0000 https://it20.info/2014/12/cloud-native-applications-for-dummies/ There have been attempts lately to describe "modern applications" or "modern workloads". A good attempt is The Twelve-Factor App. It's a great way to describe such workloads but I think those concepts would need to be dumbed down an order of magnitude to get the average Joe to digest them properly. That's what I would like to do in this blog post. We will lose some important details by doing so but that's ok. https://it20.info/2014/09/the-dark-age-in-front-of-us-a-reality-check-of-mid-2014/ Wed, 10 Sep 2014 15:02:48 +0000 https://it20.info/2014/09/the-dark-age-in-front-of-us-a-reality-check-of-mid-2014/ As I draft this blog post on my way back from VMworld 2014, I have mixed sentiments to share. I spent my IT career (roughly 20 years) on a finite number of technologies that I ended up specializing in (somehow). It has been a progression that looks like this: Unix (briefly), Microsoft and, eventually, VMware. What characterized all these experiences was a sense of stable use cases and best practices. Back in 2008 (pick up any year between 2005 and 2012) the way Bank of America (a name I picked up out of the blue, never worked with them) would deploy an infrastructure was not vastly different than how a small SMB in Turkey would. https://it20.info/2014/07/docker-on-vchs-with-2-api-calls/ Thu, 10 Jul 2014 10:18:45 +0000 https://it20.info/2014/07/docker-on-vchs-with-2-api-calls/ In this article I am going to show how you can start using Docker on top of the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service. I am going to show you how to do that in different ways so that you can choose your own method based on the mechanisms you are more familiar with (e.g. UIs or APIs). Docker is getting so much buzz these days that I am not going to spend time describing what it is. https://it20.info/2014/06/guest-os-customization-in-vchs/ Thu, 19 Jun 2014 15:10:05 +0000 https://it20.info/2014/06/guest-os-customization-in-vchs/ As I was taking notes with some vCHS workload deployment experiments I thought I'd turn them in a blog post. This is more for me to find it easily in 2 months when I will have forgotten pretty much everything I found. If you are interested in the matter of guest OS customization options in vCHS read on, but I can't guarantee the result. Customizing a guest OS is a science in itself (the downside of being very powerful). https://it20.info/2014/05/is-aws-slowing-down-due-to-lack-of-demand-rather-than-lack-of-ideas/ Thu, 29 May 2014 21:14:24 +0000 https://it20.info/2014/05/is-aws-slowing-down-due-to-lack-of-demand-rather-than-lack-of-ideas/ I was surfing the web (as usual) a few days ago and an AWS presentation I spotted on SlideShare got my attention. Before I even begin, remember I (currently) work for VMware. I always try, on this blog, to be as open as possible and talk freely about what I really think. However feel free to turn on your bias filter if you don't trust me. Back to the main topic, there isn't much new in that slide deck and it basically summarizes the successful AWS story. https://it20.info/2014/04/vchs-monitoring-and-capacity-management-101-the-practice/ Fri, 18 Apr 2014 10:15:22 +0000 https://it20.info/2014/04/vchs-monitoring-and-capacity-management-101-the-practice/ In the previous blog post I provided a high level (101) theoretical overview of how resource monitoring and capacity management work in vCHS. Particularly how VPCs on shared clouds and vDCs on dedicated clouds differ from each others. Please read it for proper context. That was the theory. This blog post is about practicing the theory. The Need There I argued about what information I'd need to know do proper resource monitoring and capacity planning for a bus (the bus was the analogy I used). https://it20.info/2014/04/vchs-monitoring-and-capacity-management-101-the-theory/ Fri, 18 Apr 2014 10:13:20 +0000 https://it20.info/2014/04/vchs-monitoring-and-capacity-management-101-the-theory/ This is blog one of a series of two. In these blog posts I will be introducing (at 101 level) how resource monitoring and capacity management work in vCHS. Before we get into the meat, it is important to understand how capacity is delivered to tenants in vCHS. Background One of the many things that make vCHS unique in the public cloud landscape is that VMware sells (IaaS) capacity and not VMs. https://it20.info/2014/03/massimo-look-this-is-my-vdi/ Thu, 13 Mar 2014 13:25:59 +0000 https://it20.info/2014/03/massimo-look-this-is-my-vdi/ Probably my shortest blog post ever. I have lost track of what's happening in the EUC (End User Computing) space. Ironically I started this blog roughly 7 years ago with a post on virtual desktops (which is what I was working on at that time). Thinking about it, that was my shortest blog post ever. Not sure what happened. I probably got bored with all the "nice, but the Microsoft license to do it just costs too much" I heard. https://it20.info/2014/01/vchs-meets-vco-and-boris-becomes-a-hero/ Fri, 31 Jan 2014 16:09:25 +0000 https://it20.info/2014/01/vchs-meets-vco-and-boris-becomes-a-hero/ There are so many things I'd like to show and talk about here that I wanted to dumb down the title as much as possible. The trigger This all started (a long time ago) by realizing that with AWS you can deploy an EC2 instance and SSH/RDP into it in a matter of a couple of minutes with just a few clicks. With vCHS (and vCD for that matter) you can deploy an instance in pretty much the same time, but then you have to configure separately the Edge Gateway to get the proper NAT and Firewall rules in place (see this blog post for vCD networking configuration samples if you are new to vCD). https://it20.info/2013/12/unicorns-pendulums-and-private-clouds/ Thu, 12 Dec 2013 16:37:25 +0000 https://it20.info/2013/12/unicorns-pendulums-and-private-clouds/ Last week Alessandro Perilli of Gartner posted one of his controversial takes on cloud. In this particular post he, basically, pointed out that many CMP vendors aren't really selling a truly integrated cloud management platform software. Instead, they are proposing a rebranded old piece of software augmented with new fitting-hole products. These new products have been growing inorganically inside the company or, even worse, have been made available in the portfolio through acquisitions. https://it20.info/2013/12/virtualization-vs-abstraction-in-cloud-networking/ Mon, 02 Dec 2013 17:19:00 +0000 https://it20.info/2013/12/virtualization-vs-abstraction-in-cloud-networking/ Warning: yes it is one of those highly philosophical posts. I spent the last 10 months or so "playing around" the vCloud Hybrid Service (aka vCHS). And I spent time "playing around" AWS (and Azure) too, for obvious reasons. There are a few things that are tangibly different between vCHS and "the others". I have already argued that it's not just about the "common tools" mantra VMware tend to often mention. https://it20.info/2013/11/the-load-balancing-service-in-vchs/ Wed, 06 Nov 2013 13:13:54 +0000 https://it20.info/2013/11/the-load-balancing-service-in-vchs/ In this blog post I am going to describe the capabilities of the Load Balancing service in vCHS. This isn't going to focus on a specific use case (albeit I may refer to various software and solutions for examples). Instead I will focus more on the technical capabilities. I'd like to think about this article as the foundation that describes the capabilities, the flexibility and consumption principles of the load balancing service. https://it20.info/2013/10/vchs-apis-102/ Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:37:50 +0000 https://it20.info/2013/10/vchs-apis-102/ In the vCHS API 101 blog post I have walked you through how to find out your vCHS API end-point(s) as well as how to navigate the structure with the RESTClient browser plug-in. This was more or less a read-only tour of the structure of the objects in the virtual data center. In this post I'd like to show you how to instantiate a VM in vCHS and customize it. Particularly we are going to instantiate a VM from a catalog. https://it20.info/2013/09/vchs-apis-101/ Mon, 30 Sep 2013 12:45:48 +0000 https://it20.info/2013/09/vchs-apis-101/ When people think about vCHS they think about the vCHS portal. However we all know that an IaaS Cloud isn't (just) about a portal but rather about how you can consume it via APIs. In this post I am going to give you a brief 101 overview of how you can consume vCHS via APIs. Warning: the service will iterate quickly so some of these information can become obsolete fairly soon. https://it20.info/2013/09/t-shirt-size-instances-and-storage-management-in-aws-and-vchs/ Thu, 19 Sep 2013 10:12:57 +0000 https://it20.info/2013/09/t-shirt-size-instances-and-storage-management-in-aws-and-vchs/ In the last few weeks I had lots of discussions with customers and partners regarding the concept of T-Shirt Size instances as well as the