RackN Presents at Cloud Field Day 17

Empowering Platform Engineering with RackN Infrastructure Platform

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RackN Digital Rebar Infrastructure Platform provides the available, reliable and fast automation needed by operations teams to support enterprise Platform Engineering efforts.

RackN focuses on infrastructure platforms and platform engineering, addressing challenges faced by operations teams through their self-managed software called Digital Rebar. Their goal is to empower companies to independently manage their infrastructure, whether on-premises or in the cloud, by emphasizing infrastructure-as-code pipelines and process automation. They prioritize availability, reliability, and speed as key factors for success in an infrastructure platform. Through customer journey stories, they demonstrate how their solution has reduced equipment onboarding time, improved system availability, and increased operational speed. Automation, integration with various systems, and handling of edge systems are key features. They also address the challenges of managing Dev and Ops tool sprawl and advocate for a consolidated operational experience. RackN’s Digital Rebar is highlighted as a vendor-neutral infrastructure-as-code automation platform that offers customizable workflows and air gap capabilities.

Personnel: Rob Hirschfeld, Shane Gibson

Terraform Orchestration Bare Metal Demo via RackN Digital Rebar API

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Demonstration of declarative APIs in RackN Digital Rebar that make it easy to automate pools of bare metal infrastructure using IaC orchestrators like Terraform to empower developers with available, reliable and fast self service.

In this RackN demo section, the focus is on showing a Terraform demo for orchestration. The scenario involves an enterprise trying to terraform bare metal, including setting a target OS, running Ansible, and conducting security audits. The goal is to make infrastructure easily available, reliable, and fast, allowing for the creation and destruction of resources. The architecture relies on a feature called pooling, where machines are checked in and out, and Terraform is used to interact with the platform. The demo showcases how developers can use Terraform to request and use resources, while the infrastructure architect manages and controls the process using the digital rebar platform. The integration between Terraform and digital rebar simplifies the provisioning and management of resources, allowing for customization and automation of infrastructure.

Personnel: Rob Hirschfeld, Shane Gibson

Generative DevOps Powering the 10x Operator with RackN and Backstage

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Demos declarative APIs in RackN Digital Rebar that make it easy to automate clusters of bare metal infrastructure using Dev Portals like Backstage.io to empower developers with available, reliable and fast self-service.

In this conversation, Rob and Shane discuss their roles as developers and the integration of Backstage and Digital Rebar. Rob explains that he has set up his own Backstage developer environment and successfully connected it to his Digital Rebar system. However, he encounters an issue where a newly created cluster does not show any machines. Shane suggests looking into the front-end code to ensure that the necessary parameters are passed to the Digital Rebar API. They discuss adding additional information like the context broker and count to make the API work correctly. After making these adjustments, Rob successfully creates clusters and observes the machine resources being generated. They also touch on topics like resizing clusters, job logs for troubleshooting, and cluster cleanup. The conversation ends with a discussion on the on-ramp process for adopting Digital Rebar and the flexibility it offers for multiple teams within an organization. They mention the ability to import existing virtual machines and bare metal servers and the concept of machine objects and runner services in Digital Rebar.

Personnel: Rob Hirschfeld, Shane Gibson