Got word this morning that my Grandmother passed away overnight. Now, before everyone goes and floods me with condolences and stuff, it’s ok. Not looking for that. My Grandmother was 7 months short of 100 years old. 100. I’m 33, and I can’t even IMAGINE what it’s like to live that long.

I have a huge family. Had 2 sets of grandparents, then through a series of life events for my parents, added another full set. All of them were great family, but I always gravitated towards my Dad’s parents. Grandmother and Granddad. We just clicked. Always. They got me, I got them. No matter what was happening, they were always stable. They were my two favorite people on the face of the planet, and no matter what anybody else in my family says, I know I was their favorite. I grew up flying to their farm in McFarland, California at least once a year. Family was everything for them. When I was a young kid, my parents would go off on family cruises with them and my other aunts/uncles. I never understood why we were never invited until Niki and I had Aven. Then I realized why bringing little kids on trips like that was not a great idea. I get it now. My dad has continued their tradition with all of us a couple times, and Aven was too young to enjoy it, or we needed to be able to relax and enjoy it. You parents get it, dont‘ judge me.

Once my sister and I got old enough, they took us on a trip. One of the best memories I have in life is getting to go to Hawaii with them. We flew from LAX to the big island. Stayed at a hotel for a couple of nights, then got on a cruise ship where we island hopped for a few days. Then flew back. I got to miss a week of school for it, in 6th grade. That trip was priceless to me. We lost Granddad several years back, and that hit me really hard. We knew he had a lot of health issues, but he was always in great spirits. He was “sick” for 10+ years, so it just became normal. Grandmother was never really the same after he was gone. They were married for a couple of decades longer than I’ve even been alive. It’s completely understandable. She’s been struggling with the day to day life stuff a lot for the past year or two. She very obviously was not enjoying herself anymore. It was nothing personal to us, she had just stopped being super active, and started to slip. Personally, the second my health or mind starts to slip to an unrecoverable state, I’m out. I refuse to stay around and suffer. I’m not about that. Because of this mindset, I feel relieved for her. She was having a hard time. She held on for so long. Now it’s ok. This feeling has left me in a weird state. I’m really upset that she’s gone. She was the best. My favorite person ever. But at the same time, I’m relieved that she’s finally gone. I feel like an asshole. I know I shouldn’t because I’m relieved for her with the best of intentions. It just is what it is.

I have a crazy travel schedule all month, but I’ll be making changes at some point in the next two weeks to head out to LaVerne, CA to meet up with everyone. She will be laid to rest in Delano, reunited with Granddad.

Not really sure why I felt the need to blast all this out, but writing seems to make me feel better. Also, I didn’t want to simply post a short tweet about it. She deserved more than that. Hug your family, kids. That’s what is most important in life. Enjoy the time you get.

http://www.medium.com/@vtimd

http://www.beyondvirtual.io

Check them out, and let us know what you think. Thanks!

-vTimD

Huge thanks to A Cloud Guru courses for helping out. I hope to take the SA:A exam very soon, so we’ll see how that goes. Just wanted to get a quick win along the way. On to the next one!

-vTimD

Now, you may be a bit confused if you’ve seen the schedule, based on the content that I will present. Originally, the session was titled “Application + Self Service Kubernetes + AWS Services including AWS CodePipeline = Developer Bliss #VMwareCode39.” This was because my session was supposed to focus on how to use AWS CodePipeline to deploy an app into VMware Cloud PKS. I ran into a snag. CodePipeline only has a few different types of endpoints it can deploy to. There is a way to deploy to non-EKS Kubernetes with CodePipeline, but it requires access to the IAM that it is deployed in. With VMware Cloud PKS, this is not possible, as it is a managed service. So we’ll talk about all that a bit more in depth.

Once we get past that, we’re going to talk about a CI/CD solution where it really doesn’t matter where or how or where your Kubernetes is deployed. We’ll dive into a demo, and see VMware Cloud PKS and Code Stream in action. So if you want to check this out, or just come by and say Hi, make sure to be at the VMware Code stage at the Aria on Wednesday, November 28th, from 4:00 to 4:30. See you there!

-vTimD

Now that we’ve gone over the architectural changes, let’s take a look at what this has done to our costing. We’re going to check out pricing a different way this time. Since it is 1 instance, let’s take a look at just that instance. We’ll go to Assets, AWS, then RDS Instances. This will show us all of the RDS instances currently in our account. 

From there, we will click the View (eye) next to our FitCycle DB (db-fit-b-a-us-w1-01-r). This brings up the entire asset information for our RDS instance. 

