The Trip

Sitting here in a quiet terminal is slightly surreal. I’m not used to silence or the singular sound of roller bags one at a time going through. Its peaceful… too peaceful. I got here too early.

I’m a stickler for rules. I don’t know why, but if I’m told to be at the airport two hours early I don’t ask questions I just do. However, since waking up at 3AM and being unable to get back to sleep, getting to this point has been paramount. I should explain that the last time I flew out of DFW Airport I was late for my flight. I’m more a Love field guy. Suffice it to say I had a lot of anxiety about today.

One thing people don’t tell you about much is time management with VMworld. Oh sure the #1 thing people say to prepare you is “COMFY SHOES” its almost something on a t-shirt or a bumper sticker, but time management is paramount. Which is also something I’m not great with.

Lets see, I fly out and arrive a little after 11, and have 2 hours before my first session it get to the hotel, check-in, register at VMworld, and hopefully get something to eat along the way. Lots of places for things to go wrong. But one place to go right. to inform you, dear reader, that flying out on Saturday, isn’t a bad way to do it. Sure, its one extra night, and meals, but the free thought and peace of knowing you’re not crunched is definitely worth it.

Lets see If I get to Run Kubernetes on VMware. Which is paramount to my going to VMworld, since I’m being a deciding factor on where we should run out Kube cluster(AWS, Azure, on-prem, IBM, etc.)

TIM DAVIS WHAT UP! I normally catch up on twitter when I can, and the airport definitely affords that. While scrolling and responding back and forth in twitter I found out my friend Tim Davis was at the same airport on the same flight, but was chilling in the admirals lounge! He got me in so we could catch up and prep some more for the oncoming VMworld enjoyment. Thanks TIM!

Not much to state about the flight, it wa pretty non-eventful. I don’t normally fly American, so it was nice to see all the great stuff that they had. What I get Movies?! cool…

Run Kubernetes on VMware

@Boskey, and @morellatosimone

Well as a first session goes, this is impressive. A full house made right at the kickoff. Really excited. As this is a Workshop there isn’t much to discuss or talk about. This will supposedly be an intro into kubernetes and a great warm up for VMworld. Here.We.Go…

• Definition of Devops in this session is “Improving the pipeline to deploy code.”
• its time to abstract the Operating system. (Heck yes it is. This is the main response to containers in our environment)
• Kubernetes is a container orchestration layer that maintains desired state, distribute containerized workloads, decouple app from infrastructure.
• Focusing on the removal of the App from the Infrastructure, normally when building an application you need the binary, configs, resources, storage, replication, load balancer(if needed), security(ACL) and Upgrades(CI/CD)
• The same app in Kubernetes speak turns int pods, Secrets, deployment, PV(Persistant Volume) Claims, Replica Sets, services, Network Policies, Labels, and Services.
• The infrastructure layer would be either vSphere, AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Kubernetes Workloads: Pods, Jobs, Cron Jobs, Daemon Sets, Deployments, Replica Sets, Stateful Sets, CRDs
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• Normally Kubernetes is stateless applications, but here we define StatefulSet in action:
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• Labels
• Deployments, Replica Sets and Service
• Map of Kubernetes and Load balancing
• Map of PODS(How it looks)
• Now the good stuff. Persistent Volumes. This is definitely a confusing discussion and caused a lot of questions. Here are the slides to hopefully show what it looks like.
• Slide on Config Maps/Secrets. This is something that I don’t really know enough about and need to review but hey, thats what Google is for right?
• Good summary of the Session
• Here is the link to alot of the PODS. Unfortunately, this requires PKS deployed and a pod available. Perhaps you can spin up a PKS HOL and have time to go through this as the YAMLs and information is all in a public Github.
• Labs here: https://github.com/Boskey/run_kubernetes_with_vmware/wiki

The main difficulty for me was getting the VKE and Kubernetes cli in the /usr/bin. Its worth noting that if you have El Capitan installed on your Macbook /usr/bin is now a system folder and you can’t move or copy files there. I got around this by putting it in /usr/local/bin and then setting the PATH variable there.

All in All an amazing session. Give @Boskey, and @morellatosimone a follow!

Opening the Solutions Exchange

HASHICORP IS HERE! Getting face to face with people for the application is probably as good if not better than any session at VMworld. I only did about 4 to 5 booths, but was able to hit up Hashicorp, Git, Puppet, and cloudbolt. So many more vendors to talk to, with the bigger companies like Cohesity, Rubrik, Dell, AWS, GCP, Pure, etc.

Obviously these are great conversations here but I’m extending an already extended blog, so lets just call it a great time had by all 🙂

Parties

With Jet Lag and everything I didn’t make any parties to talk about. I tried to get to the VMUG and the VMunderground, but didn’t make either. So sad… Now to bed… I’m really tired…