nuances of storage management in both AWS and vCHS. In this post I'd like to touch on both. A similar (albeit not as detailed) discussion was included in the AWS and vCHS parallel session I presented at VMworld 2013. The content was somewhat controversial as you can read here and perhaps a bit misinterpreted (make sure to read the comments of that post as well). https://it20.info/2013/09/the-cloud-spectrum-and-the-amazon-dilemma/ Thu, 05 Sep 2013 12:28:23 +0000 https://it20.info/2013/09/the-cloud-spectrum-and-the-amazon-dilemma/ Last week at VMworld 2013 in San Francisco, among various other sessions, I presented "a Parallel between vCloud Hybrid Service and Amazon Web Services" (session #PHC5123). It went overall fairly well with lots of positive feedbacks. The one that stood out for me was a tweet from Jack Clark. I enjoyed reading that feedback because that meant I successfully managed to "...NOT doing this session... the Microsoft way". Also, since I always try to be a trusted advisor, I appreciated that my name was associated to the word "honesty". https://it20.info/2013/09/my-web-2-0-a-6-years-old-survival-guide-to-social-media/ Mon, 02 Sep 2013 13:25:51 +0000 https://it20.info/2013/09/my-web-2-0-a-6-years-old-survival-guide-to-social-media/ I have just got back from VMworld 2013 where, for some reasons, I ended up in many "how did you get this blog thing started" and "when did you start speaking at VMworld?" type of discussions. It's fun to go through those memories during team dinners. I thought I'd write a short (yeah, sure..) blog post on the topic. I am not sure why I am doing this. Perhaps I just want to come back in 20 years and read it again and see how it feels. https://it20.info/2013/06/662/ Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:04:52 +0000 https://it20.info/2013/06/662/ When I see my proposals being accepted at VMworld... my ego typically gives way to fear and anxiety. Attendees invest time, money and their expectations are (rightly so) very high. I usually hate going on stage and look dumb (it happens). More so at VMworld. So help me doing a better job, please. For 2013 two of them have been accepted. They are listed here below: This is the first session. https://it20.info/2013/05/vchs-stop-thinking-about-building-a-cloud-start-thinking-about-how-to-consume-it/ Wed, 22 May 2013 07:05:03 +0000 https://it20.info/2013/05/vchs-stop-thinking-about-building-a-cloud-start-thinking-about-how-to-consume-it/ Today (technically it's still 11:59 PM Pacific Time) VMware announced the vCloud Hybrid Service (aka vCHS). I have been keeping an eye on how this idea developed internally for a certain amount of time. I have been more closely involved since December last year when I participated in some "sausage making" summits (boy, those things are scaring if you are not used to them). And then I started working full time on it since roughly February this year. https://it20.info/2013/03/liquid-data-center/ Mon, 18 Mar 2013 14:17:20 +0000 https://it20.info/2013/03/liquid-data-center/ Having worked for about 3 years with vCloud Director I have to admit that the networking subsystem is the one that takes more time to digest. Part of this is because it is fairly complex rich. Part of it is because VMware has not done a great job at trying to expose that richness in a simple way to the cloud consumer. I kept saying for years that vCD should have had more visual support and network layout diagrams in the UI to make it easier to understand and digest that richness. https://it20.info/2013/03/a-tail-of-wrong-assumptions-that-lead-to-wrong-conclusions/ Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:17:51 +0000 https://it20.info/2013/03/a-tail-of-wrong-assumptions-that-lead-to-wrong-conclusions/ Yesterday morning I woke up and found myself being mentioned in one of Randy Bias' blog posts on the Amazon Vs VMware battle. As I was reading thorough the article I found hard to disagree with what Randy was saying. I am not referring specifically to his conclusions (more on this later) but rather to the general sense of the blog post in terms of efficiency of scale and stuff like that. https://it20.info/2013/02/the-cost-of-building-clouds/ Wed, 06 Feb 2013 16:54:51 +0000 https://it20.info/2013/02/the-cost-of-building-clouds/ Last week I posted an article on the VMware vCloud corporate blog (re-posted here). That article talks about the extensibility of the core vCloud platform to use features that are not natively exposed. While the use case is centered around vShield App, the extensibility framework really provides infinite possibilities. I am very excited about this because it really demonstrates how the core can be extended. While VMware customers and partners cannot modify the core itself, they can indeed extend it. https://it20.info/2013/02/vcloud-director-meets-vshield-app-2/ Tue, 05 Feb 2013 13:33:58 +0000 https://it20.info/2013/02/vcloud-director-meets-vshield-app-2/ This article was originally posted on the VMware vCloud corporate blog. I am re-posting here for the convenience of the readers of my personal blog. By: Massimo Re Ferre’ (Staff Systems Engineer – Global CoE) and Joe Sarabia (Sr. Consultant – Global CoE) Background In the last few years I have seen a rise of interest for vCloud Director use cases where multiple virtual machines (in a vApp or across vApps) can share a single Layer 2 network and yet be secured, at the vNIC level. https://it20.info/2013/01/backup-and-restore-of-vcloud-director-consumer-workloads/ Thu, 31 Jan 2013 13:35:18 +0000 https://it20.info/2013/01/backup-and-restore-of-vcloud-director-consumer-workloads/ Backup and restore (of consumer workloads) in a vCloud Director environment is a hot topic. When you deal with Pets (Vs. Cattle) it is important that you take care of your little lovely friends workloads. Part of the effort of taking care of them includes backing them up regularly and, more importantly, restoring them when needed. This industry has achieved a high level of maturity in terms of best practices (and tooling) for backing up and restoring workloads running on vSphere virtual infrastructures. https://it20.info/2012/12/aws-a-space-shuttle-to-go-shopping/ Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:20:07 +0000 https://it20.info/2012/12/aws-a-space-shuttle-to-go-shopping/ I apologize for the catchy title (I need to drive clicks, somehow). The title of this blog post should have been "considerations on some interesting AWS (Amazon Web Services) usage data I came across". Not very catchy. A few weeks ago I saw a study done by The Big Data Group re the above. I found this extremely interesting. I am not sure how much this analysis is representative of the total AWS usage but it does cover 250. https://it20.info/2012/12/vcloud-openstack-pets-and-cattle/ Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:03:33 +0000 https://it20.info/2012/12/vcloud-openstack-pets-and-cattle/ I keep bumping into discussions where people try to compare vCloud (Director) and OpenStack. The last one that caught my attention was an email from a colleague that went like: "We are in a competitive situation with OpenStack. Customer is currently using Amazon EC2... They are looking at moving from Amazon to VMware due to outages killing revenue for their customers. They are also looking at moving to OpenStack internally". https://it20.info/2012/11/vmware-openstack-nicira-and-the-t-theory/ Thu, 15 Nov 2012 17:28:25 +0000 https://it20.info/2012/11/vmware-openstack-nicira-and-the-t-theory/ There has been some turmoil lately in the industry when VMware announced that wanted to join the OpenStack community. In the last few days Martin Casado (Nicira co-founder and now Chief Network Architect at VMware) was quoted in a few interviews for the plans VMware has to integrate, evolve and position the Nicira technology. You can read more about it here and here. I guess we can summarize the bulk of those interviews in the following quote from one of the articles: "Specifically, Casado says we can expect a hypervisor-agnostic network virtualization platform that could be marketed as an independent product. https://it20.info/2012/10/vcloud-director-5-1-1-changes-in-resource-entitlements/ Wed, 31 Oct 2012 09:45:30 +0000 https://it20.info/2012/10/vcloud-director-5-1-1-changes-in-resource-entitlements/ vCloud Director 5.1 has introduced a fair amount of new functionalities. One of those is a change in the resource allocation models. I have tried to capture those changes from vCloud Director 1.5 to 5.1 in a couple of tables. For those of you that are new to vCloud Director it may be a good idea to get a background and a complete explanation of how the various resource allocation models work. https://it20.info/2012/09/cloud-and-the-three-it-geographies-silicon-valley-us-and-rest-of-the-world/ Wed, 05 Sep 2012 15:12:01 +0000 https://it20.info/2012/09/cloud-and-the-three-it-geographies-silicon-valley-us-and-rest-of-the-world/ In the last 3 years I spent most of my time advocating that the cloud world is marching at a (very) different pace based on where you are and who you are. If you are a professor consultant working with the like of Google, Facebook and such your vision of the world may be a bit skewed compared to "the average". I am sorry if I shocked you. Similarly, if you consult for a big manufacturing company in Italy you may be skewed as well (but in a different way and for different reasons). https://it20.info/2012/09/vmware-distributed-storage-this-is-where-the-cloud-world-collapses/ Tue, 04 Sep 2012 13:35:25 +0000 https://it20.info/2012/09/vmware-distributed-storage-this-is-where-the-cloud-world-collapses/ At VMworld 2012 VMware showed something dubbed Distributed Storage. If you were in SF and you missed it, I strongly suggest you watch the recording of session INF-STO2192. The demo in particular is very cool. I am very excited about this for a number of reasons. This post isn't going to talk specifically about the VMware Distributed Storage technology. It is rather going to talk about the philosophy behind it and the trends in the industry. https://it20.info/2012/08/the-evolution-of-x86-server-architectures/ Tue, 28 Aug 2012 12:30:10 +0000 https://it20.info/2012/08/the-evolution-of-x86-server-architectures/ I spent a good 10 years of my IT career looking closely to hardware platforms (at IBM STG - Systems and Technology Group). After more than two years focusing purely on infrastructure software (at VMware) I thought I wanted to share where I think we are headed with the design of x86 servers. We all know x86 is eating away other platforms' marketshare. This shouldn't be a shocking news. I wrote about it when I was at IBM working on these stuff. https://it20.info/2012/08/vmworld-2012-software-defined-datacenter-and-random-rants-and-suggestions/ Wed, 08 Aug 2012 17:08:35 +0000 https://it20.info/2012/08/vmworld-2012-software-defined-datacenter-and-random-rants-and-suggestions/ So far I have only missed a single VMworld in the last 8 years. Unfortunately this time I won't be there for VMworld 2012 in San Francisco. My session was turned down and I was told that I am supposed to know everything already so why going? Thinking about it, it may very well not be so unfortunate that my session was rejected given his nature and associated challenges. If interested, this is what I proposed: https://it20.info/2012/06/azure-virtual-machines-what-sort-of-cloud-beast-is-it/ Mon, 25 Jun 2012 14:45:31 +0000 https://it20.info/2012/06/azure-virtual-machines-what-sort-of-cloud-beast-is-it/ A few weeks ago, at TechEd, Microsoft announced Azure Virtual Machines. In other words their response to a growing sentiment that PaaS is too early for many and IaaS is the natural first step into the cloud (let's put SaaS aside for a second). Yes, I am over-simplifying just to avoid a ten pages blog post this time but it does look like Google is on the same path here. https://it20.info/2012/05/typical-vxlan-use-case/ Tue, 22 May 2012 13:57:48 +0000 https://it20.info/2012/05/typical-vxlan-use-case/ One of the problems VXLAN is supposed to solve is the possibility to decouple (and abstract) the compute capacity from the underling network configuration. A lot of people whose background is solely in the compute space now know that there is a solution but don’t really get why there is a problem in the first place. In this post I’ll attempt to describe the problem first and (in brief) the solution later. https://it20.info/2012/04/vmware-wants-to-be-the-vmware-of-networking/ Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:09:07 +0000 https://it20.info/2012/04/vmware-wants-to-be-the-vmware-of-networking/ There have been a lot of discussions lately about SDN (Software Defined Networking). Arguably SDN may mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. If you ask the like of Facebook, Google and academic researchers they will probably tell you that SDN is all about gaining full visibility (and control) on how packets flow on the network. People and organizations that are closer to the commercial world may tell you that SDN is all about creating an abstraction layer (virtualization anyone? https://it20.info/2012/03/vcloud-director-1-5-multisite-cloud-considerations/ Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:39:56 +0000 https://it20.info/2012/03/vcloud-director-1-5-multisite-cloud-considerations/ In the last few months, among other things, I have been working on the document in subject. Being able to deploy vCloud Director 1.5 across different sites is something our customers and service provider partners have been asking us a lot. Some of these customers and partners have decided to deploy independent vCloud Director instances in different "sites", others wanted to get more clarity on how far they could stretch a single vCloud Director instance across multiple "sites". https://it20.info/2012/03/the-cost-of-doing-public-cloud-with-vmware/ Wed, 07 Mar 2012 13:46:46 +0000 https://it20.info/2012/03/the-cost-of-doing-public-cloud-with-vmware/ Very often VMware gets compared to the Ferrari of cloud computing whereas AWS gets compared to the Ford. Others describe this as “Enterprise” Vs. “Commodity” clouds. While VMware tends to proudly take this as an esteem of the value you can extract from the software, people usually refer to that meaning that VMware based clouds are expensive (compared to AWS being cheap). I have recently been working with Aruba Spa, a big EMEA hoster (and now cloud provider) whose HQ happens to be in Italy. https://it20.info/2012/03/the-frankencloud/ Tue, 06 Mar 2012 16:14:03 +0000 https://it20.info/2012/03/the-frankencloud/ For a change, last week on twitter there was a discussion about multi hypervisor deployments. Knowing that, after food and family, multihypervisor is my biggest interest, I was taken and thrown into that discussion. Again. Unfortunately. Yes, I do have (strong) opinions about the thing but, regardless, I believe it will happen anyway. Read on. The best way to clarify my position is to distinguish between use cases and scenarios: the typical Private and Public cloud implementations. https://it20.info/2012/02/the-cloud-magic-rectangle-tm/ Mon, 27 Feb 2012 11:28:07 +0000 https://it20.info/2012/02/the-cloud-magic-rectangle-tm/ This isn't the counter argument to Gartner's Magic Quadrant (I think). Oh, and notice I am not even going into the "this is cloud, this is not cloud" type of discussions. How boring? World peace folks, everything is cloud, even my bike (according to the NIST definition anyway). In all seriousness it is becoming pretty obvious that the classification we have been using so far isn't cutting it. IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are obviously required to describe the type of services a given cloud provides but only one dimension won't cut it. https://it20.info/2012/02/will-we-need-a-c-for-nicira-god-forbid/ Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:30:46 +0000 https://it20.info/2012/02/will-we-need-a-c-for-nicira-god-forbid/ This morning I was on the phone with Ivan Pepelnjak (@ioshints) to decipher some of the paragraphs in one of his latest posts on Nicira Open vSwitch inside vSphere. He always has to bear with my stupid questions so I can see him (virtually), from time to time, facepalming some of my questions. Long story short we cleared a few doubts I had on his write up and I decided to ask him yet another border line question. https://it20.info/2012/02/the-abc-of-lock-in/ Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:03:18 +0000 https://it20.info/2012/02/the-abc-of-lock-in/ There have been a lot of discussions lately about a topic I find extremely interesting: vendor lock-in. Multi-hypervisor is a discipline where you can apply the high level ranting below but you can really apply it to pretty much everything in IT. I started this blog post writing a couple of pages (as usual) and then I thought no one would care to read it (how can I blame you?). So I summarized it in a few pictures. https://it20.info/2012/01/virtualization-costs-virtualization-advantages-and-the-case-for-multi-hypervisors/ Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:41:17 +0000 https://it20.info/2012/01/virtualization-costs-virtualization-advantages-and-the-case-for-multi-hypervisors/ Last week I came across an interesting blog post from Mark Thiele. The idea of the article is that, as virtualization becomes a relevant cost for IT, it becomes a target for savings. I tried to engage with Mark on twitter but discussing a matter like this in 140 chars becomes a bit frustrating. So I decided to share my thoughts in a more structured way in this (hopefully) brief post. https://it20.info/2011/12/vcd-custom-portals-and-backend-integrations-in-a-service-provider-environment/ Thu, 01 Dec 2011 09:24:13 +0000 https://it20.info/2011/12/vcd-custom-portals-and-backend-integrations-in-a-service-provider-environment/ This article was originally posted on the VMware vCloud corporate blog. I am re-posting here for the convenience of the readers of my personal blog. This topic is (rightly so) coming up a lot lately with the Service Providers (SPs) I am working with so I thought I'd share some high level ideas on how we are engineering those clouds. This short article is meant to share some guiding principles on how to engineering custom portals and backend integrations for SPs that are adopting vCloud Director. https://it20.info/2011/09/amazon-netflix-standard-cloud-apis-and-the-inevitable-lock-in/ Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:27:33 +0000 https://it20.info/2011/09/amazon-netflix-standard-cloud-apis-and-the-inevitable-lock-in/ A few weeks ago Adrian Cockcroft (Cloud Architect @ Netflix) wrote another very interesting post on his blog. Adrian warms up the discussion sharing his experience about the reasons for which you may want to use public cloud services. While there are a lot of people (including myself) sometimes advocating about these concepts, there isn't anything like hearing this first hand from the people that are actually running a business out of this model. https://it20.info/2011/06/vcloud-director-1-0-1-networking-samples/ Wed, 29 Jun 2011 14:50:50 +0000 https://it20.info/2011/06/vcloud-director-1-0-1-networking-samples/ My old vCloud Director Networking for Dummies post is still going strong according to my blog statistics. I believe this is an indicator that people are looking for more information about this topic so I thought I'd give it a little bit more color and create a few real life examples on how that theory works in practice. I suggest you read the Networking for Dummies post linked above before you dive into this one. https://it20.info/2011/06/the-cloud-and-the-sunset-of-the-ghz-based-cpu-metric/ Fri, 24 Jun 2011 08:47:14 +0000 https://it20.info/2011/06/the-cloud-and-the-sunset-of-the-ghz-based-cpu-metric/ We have known this for years but it's only when you get a slap on your face that you understand what's going on for real: the GHz metric is useless these days. I was experimenting with vCloud Director the other day and I was checking out from the catalog my Turnkey Linux Core virtual machine (I use that because it's small and I can check it in and out from the catalog very quickly - it's also a very nice distro! https://it20.info/2011/06/the-italian-elections-and-the-case-for-cloudburst/ Thu, 02 Jun 2011 12:11:32 +0000 https://it20.info/2011/06/the-italian-elections-and-the-case-for-cloudburst/ A few days ago we had a big election day in Italy for renewing a good part of the public local administration. For and in itself this wasn't a big deal and something that wouldn't have generated a lot of attention among the 60M people living here. However, without getting into a lot of details, suffice to say that this turned into yet another "do you like Mr. Berlusconi? Yes or No? https://it20.info/2011/04/tcp-clouds-udp-clouds-design-for-fail-and-aws/ Wed, 27 Apr 2011 14:05:21 +0000 https://it20.info/2011/04/tcp-clouds-udp-clouds-design-for-fail-and-aws/ An entire Amazon AWS Region was recently down for four days. Everyone has got to blog something about it and this is my attempt. Just as a warning: this post may be highly controversial. There has been a litany of tweets pontificating how applications on AWS should be deployed in a certain way to achieve the maximum level of availability and how applications need to be "re-architected" to properly fit into the new cloud paradigm. https://it20.info/2011/03/the-93-000-firewall-rules-problem-and-why-cloud-is-not-just-orchestration/ Wed, 30 Mar 2011 20:14:19 +0000 https://it20.info/2011/03/the-93-000-firewall-rules-problem-and-why-cloud-is-not-just-orchestration/ A few days ago I was in a very interesting meeting with a big Service Provider in Europe and I heard a lot of interesting comments. I'd like to quote the best that I heard which was "Oh a portal? Oh not another one... we have many of them already!" but this will open up a different can of worms so I am not going to talk about this now. What I am going to talk about relates to another comment someone made in the middle of the meeting which was ". https://it20.info/2011/03/vshield-products-packaging-explained-with-a-focus-on-vcloud-director/ Mon, 14 Mar 2011 14:36:07 +0000 https://it20.info/2011/03/vshield-products-packaging-explained-with-a-focus-on-vcloud-director/ The way VMware is packaging / positioning vShield technologies isn't clear to everyone. This shouldn't be surprising since we have been lately expanding the offering with a lot of new stuff. In this post I am going (to try) to make a sense of vShield, its importance and specifically how it relates to vCloud Director. I am probably doing this in a non conventional way. At least in a way that a formal product manager wouldn't use. https://it20.info/2011/02/vcloud-the-morphing-channel-behavior-and-neural-circuits/ Tue, 22 Feb 2011 12:56:00 +0000 https://it20.info/2011/02/vcloud-the-morphing-channel-behavior-and-neural-circuits/ A few days ago I have received an email from an IBM Business Partner I used to work with during my previous life. They are (admittedly) a small partner working primarily with local Italian SMB customers and they are (or I should say were) in the business of reselling hardware, software and integrate them for the customer. I haven't heard from them for a while but that's not the reason for which I was floored when I received their email. https://it20.info/2011/02/my-cloud-consumer-experience-%E2%80%93-episode-4-managing-workloads-with-vcloud-connector/ Tue, 08 Feb 2011 13:02:59 +0000 https://it20.info/2011/02/my-cloud-consumer-experience-%E2%80%93-episode-4-managing-workloads-with-vcloud-connector/ I am very excited about this episode. Today we are announcing a new technology called VMware vCloud Connector and this is going to be the core of this episode. But before you read on I urge you to read this other post of mine that went live together with this and that explains, in more details, what we are trying to do with vCloud Connector and the strategy behind it. This post you are reading is going to be more "show and tell" (that's the idea about these series of episodes). https://it20.info/2011/02/vmware-vcloud-connector-on-the-way-to-the-hybrid-clouds/ Tue, 08 Feb 2011 13:02:37 +0000 https://it20.info/2011/02/vmware-vcloud-connector-on-the-way-to-the-hybrid-clouds/ Talking from experience, trying to explain "cloud computing" comes with its own challenges. Trying to explain "hybrid cloud computing" is even harder. I always like to think about cloud computing (or hybrid) not as a weapon that marketing departments gave us to cheat people, but rather as a name (or a concept if you will) to describe infrastructure characteristics that we have always been dreaming about - and that happen to be less far away these days. https://it20.info/2011/02/my-first-year-vmware/ Wed, 02 Feb 2011 23:24:50 +0000 https://it20.info/2011/02/my-first-year-vmware/ It was dense! That's pretty much it. Today 3/2/2011 (or 2/3/2011 as the US folks would erroneously write) marks my very first year at VMware. My switch from IBM (where I worked for 15 years) to VMware was a quick one and among the contacts I have made to make it happen there is a paragraph of an email exchange I had with my fellow Mike Dipetrillo that I'd like to quote: https://it20.info/2011/01/my-cloud-consumer-experience-%E2%80%93-episode-3-moving-vsphere-workloads-into-the-cloud/ Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:29:26 +0000 https://it20.info/2011/01/my-cloud-consumer-experience-%E2%80%93-episode-3-moving-vsphere-workloads-into-the-cloud/ Everybody says the future is in hybrid clouds. In fact that's where I think the "trust" in private clouds and the "flexibility" of public clouds will find the compromise: it will be a mix of both. The ultimate goal is for a cloud consumer to be able to deploy a workload onto either a public or private cloud using the same tools with a completely transparent experience. In the first episode of this series of posts we explored the cloud on-boarding experience with VMware partner Stratogen. https://it20.info/2011/01/economics-of-cloud-computing-a-different-angle/ Tue, 25 Jan 2011 23:05:15 +0000 https://it20.info/2011/01/economics-of-cloud-computing-a-different-angle/ This article was originally posted on the VMware vCloud corporate blog. I am re-posting here for the convenience of the readers of my personal blog. A homonym (and anonymous) friend of mind I used to work with in a previous IT life sent me a document exploring cloud economics from slightly different angle than usual. We often talk about this topic in the scope of elasticity, CAPEX vs. OPEX, PAYG (pay as you go) cost models and things like that. https://it20.info/2011/01/my-cloud-consumer-experience-%E2%80%93-episode-2-basic-cloud-consumption/ Thu, 20 Jan 2011 15:43:03 +0000 https://it20.info/2011/01/my-cloud-consumer-experience-%E2%80%93-episode-2-basic-cloud-consumption/ In the first episode of this series of posts we explored the cloud on-boarding experience with VMware partner Stratogen. I strongly suggest you read the first episode first for proper context moving forward. In essence we subscribed to the Stratogen public cloud offering (currently in beta) and I am now going to show, in this post, basic operations that an end-user would do to start "consuming the cloud". The organization administrator experience https://it20.info/2011/01/my-cloud-consumer-experience-episode-1-the-on-boarding/ Thu, 13 Jan 2011 14:12:25 +0000 https://it20.info/2011/01/my-cloud-consumer-experience-episode-1-the-on-boarding/ I believe there is nothing like using a technology (or a solution) from an end-user perspective to really appreciate it. That's what this series of episodes is all about. A little bit of background: back in November last year I was approached by a UK based VMware hosting partner called Stratogen. They have seen my blog and offered me an opportunity to enroll into their vCloud Director beta program since they were looking for users that could, quoting them, "really put it through it’s paces". https://it20.info/2010/11/random-thoughts-and-blasphemies-around-iaas-paas-saas-and-the-cloud-contract/ Tue, 30 Nov 2010 21:21:57 +0000 https://it20.info/2010/11/random-thoughts-and-blasphemies-around-iaas-paas-saas-and-the-cloud-contract/ As I am sitting on my plane to Frankfurt with 45 minutes of delay due to heavy snow I thought I'd give this thought of mine a place on this blog. A few days ago I have posted an article regarding the concept of the cloud "Sandbox". Here I'd like to post something about another angle you can use to view cloud computing. I call this the cloud "Contract". Most of the thoughts below can apply to both private and public clouds although I'll talk more about the latter. https://it20.info/2010/11/virtualization-sandbox-vs-cloud-sandbox-from-an-end-user-perspective/ Mon, 15 Nov 2010 14:10:57 +0000 https://it20.info/2010/11/virtualization-sandbox-vs-cloud-sandbox-from-an-end-user-perspective/ What is cloud? Good question. You can put down a list of things that relates to cloud. I tried to do this in a previous post. But I've thought recently that that list (alone) doesn't really cut it. After having worked for a number of months all day long on this "cloud thing" I came to the conclusion that you need to explain what cloud is in a substantial different manner. https://it20.info/2010/11/thoughts-around-service-providers-public-cloud-platforms/ Wed, 03 Nov 2010 13:27:31 +0000 https://it20.info/2010/11/thoughts-around-service-providers-public-cloud-platforms/ This article was originally posted on the VMware vCloud corporate blog. I am re-posting here for the convenience of the readers of my personal blog. Over the last few days there have been a bunch of articles that , all of a sudden, are surprisingly (when you consider the sources) quite pointed in their recognition of how VMware technologies are superior compared to the rest of the market. Well, check out the articles for yourself. https://it20.info/2010/10/vcloud-director-and-active-directory-backed-authentication/ Tue, 26 Oct 2010 15:44:30 +0000 https://it20.info/2010/10/vcloud-director-and-active-directory-backed-authentication/ These days I am working on a bunch of new vCloud products that are currently in private beta and I found myself in need to create an Organization on vCloud Director (vCD from now on) with authentication backed by an Active Directory. As you may know, when you create a new vCD Organization you have three choices: With the first option you are telling the cloud to create Organization users inside the Oracle database that is backing the vCD cell(s). https://it20.info/2010/09/vcloud-director-catalog-experiments/ Thu, 30 Sep 2010 15:56:16 +0000 https://it20.info/2010/09/vcloud-director-catalog-experiments/ One of the promise of cloud computing is the simplification through standardization of deployments. A major role in this is played by the vCloud Director Catalog. In vCloud Director version 1.0 the catalog is a collection of vApps and media files. If you are familiar with vSphere think of vApp templates as vSphere VM templates on steroids: not only you can group more VMs together and capture them into a catalog as a single entity, but you can also set startup priorities, shutdown policies and things like that. https://it20.info/2010/09/vcloud-director-networking-for-dummies/ Tue, 14 Sep 2010 15:50:27 +0000 https://it20.info/2010/09/vcloud-director-networking-for-dummies/ During the Beta phase of vCloud Director (aka Redwood) I put together a small deck called "Redwood Networking for Dummies". I have received a number of positive feedbacks so I decided to turn that document into a blog post. Networking in vCloud Director is certainly a controversial matter. I believe it is fair to describe it both complex and rich at the same time. There have been many attempts lately to describe it from the like of Duncan Epping and Hany Michael on their own Blogs. https://it20.info/2010/09/vsphere-vcloud-and-the-meaning-of-being-open/ Mon, 13 Sep 2010 10:27:11 +0000 https://it20.info/2010/09/vsphere-vcloud-and-the-meaning-of-being-open/ This article was originally posted on the VMware vCloud corporate blog. I am re-posting here for the convenience of the readers of my personal blog. This year’s VMworld was crazier than ever—and a return to our geekier roots. And, as I promised in an earlier post, this year’s event would be a lot of fun for those attending for the simple reason that geek=crazy=fun. Well, I can proudly say I delivered on my promise. https://it20.info/2010/08/thoughts-on-vmworld-7-0-and-virtualization-2-0/ Sat, 21 Aug 2010 14:12:52 +0000 https://it20.info/2010/08/thoughts-on-vmworld-7-0-and-virtualization-2-0/ This article was originally posted on the VMware vCloud corporate blog. I am re-posting here for the convenience of the readers of my personal blog. Yes that's right, it’s the 7th year of VMworld. The event started years back as a small gathering of a few hundreds geeks. At least this is what VMware was expecting, in fact almost 1,500 individuals showed up in San Diego in 2004 for the inaugural show. https://it20.info/2010/08/open-standards-open-source-openstack-and-the-tcpip-of-cloud-apis/ Thu, 12 Aug 2010 11:53:37 +0000 https://it20.info/2010/08/open-standards-open-source-openstack-and-the-tcpip-of-cloud-apis/ A few weeks ago Rackspace and NASA announced an initiative called OpenStack aimed at providing an(other) open source alternative for building public and private clouds. This generated some reactions in the open source community like this one from the OpenNebula team. By the way do not confuse OpenNebula, one of the other open source cloud implementations mentioned, with NASA's Nebula, an open source compute-related cloud implementation that is part of the OpenStack announcement along with Rackspace's CloudFiles, an open source storage-related cloud platform. https://it20.info/2010/06/cloud-and-the-new-it-pillars/ Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:51:26 +0000 https://it20.info/2010/06/cloud-and-the-new-it-pillars/ This article was originally posted on the VMware vCloud corporate blog<. I am re-posting here for the convenience of the readers of my personal blog. I have used one of my recent posts in some off-line discussions about the use and penetration of virtualization in some accounts. In this post I’d like to expand a bit on that. I will just start with a nice picture that is supposed to summarize with a different graphic (but with the same core concepts) what I was trying to argue in the post I was referring above. https://it20.info/2010/06/are-hypervisors-cloud-commodities/ Sat, 05 Jun 2010 11:49:37 +0000 https://it20.info/2010/06/are-hypervisors-cloud-commodities/ This article was originally posted on the VMware vCloud corporate blog. I am re-posting here for the convenience of the readers of my personal blog. There have been a number of discussions in the industry in the last few years about whether hypervisors are (becoming) a commodity and whether the value is (or will be) largely driven by the management and automation tools on top of them. To be honest, I have conflicting sentiments about this. https://it20.info/2010/06/vmware-virtualization-and-more/ Wed, 02 Jun 2010 11:47:16 +0000 https://it20.info/2010/06/vmware-virtualization-and-more/ Before joining VMware roughly 4 months ago I was wondering, along with many of you, what sort of company VMware was turning into and what they were doing and what they wanted to become in the long run. The more I was tracking VMware buying (supposedly) disconnected companies the more I was thinking "what does this have to do with virtualization? What (the hell) are they doing?". Some of them are a bit