One thing you may notice on here is that we have several cost numbers right on the front page. We have the List Price Per Month, the Current Hourly Cost, and the Projected Cost For Current Month. This is the number that we’re going to use for the purpose of this exercise. So this shows that we are spending roughly $68.88 this month on this RDS instance. 

This is a pretty substantial uptick in the cost of our DB tier. But overall, lots of factors go into cost analysis. One thing being that we removed the DBLB box. Though this is a small change, it can add up across the infrastructure. It isn’t just instances prices that can help to bring savings. Think about operational savings. You no longer have to maintain the HA Proxy EC2 instance. So this is OS, App, and Config updates you no longer have to make. Also think about the EC2 instances for the MySQL DB’s. You have to keep up with patching on the OS, App, and Configs there as well. 

There are tons of variables that come into play with this type of exercise. We can’t really tell you what is best for your business, without knowing it. Cloud Health is perfect for helping you make the best decisions you can, by providing you with the best possible information about your infrastructure. For more information, please check out https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/

-vTimD

We have several versions of the application. A big app with high availability, a small app with no HA, and a Kubernetes version of the app. Today we’re just talking the big app. And for that one, we actually have two different sub-versions. We have one that is using MySQL on full EC2 instances, and the other running MySQL backed RDS. The architecture is pretty straight-forward. Web tier into app / api tier into load-balanced DB tier.

So now that we’ve talked about how the applications look, let’s take a look at how we can quickly and easily view the costing for these resources. For this, we’re going to utilize CloudHealth. To make this easier to create reports based on just the resources we want to see, I have added tags in AWS to the 2 EC2 instances, and the 2 RDS instances. The category is Cost Reporting, and the value is ‘timd‘.

The first thing we should do is to create a new perspective. CloudHealth Perspectives enable precision reporting. They let you create unique business groups that reflect different sets of analysis, management and evaluation criteria. I am going to add the 2 EC2 instances and 2 RDS instances to it. The tags will make it easy to filter and add the resources to my perspective. 

Now that we have our perspective setup with the correct resources, we’re going to need to let it churn away for a short bit. CloudHealth actually goes in and starts generating reporting information based on the assets that you add to the perspective. This allows for much easier report creation and reading. 

EC2 Reports

Let’s start by checking out the monthly cost of our EC2 instances. To do this, we go to Reports, Cost, EC2 Instance. From there, we want to filter based on our perspective and select the Amazon EC2 Instances group we created.

I then filtered the results by a Monthly interval. This allows us to see a nice view of the past few months worth of EC2 spend. Remember, this report is generated only off the 2 MySQL EC2 instances we have configured for our perspective. 

As you can see in the report, we spent $19.87 last month. That’s not too bad, is it? Remember, this is only for 1 tier of a tiny application. Let’s do the exact same thing again, but this time we’ll go to Reports, Cost, RDS. And we’ll do the same filtering.

As we can see here, we spent $37.20 on the RDS instances. This is just over double the cost of our EC2 MySQL DB’s. You’d wonder why someone would do RDS vs EC2 with MySQL when given just this data. 

One other thing you may be asking yourself is why we’re using RDS the exact same way we use EC2 DB’s. Using multiple instances and a DB load balancer. Not really the pinnacle of “Cloud Native” design, right? Well, I have great news for you! This is going to be a two-part blog. I will be going in and rearchitecting the RDS application. I am going to remove the EC2 instance with HA PRoxy (DB Load Balancer) and point the app servers directly to an RDS instance. For high availability purposes, it will be a Multi-AZ RDS instance.  So, while that type of RDS instance is more expensive than a Single-AZ instance, removing the second instance and the DB load balancer EC2 instance may just bring the cost down. Stay tuned to find out!

First and foremost, let’s talk about these two products, starting with VMware Kubernetes Engine. VKE is an enterprise-grade Kubernetes-as-a-Service offering in the VMware Cloud Services portfolio that provides easy to use, secure, cost-effective, and fully managed Kubernetes clusters. VKE enables users to run containerized applications without the cost and complexity of implementing and operating Kubernetes. For more information about this service and to request access, please visit http://cloud.vmware.com/vmware-kubernetes-engine. The second piece of this is Code Stream. This is part of VMware Cloud Automation Services. It offers full CI/CD as a Service. For more information about this service and to request access, please visit https://cloud.vmware.com/code-stream. 

So, to make this work, I needed a simple application for Kubernetes. I found this in the Kubernetes sample applications on GitHub. I cloned the repo to here. I will be using the YAML files in the Guestbook app. The process is pretty simple. When code is committed and pushed from VS Code, or any editor, to Github, it will trigger the pipeline.

