ANZ Pied Piper

Kubernetes can be hard work. The success of distributions like Openshift, Rancher or PKS is due to the promise of making it easier. Still a large part of the user base (in fact this still has the largest market share of any on-prem Kubernetes distro) choose to deploy plain vanilla Kubernetes to take advantage of the super fast-paced innovation However this is usually a path that leads to long hours trying to figure how to make things work and overcome many problems. This is painful even though the community out there is massive. With this in mind one of my colleagues ( Deepak Waghmare ) took upon himself the task of simplifying and streamlining some of these tasks as much as possible. He created an Ansible collection with several roles. This collection is now published in Galaxy The collection is primarily aiming at the the simplification of the installation of the CSI driver in DellEMC storage arrays. All these arrays follow the same pattern by using Helm, so with a littl...

Traditionally, if you wanted code against a REST API your first point of call was the reference guide. This is typically a  several hundred page PDF document (the largest I have seen was 850 page). Sometimes it is hard to navigate and more often than not it requires you to jump a lot between different parts of the document to find how to format the "body" of a POST request. This is part of the reason I worked on Project Vision and leveraged Postman's ability to export/import collections. This can be a very . You can read more about Project Vision here: http://anzpiper.blogspot.com/2019/12/postman-collections-for-dellemc-block.html Postman is by no means unique. Nowadays it is more common to see tools that allow you explore API's in a more friendly and interactive way. One great option is Swagger. I work for DellEMC and I see the trend where new products are coming with Swagger UI packaged, which is nice to see ... just to clarify, this is usually in addition to th...

In a  previous post I introduced Project Vision, which is a set of Postman collections for DellEMC storage arrays. I have now recorded a short video and uploaded it to Youtube so that you can get an idea of how it works and what API calls are covered. Enjoy! ***Update 17-June-2020 - A new Postman collection has been added for PowerStore https://github.com/cermegno/Project-Vision

Today I will be discussing the details and artefacts of Project Vision. This new Avengers' project leverages Postman's import collection capabilities to provide sample API calls. For more details about the IaC Avengers initiative you can read this other article: http://anzpiper.blogspot.com/2019/12/confiure-vxflex-scaleio-api-with-python.html This first release Project Vision provides API examples for the following products: PowerMax XtremIO Unity PowerFlex/VxFlex (formerly ScaleIO) PowerStore - Added in June 2020 PowerOne - Added in June 2020 VPLEX - Added in June 2020 - Courtesy of Ankur Patel The goal of the project is to help customers of these products to automate day 1 and day 2 operations by looking at handy examples. API reference guides can sometimes be many hundred pages long and take considerable effort to understand. So by looking at some of the most common operational examples one can kickstart coding efforts. Each collection has been built to pro...

In the previous article  I explained that the configuration management ecosystem and the automation in general is too crowded and dynamic and it is easy to make the wrong decision that can be costly in the long term. In my opinion, one tool is emerging as the winner above the rest, and that tool is Ansible. It is no surprise that more and more modules are being released to manage other aspects of the IT infrastructure including on-prem hardware. One example of that is PowerMax/VMAX which got its first release in June 2019. This first version covers all the basics of storage provisioning including snapshots https://github.com/dell/ansible-powermax It leverages the popular PyU4V python library  which wraps the REST API that lives in Unisphere. The library provides way more functionality than that, so it wouldn’t surprise anyone to see more versions in the near future that provide more functionality. The “Product Guide” document in the “docs” folder of the DellEMC repo prov...

In recent years, as cloud operating models have become more pervasive, organisations have started to adopt DevOps culture and processes to break previously existing organisational silos such as Development, Operations and QA. A key element for this transition is to treat Infrastructure as Code and to employ specialised automation tools. This is reporting benefits such as: Improved agility by eliminating manual or siloed tools which translates in significant reduction of provisioning times Minimise provisioning errors       Ensure consistency Ability to manage larger environments typically associated with scale-out microservices architectures Lower operational cost  The right choice of tool is essential to achieve these outcomes. Instead of leveraging element-specific scripting tools organisations need to move towards automation tools that can: address the configuration of large parts of the infrastructure so that multiple teams can “speak” the same la...