less disconnected than others when it comes to virtualization but yet the full picture was not clear to me. https://it20.info/2010/05/public-cloud-adoption-curve-is-history-repeating/ Tue, 18 May 2010 11:44:38 +0000 https://it20.info/2010/05/public-cloud-adoption-curve-is-history-repeating/ This article was originally posted on the VMware vCloud corporate blog. I am re-posting here for the convenience of the readers of my personal blog. As I mentioned in my previous post I started working on virtualization technologies years ago. It was around 2003 when I started talking, at public events, about what one could achieve using VMware ESX (which at that time was the only VMware offering for the enterprise market). https://it20.info/2010/05/dont-fear-the-cloud-the-cloud-is-good/ Tue, 18 May 2010 11:41:02 +0000 https://it20.info/2010/05/dont-fear-the-cloud-the-cloud-is-good/ This article was originally posted on the VMware vCloud corporate blog. I am re-posting here for the convenience of the readers of my personal blog. I have been working in IT for about 15 years now, nine of which I have spent working with customers to get the maximum out of VMware enterprise technologies in the x86 space. I have always said that virtualization has been a cornerstone in this “PC space”. https://it20.info/2010/04/i-am-back-on-the-blogsphere/ Sat, 17 Apr 2010 11:38:30 +0000 https://it20.info/2010/04/i-am-back-on-the-blogsphere/ Yes I am back. After a few months of "electronic silence" (on this blog at least) here I am again. For those (few) of you that may have been wondering "where (on earth) is he?"..... well lots of things happened and I have been pretty busy. One for all I joined VMware after having spent more than 15 years at IBM and I felt like I have been literally hit by a train running over me at 200Km/h. https://it20.info/2009/12/from-scale-up-vs-scale-out-to-scale-down/ Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:10:31 +0000 https://it20.info/2009/12/from-scale-up-vs-scale-out-to-scale-down/ Those of you that have been following me on twitter and on my blog know that I have been very focused on studying and monitoring the latest trends regarding which hardware platforms virtualization users are using for their infrastructures. This includes multiple points of view such as simple sizing rules of thumb, potential reference architectures and scale up vs. scale out strategies. I'd like to spend the next few minutes talking about what's going on lately in this respect, specifically in light of the latest (and future) hardware improvements we have seen or that we will see in the next few months. https://it20.info/2009/10/xenserver-why-updated/ Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:08:26 +0000 https://it20.info/2009/10/xenserver-why-updated/ There have been lots discussions lately about what's happening around Citrix XenServer. Perhaps too many. For what it is worth, I was one of the people discussing this on the net (Twitter, Blogs etc) with some other folks. I originally drafted a blog post when Citrix bought XenSource but it never made it (officially because I was busy, unofficially because I couldn't figure out "why"). I think that what it is happening is pretty clear at this point. https://it20.info/2009/10/ad-hoc-designed-infrastructures-do-they-still-make-sense/ Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:39:28 +0000 https://it20.info/2009/10/ad-hoc-designed-infrastructures-do-they-still-make-sense/ The topic in this article is something that I have been thinking about for a while. It's about the methodology, the patterns, the habits - if you will - associated with how new IT infrastructures are being assessed, designed, sold and - in the final analysis - acquired by end-users for their datacenters. While it might not make a lot of sense to you initially, please bear with me as I go through my "internal mental brainstorming. https://it20.info/2009/09/the-potential-value-of-blogging-for-your-career/ Sat, 12 Sep 2009 15:34:59 +0000 https://it20.info/2009/09/the-potential-value-of-blogging-for-your-career/ Last night I posted a new article about the SpringSource/VMware story and the potential implications for the industry that this will have. After slightly more than 24 hours I am looking at the statistics and they say I am just south of 1000 views, which I think it is amazing - for a casual blogger like myself at least. These days I have also come across a few comments on Twitter about a presentation that Jason Boche did at VMworld 2009 about the value of blogging for his visibility. https://it20.info/2009/09/vmware-springsource-and-whats-not-appropriate-to-say/ Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:31:36 +0000 https://it20.info/2009/09/vmware-springsource-and-whats-not-appropriate-to-say/ The acquisition of SpringSource that VMware has announced is going to change the way the industry as a whole perceives and segments the key players in the x86 virtualization market. I think most people (myself included) need to change gear and look at the whole thing from a new perspective. In this article I am going to talk more about a concept that I have been thinking about lately: virtualization is becoming more and more broad and deep. https://it20.info/2009/07/disaster-recovery-inside-out-for-dummies-with-lsi/ Sat, 04 Jul 2009 16:15:00 +0000 https://it20.info/2009/07/disaster-recovery-inside-out-for-dummies-with-lsi/ In this article, I'd like to document a setup I have been working on for a few days at the LSI office in Milano (great guys and free beverage there! Thanks!). LSI is the company from which IBM OEMs the DS3000, DS4000 and DS5000 lines of storage servers. Since I am trying to get a little bit more into the storage and network subsystems I wanted to spend a few days playing with those kits. https://it20.info/2009/04/xeon-5500-aka-nehalem-marks-the-death-of-itanium-and-more/ Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:37:17 +0000 https://it20.info/2009/04/xeon-5500-aka-nehalem-marks-the-death-of-itanium-and-more/ The last day of March 2009 Intel officially unveiled its brand new Nehalem core architecture under the Xeon 5500 product name umbrella. There is not much to say about it other than it's impressive from a performance perspective. Just to give you a sense of what we are talking about the new product - only available for 2-socket servers today and with up to 4 cores per socket - has published many benchmark numbers that are either on par or slightly better than 4-socket Intel based servers with up to as many as 24 cores. https://it20.info/2009/03/cisco-ucs-there-is-something-i-am-still-missing/ Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:45:30 +0000 https://it20.info/2009/03/cisco-ucs-there-is-something-i-am-still-missing/ On Monday 16th Cisco unveiled its Unified Computing System (UCS). A few days ago I have been briefed by some local Cisco guys about the product (err, the architecture as they stressed). I assume that people reading this post know what Cisco is doing and are familiar with the announcement. In a nutshell they have announced a new thing which is a mix of hardware (primarily) and software that is comprised of the following: https://it20.info/2009/03/hyper-v-server-r2-a-few-additional-thoughts/ Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:22:30 +0000 https://it20.info/2009/03/hyper-v-server-r2-a-few-additional-thoughts/ A few weeks ago I wrote a tutorial on how to deploy Hyper-V R2 on the IBM BladeCenter S where I demonstrated, among other things, how to LiveMigrate from one blade to another. I didn't spend too much time commenting on the implications this will have in the market. In this article, I'd like to comment on some of those potential implications. Reading my piece you might have had the impression that I was "backing" Microsoft and putting Hyper-V R2 on the spotlight. https://it20.info/2009/03/and-the-winner-is-appspeed/ Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:28:36 +0000 https://it20.info/2009/03/and-the-winner-is-appspeed/ I have just got back from VMworld 2009 Europe in Cannes. It was an interesting week and not just because we were in Cote D'Azur (Azur, not Azure like in Windows Azure). There have been a few interesting announcements, demo and breakout sessions going on at the Palais de Festival during the week so it would be difficult to make a ranking but if I have to give my "virtual Oscar" to something I have seen. https://it20.info/2009/02/hyper-v-server-r2-on-bladecenter-s-tutorial/ Mon, 09 Feb 2009 17:25:15 +0000 https://it20.info/2009/02/hyper-v-server-r2-on-bladecenter-s-tutorial/ My good friend at Microsoft, Giorgio Malusardi, noticed my post "Enterprise Virtualization in a Box" which was essentially an example of how to create a BladeCenter-contained VMware-enabled data center in a box (including servers, storage and networking). Giorgio challenged me with the task to create something similar using the Hyper-V