Now, I’ll also need a place to put this app. This is where VKE comes in. You can create a new cluster in VKE with one simple config page:

With just that little bit of stuff, we now have a fully configured VKE cluster! The great part about VKE is that it doesn’t start provisioning a bunch of resources until you start deploying apps. Resources stay at 0 until you deploy, then they scale out as needed. Once you start removing things, or if the app isn’t resource-intensive, the smart cluster will scale the cluster back automatically. This cluster gives you full UI and API access into Kubernetes. VKE offers it’s own CLI which can be loaded onto just about any system. From there, you can login and very simply setup merged authorization to allow the use of kubectl just as you would with any other Kubernetes deployment: 

vke account login -t INSERT ORG ID -r INSERT CSP API TOKEN
vke folder set INSERT FOLDER NAME
vke project set INSERT PROJECT NAME
vke cluster merge-kubectl-auth INSERT CLUSTER NAME

Now let’s take a look at Code Stream. This part of the configuration has a few pieces. The endpoints, the webhook / trigger, and then the pipeline itself. First, we’re going to look at the endpoints. This is essentially the source / destinations of your pipeline content. We’ll need one for GitHub, and one for VKE (K8s).

The Kubernetes endpoint should be created with the token of a service account. This will allow you to keep the token active and not have to refresh it manually once a day. You can see that process here. This is a look at the endpoint configuration screen for that:

Once you’re done here, you’ll need a GitHub endpoint. For this, you just need your GitHub Credentials. This one is easy enough!

Now to create the actual pipeline! Go into the Pipelines section, hit New Pipeline, then create from Blank Canvas:

This is a single stage pipeline, and I made that stage “Deploy”. There is 6 “K8s” tasks in this stage, and they simply take the YAML from the GitHub repo, and deploy them in the order needed for the application to deploy properly. This is a look at that workflow:

You simply click and drag tasks from the options on the left to the canvas. Once there, you configure the tasks. For K8s’s tasks, you give it an endpoint (that we already configured) and then give it the payload source, which is our GitHub endpoint in this case:

At any point, you can click Validate on the tasks. It will make sure your endpoints are responding, and that all looks good with the tasks. I went through lots of validation failures in my time trying to figure all this out. It makes it very easy to troubleshoot issues and get moving. 

Now that we have everything setup, we need to configure the trigger. So go to the home screen in Code Stream, and click Git under “Triggers.” From there will we goto Webhooks for Git, and select New Webhook. You will need the project, a GitHub endpoint, and also your API Token from the Cloud Services Portal that we used to login to VKE earlier. 

Once you click Create, it will automatically register Code Stream with GitHub Apps. Now, if you make a commit / push to the repo, it will automatically trigger your pipeline, and you’re good to go!

Success! We have a pipeline, be it very simple. Next we can go in and beef up the pipeline to do all the docker builds etc right from within Code Stream! But that’s for another time.

If you have any questions or want to learn more about VKE or Code Stream, feel free to check out http://cloud.vmware.com.

-Tim Davis – Technical Cloud Specialist, VMware Cloud Services

Now, before I get to what and where that is, I need to call out a laundry list of people who have helped to make my career at VMware possible. Brad Christian was the reason I got to join VMware in the first place. He heard me talking NSX at a VMUG event, hit me up on twitter, and asked if I wanted to sell NSX. Never imagined I would be the right candidate for it, as most of my  colleagues are serious networking guys. But here we are. Sean Howard, my first manager who gave me a shot. He knew I wasn’t the long time Cisco guy, but we got along really well and he took a shot. All of my teammates this past two years who have helped me along. We really are the Dream Team. We’ve had a lot of managers, but always remained a strong team. Sean, Sachin, Dave, David, and the entire management crew have been fantastic.

Paul B and The Dom Father. Two of the greatest Senior Managers of all time. I strive daily to do my job half as well as they do theirs. They run the finest damn pirate ship on the globe.

Now, at this point, you’re probably wondering where I am going. Am I staying at VMware? Am I leaving? What is happening? Why are you still reading this? AM I GOING TO MICROSOFT?!

