[BBLISA] June recap and July meeting

[John P. Rouillard]

Hi all:

I have been a little behind on tasks, so I apologize for the delay.

Nick Cammorato's talk on Continuous Integration of Infrastructure
started by discussing the shift in system administration from
configuring systems to be more like changing software and less about
logging into systems. Given this shift in system administration a lot
of the problems we see are actually integration issues similar to
software administration. So what tools can we use from software
development to assist us in handling the changes we do as part of
systems administration.

He described the system he developed at TERC which is based on using:

  * puppet for administration/management with hiera for configuration
  * jenkins for continuous integration with rake as
    the build/task management element
  * vagrant for deploying virtual hosts used for testing deployment
    changes
  * nagios for testing/validation

This system works well when deploying software stacks as it deploys a
newly configured system from bare (virtual) metal and enables nagios
tests against the newly deployed system to validate the configuration.

This can be extended to multiple interacting hosts working together to
simulate changes to multiple stacks and system configuration to make
sure they will still interact correctly.

This simulation works well at the system level. The next area for
investigation is at the network control layer. This is currently
challenging because of the lack of good mechanisms to
simulate/control/deploy network level devices (e.g. routers, switches)
that match his current software/hardware.

This was followed with a lively discussion with Nick and the 25 people
who attended his talk.

***** JULY TALK *****

On Wednesday July 10, 2013 at 7PM Jeff Darcy (Red Hat) will be speaking on:

  
    Cloud storage options and DFS


This talk will be compare some of the cloud-storage options that are
out there, with a particular focus on distributed
filesystems. GlusterFS and Ceph will be compared in detail. Other
options including HDFS, object stores, and NoSQL document stores will
also be discussed.

Jeff Darcy has been working on distributed storage since DECnet and
NFS version 2 in the early 1990s. Later he was one of the original
developers for MPFS while at EMC, and is currently an architect for
GlusterFS at Red Hat.

It will be held at MIT E-51, Room 145 with the formal presentation
starting at 7:30.

--
				-- rouilj
John Rouillard
===========================================================================
My employers don't acknowledge my existence much less my opinions.