Server R2 Beta that has just been announced. And I accepted the challenge! This tutorial is going to document the setup of the environment based on what I have seen and I have done. https://it20.info/2009/02/vmworld-2009-europe-is-coming-do-you-want-to-scale-up-or-scale-out/ Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:24:13 +0000 https://it20.info/2009/02/vmworld-2009-europe-is-coming-do-you-want-to-scale-up-or-scale-out/ VMworld 2009 Europe is coming (last week of February). I was planning to go and I have just found out that they have also accepted one of the two topics I submitted for the break-out sessions. The title of the session that got selected is: Virtual Infrastructures: Scale Up or Scale Out? Rack or Blade form factors? This is the abstract as I entered it originally (I assume it will remain the same): https://it20.info/2008/11/enterprise-virtualization-in-a-box/ Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:40:35 +0000 https://it20.info/2008/11/enterprise-virtualization-in-a-box/ In this post I am going to talk about a specific piece of hardware technology that is intercepting a specific virtualization industry trend. This piece of technology is called BladeCenter S. Those of you that have been reading my blog know I don't usually talk about IBM specific stuff (I work for IBM) but this time I felt like the infringement of the law was worth it. Believe me or not I would have posted this anyway. https://it20.info/2008/11/will-microsoft-sunset-vmware-18-months-later/ Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:41:08 +0000 https://it20.info/2008/11/will-microsoft-sunset-vmware-18-months-later/ Early in 2007 I wrote a post whose title was "Will Microsoft Sunset VMware?". You can read it here. The closing of that post was: > This analysis is as of April 2007. I am sure many things can and will change and I might be proven wrong. Let's see what happens. I went through it this morning and I have to say that (so far) I have gotten it right. https://it20.info/2008/10/distributed-it-is-definitely-broken/ Sat, 25 Oct 2008 15:22:01 +0000 https://it20.info/2008/10/distributed-it-is-definitely-broken/ I have been working in IT for about 17 years now, 14 of which at IBM. Since the first day I was immediately exposed to the concept of a centralized IT where everything is fully controlled, fully secured, fully automated and easy to manage within the data center boundaries; on the other hand whatever sits outside of the server room should be dumb and wouldn't require any (major) maintenance tax onto the IT organization. https://it20.info/2008/09/plagiarism-did-paul-maritz-steal-my-pitch-for-the-vmworld-2008-keynote/ Sun, 21 Sep 2008 11:21:27 +0000 https://it20.info/2008/09/plagiarism-did-paul-maritz-steal-my-pitch-for-the-vmworld-2008-keynote/ I think he did but, relax Paul, I am not going to sue you... ;-) Joking aside I was sitting at the VMworld 2008 Keynote in Las Vegas back on Monday last week and I was somewhat surprised (perhaps even pleased) to see Paul touching on many innovative concepts I have been talking about last year at VMworld 2007 in my breakout session. Those of you that are entitled to download the official VMworld presentations can find it searching on the portal for session number S288511 (Virtual Appliances and the New Datacenter: Changing the Rules); those of you that do not have an account on the VMworld portal can get a similar (superset) version here. https://it20.info/2008/08/esx-3-5i-for-free-and-the-impact-on-hyper-v-and-the-smb-my-thoughts-on-mikes-post/ Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:04:48 +0000 https://it20.info/2008/08/esx-3-5i-for-free-and-the-impact-on-hyper-v-and-the-smb-my-thoughts-on-mikes-post/ So finally it happened. Hypervisors are (essentially) free. I remember the very first engagement I had with VMware technologies some 8 years ago; that was the 1.1 (beta) time frame: we did a Proof of Concept and closed the deal with a very satisfied customer... While they were very happy about the achievements they have always taken the opportunity to remind me how expensive VMware (i.e. ESX 1.1) was. Well, time goes by I guess and what used to be a large chunk of the project expenditure it is now a piece of (business) commodity. https://it20.info/2008/05/storage-high-availability-and-dr-for-the-masses/ Mon, 19 May 2008 11:31:59 +0000 https://it20.info/2008/05/storage-high-availability-and-dr-for-the-masses/ Virtualization is a disruptive technology and we all know that. With this post I want to share with you some scenarios about how server (and storage) virtualization can drastically change the landscape for "small IT shops" (aka SMB's) in the context of High-Availability and Disaster/Recovery. Up until today server "high availability" was not for everyone as it required a complexity and a cost that many IT shops could not sustain. I have already been talking about the change of paradigm that a virtual infrastructure brings in when it comes to make a service highly available. https://it20.info/2008/03/vmware-ha-vs-microsoft-cluster-server-we-are-at-the-inflection-point/ Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:51:54 +0000 https://it20.info/2008/03/vmware-ha-vs-microsoft-cluster-server-we-are-at-the-inflection-point/ Lately, there have been many discussions on the Internet and on various forums regarding the implementation of HA clustering technologies (namely and primarily Microsoft Cluster Server) within virtual machine environments (namely and primarily VMware infrastructures). Many customers are still treating virtual machines as if they were standard Windows servers (or Linux for what that matters) so this does make sense. However there is a trend in this industry that is shifting typical infrastructure services from the multi-purpose operating systems into the virtual infrastructure. https://it20.info/2008/01/why-desktop-virtualization-is-not-as-easy-as-server-virtualization/ Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:02:43 +0000 https://it20.info/2008/01/why-desktop-virtualization-is-not-as-easy-as-server-virtualization/ In the last few months I have been struggling to understand what is so different, in terms of mass adoption, between virtualizing server workloads and virtualizing desktop workloads (also known as "VDI" or "Virtual Desktop Infrastructure"). I have been exposed to this phenomenon of x86 virtualization since around 2000 where the idea was as simple as taking a high end server and miniaturizing it into many small virtual servers. Similarly I have been exposed for the last 3 years to the other big use-case for x86 virtualization which is "Desktop Virtualization" and I can tell you that the time it took for the first traditional use-case to take off (through seeding the market with the idea - piloting and proofs of concept - mass adoption) was way shorter than the time it is taking for VDI to take off (going through the same phases above). https://it20.info/2007/12/site-recovery-manager-what-is-it-going-to-be-good-for/ Sat, 29 Dec 2007 15:17:46 +0000 https://it20.info/2007/12/site-recovery-manager-what-is-it-going-to-be-good-for/ VMware, at VMworld 2007, announced that next year they will provide an out-of-the-box solution/product for Disaster/Recovery scenarios. It is called Site Recovery Manager (SRM for short) and it is supposed to orchestrate and facilitate system administrators to create a D/R plan for their organizations. It is important not to confuse this product with a "stretched HA cluster" or a "Geocluster" configuration. This is a "red-button" type of product where a human being, with high-level responsibilities within the organization, will assess the situation and, in case, will declare a "disaster" which in turn means that someone will push that red-button and restart the IT organization onto the DR site. https://it20.info/2007/11/virtualization-hardware-sizing-quick-and-dirty-approach/ Mon, 26 Nov 2007 14:58:13 +0000 https://it20.info/2007/11/virtualization-hardware-sizing-quick-and-dirty-approach/ Hardware virtualization these days is a hot topic and we all know that. There are many customers looking into it for the first time and one of the problems they are facing right now is how they are going to size their new virtual infrastructure. Lately I have received lots of requests from many people in order to help them project the hardware investments (in terms of physical servers) that they need to jump onto the virtualization band wagon. https://it20.info/2007/10/infiniband-vs-10gbit-ethernet-with-an-eye-on-virtualization/ Tue, 30 Oct 2007 14:46:41 +0000 https://it20.info/2007/10/infiniband-vs-10gbit-ethernet-with-an-eye-on-virtualization/ Last week I came across a hardware configuration requested ad-hoc by a customer to support their VMware VI3 setup. The hardware, an IBM System x 3950 M2 4-way (I know it's not yet generally available at the date), was configured with as many as 5 quad-port 10/100/1000 