No, I am staying at VMware. Obviously. I bleed our green and blue now. I worked so hard to get into this company, I refuse to leave it. But, I am making a really huge shift. I am following in the footsteps of Sean “Fancy Pants” O’Dell and running to the land of VMware Cloud Services! I will be a Technical Cloud Specialist for the VCS team under Bill Shetti. Huge thanks to my colleague Prabhu Barathi for helping me realize that this was the gig for me. Started out as just having a conversation, and turned into something I knew I had to be a part of. A fundamental shift in the way that VMware does business. All of those customers out there who are making the huge push to the cloud, we have tons of tools to help them be successful. Look forward to a ton of cool new stuff out of VMware. Things you never thought we would do!

But, don’t worry. I will always rep team #RunNSX. The Virtual Cloud Network is the future of the business network.

Be on the lookout for a ton of new stuff from me, and the rest of the VCS team!

-vTimD

I was supposed to be a VCDX  by now…

After being called out by Ariel on Twitter, I called my shot. I said that I would be submitting by December 2016. That very obviously didn’t happen. Life, and the process, is hard. Never underestimate how much work goes into a design. I thought to myself, “I know everything about the design IRL. I can do this quick and easy.” Well, that’s just not how it works in the real world.

I have heard many stories of people who have gone into hiding during the writing process. Neglecting their family and friends for a while, etc. I’m sure this is a very effective way of completing quickly. I simply cannot do that. This certification is my one and only career goal at this current point in time. But, family comes first, and work comes second. As badly as I want this certification, I’m not going to cripple my life over it. Now, in reading and hearing some people’s experiences with this cert, some may say that because I don’t want to cripple my life over it, I simply just don’t want it bad enough. And, this isn’t the case. Professionally, it really is my ONLY goal right now. I’ve had talks with my managers over it. I always get asked “what do you want to be doing in 5 years” type questions. The answer is the same. I want to be a VCDX.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been ruthlessly pushed along the way by a merry band of lunatics… The #VCDXWolfPack. Very firm, but accepting. My kind of lunatics. All, but 1, currently have gotten numbers not counting myself. We swore we were in it to win it this round that ended in September. Yep, that didn’t work out.

Where am I going with all this rambling about my utter failures as a man, and a human being? It’s simple. That is OK. Sometimes, schedules don’t work out. As a wise woman once said, “Remember, your goals are allowed to evolve.” It’s a personal journey, and my want for the certification is 100% selfish. I just want it for myself. Just like my college degree. I had my career started LONG before I went back to school. I just got it for me.

So, eventually, I will be a VCDX. I stopped stressing myself out over dates, and am working on my design during my free time to ensure that I can try and knock it out first try. Whenever that happens to be. We’ll see how that goes. Best of luck to everyone who submitted September 22nd for the December defenses!

-vTimD

This was an extremely successful VMworld. I spent most of my time in the Hands-on-Labs area, working as a proctor. We cleared over 11k labs in under a week. That is fantastic.

Some of you may have noticed that I wasn’t out and around the conference anywhere near as much as I was in previous years. This is due to the HOL job. It really takes a LOT of work to make HOL go as well as it does. You need a lot of rest. Even though I was not physically around much, you may have seen my face quite a bit. I ended up showing up all over the place.

Let’s start with the stickers. Throughout the past year, Ariel has been asking for a high-res picture of my face. This is due to the running gag that I am “The Face” of vExpertNSX. Shortly before VMworld, I thought he was joking when he said I was going to be a sticker. This was, in fact, not a joke. These were passed out in Vegas, and a package is making it’s way to Barcelona for VMworld EU. Here it is in all it’s glory:

Now, it wasn’t just stickers. Thanks to Ronbecca and Rubrik, I am also a part of the #vAllStars trading card series!

If stickers and trading cards aren’t your thing, maybe you found a copy of the vTrail Map book. It is part of the new LevelUp Program that is being setup by Druva. Huge thanks to Yadin for getting the book put together. I am now the NSX Ambassador for the vTrail Map, which is a great book on all the different areas of VMware, and the best posts / videos to get started with:

So now we have stickers, trading cards, and books. That is all we have for the print media. But, that is just 2d renderings of my face. While I was not out and about much, I did find my way around a few times. I spent almost 7 full minutes in the VM Village talking to Tim Smith about… Can you guess the subject?… Of course you can. NSX of course!

And, in a final act of pure excellence, I made my way to the vBrownBag stage to deliver one of the many sessions that I had denied for the official session list. The session was called, “NSX: Out of the Box, and into Production!” This focused on the use cases for NSX, which one is the easiest to deploy, and then using vRNI to kick the process into overdrive. Check it out!

Well, that’s all I have. I had a great time, and got a lot done. I have also done an almost complete true-up on all the people I know from the community, but hadn’t met in person. It was great to meet so many of you in real life. Safe travels home to all!

-vTimD