Ethernet adapters which in total would account for 5 x 4 Ethernet ports + the 2 on-board NIC's. The grand total was 22 Gigabit Ethernet ports per physical server. https://it20.info/2007/10/intel-amd-vmware-and-aircrafts/ Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:42:09 +0000 https://it20.info/2007/10/intel-amd-vmware-and-aircrafts/ "I need to setup a VI3 solution. Which CPU should I choose from a performance perspective? Intel or AMD?". I have heard this ad nauseam. If I was to get one single cent for every thread discussion I have seen on the net regarding the matter... I would be a billionaire. I have my opinion on the matter and I want to share it with you with this post. Background https://it20.info/2007/09/viridian-version-0-is-here/ Sun, 30 Sep 2007 14:50:18 +0000 https://it20.info/2007/09/viridian-version-0-is-here/ A few days ago Microsoft released Release Candidate 0 for Windows Server 2008. Apparently, in a last minute rush before the final RC0 build was "cooked", they wanted to give the industry a taste of how Windows Server Virtualization (aka Viridian) will look like. I took the opportunity to get the build and give it a try in my lab. This is not going to be a detailed step-by-step guide on how to install Viridian nor a complete analysis of its functionalities (it's still in pre-beta so it wouldn't even make much sense). https://it20.info/2007/09/what-really-vmware-esx-3i-is-to-me/ Wed, 19 Sep 2007 14:38:29 +0000 https://it20.info/2007/09/what-really-vmware-esx-3i-is-to-me/ Last week, at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco, VMware announced ESX 3i. There have been lots of speculations within the virtualization community about what ESX 3i would have looked like. And now it's here. So what (really) is this thing and what does it mean for the industry? I personally think that 3i is a good technology step forward, a great marketing announcement and a tremendous potential point of control for VMware. https://it20.info/2007/08/amd-to-add-new-interesting-virtualization-feature-support/ Sat, 11 Aug 2007 13:37:15 +0000 https://it20.info/2007/08/amd-to-add-new-interesting-virtualization-feature-support/ It's interesting that up until a year ago many people were showing their AMD tattoos claiming that Opteron was king of the hill and Intel was going nuts. Nowadays all these people seem to wear very nice shirts that hide these tattoos as there seems to be a consensus now that Intel, backed by their immense R&D capabilities and more than immense marketing funds, have returned to be king of the hill again leaving the AMD Opteron (and even their own Itanium processor) in the dust. https://it20.info/2007/08/my-session-at-vmworld-2007/ Thu, 09 Aug 2007 11:29:24 +0000 https://it20.info/2007/08/my-session-at-vmworld-2007/ For those interested the Session ID is WV27 and the title is "Virtual Appliances and the New Data Center - Changing the Rules" The bad news is that there is going to be a partner on stage (IBM). The good news is that I won't be trying to sell you anything ... :-) Joking aside, this year I thought it would have been interesting to touch on this new trend (and cool concept) that is . https://it20.info/2007/06/one-of-the-next-big-things-from-servers-to-services/ Mon, 25 Jun 2007 13:45:10 +0000 https://it20.info/2007/06/one-of-the-next-big-things-from-servers-to-services/ A few days ago I was with a Business Partner at an event where one of the customers presented their own consolidation projects. This was not a shocking presentation for me as I have seen many customers moving from a physical environment to a virtual environment and get very excited about that (more flexibility, consolidated footprint, less power required etc etc). One thing got my attention during the presentation though. It was clear since the beginning that the presenter was not a "geek person" like us spending most of our time to understand the very latest technology trends used by customers world-wide trying to influence what others should be doing based on our own vision of the (IT) world. https://it20.info/2007/06/a-brief-architecture-overview-of-vmware-esx-xen-and-ms-viridian/ Sun, 17 Jun 2007 12:43:28 +0000 https://it20.info/2007/06/a-brief-architecture-overview-of-vmware-esx-xen-and-ms-viridian/ It is my feeling that there has been a bit of confusion lately around how hypervisors are being positioned by the various vendors. I am specifically referring to the three major technologies that seem to be the most relevant strategically going forward: VMware ESX Microsoft Viridian Xen VMware ESX is the VMware flagship hypervisor product: it's the basis for the Virtual Infrastructure version 3 framework. MS Viridian is the next generation hypervisor that Microsoft is going to use in the Longhorn time frame and that is currently being developed. https://it20.info/2007/05/no-more-corporate-pcs-wouldnt-it-be-nice/ Sat, 05 May 2007 13:33:31 +0000 https://it20.info/2007/05/no-more-corporate-pcs-wouldnt-it-be-nice/ I recently bumped into a new idea that is "Employee Owned PC". Brian Madden made a very good article on the concept here: I like the idea. I have been working on this SBC (Server Based Computing) thing for so long and recently I have been looking into this VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure).... and, other than all the technologies involved, I must admit I have always been very intrigued by this thin client concept that most organization could benefit from. https://it20.info/2007/04/will-microsoft-sunset-vmware/ Sun, 15 Apr 2007 13:05:54 +0000 https://it20.info/2007/04/will-microsoft-sunset-vmware/ "Now that Microsoft is coming out with their own enterprise virtualization software who's going to buy VMware products any more?". How many times have I heard that? Let me first be very clear before you ever start reading this post: I have a Microsoft background and I have built my own career on that. On the other hand I have been working, during the last few years, with VMware and someone might think that I have a "story" with them now. https://it20.info/2007/03/hardware-virtualization-vs-os-virtualization-vs-application-virtualization/ Tue, 27 Mar 2007 13:20:03 +0000 https://it20.info/2007/03/hardware-virtualization-vs-os-virtualization-vs-application-virtualization/ In this article I'd like to touch briefly on the different level of virtualization technologies that I see being discussed lately. I am not going to talk about specific products but I'd rather keep this at an higher level referencing product implementations just as examples. Lately I have been working on a "Virtual Appliance" presentation that I did for an IBM internal symposium and while I was trying to picture the advantages of a "Virtual Appliance" a doubt raised in my mind: isn't this the same concept we are using to describe the benefits of "Application Virtualization"? https://it20.info/2007/03/exposing-physical-layouts-to-virtual-machines/ Sun, 11 Mar 2007 13:27:59 +0000 https://it20.info/2007/03/exposing-physical-layouts-to-virtual-machines/ There have been quite a lot of discussions lately on the VMware forums about topics related to exposing physical hardware layouts to virtual environments. Specifically I am referring to things like: RDM's, NPIV's and Virtualization of I/O. There might be other stuff being discussed but these three are those about which I'd like to throw my two cents. I am sure most of the readers know what an RDM is: Raw Disk Mapping is a method by which you expose to a virtual machine an entire SAN LUN instead of letting ESX create a VMFS volume. https://it20.info/2007/02/vmware-ha-and-dr-case-study-presentation-available/ Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:26:36 +0000 https://it20.info/2007/02/vmware-ha-and-dr-case-study-presentation-available/ It's amazing how many customers have embraced VMware and virtualization in general (that is: VMware) just for the purpose of "out-of-the-box" High Availability and Disaster Recovery features. I remember I have met customers for example that have "n Blades" with "n Windows Hosts" with "n VMware GSX installs" with "n Windows Guest OSes" ....... just for the purpose to backup the minidisk files over night and send them off site for DR purposes. https://it20.info/2007/02/client-consolidation-solutions/ Sun, 18 Feb 2007 21:50:02 +0000 https://it20.info/2007/02/client-consolidation-solutions/ I have lately been involved with "Client Consolidation" solutions which is a new (well it's not that new) trend aimed at re-architecting the way companies/organizations think about their standard desktop deployments. It encompasses different philosophies and models from traditional Terminal Services and Citrix scenarios through Virtual Clients (what VMware calls "Virtual Desktop Infrastructure" to be pragmatic) all the way to Blade PC's and Workstations. This is an "announcement post" meaning that I will expand and discuss on the technical details in a couple of ways: