What is DevOps in Managed Services?

Let’s start with a quick review of what DevOps is. The word DevOps combines development and operations, reflecting the idea that it automates and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams. DevOps is a broad term for a combination of culture, practice and tools that accelerate an organization’s abilities to deliver applications and services. DevOps involves adjusting and reiteration products at fast pace. It is often visualized as a continuous loop, embodying the idea of automation and continuous improvement resulting from the seamless cooperation of developers and operators.

DevOps Managed Services helps enterprises implement changes to their digital products faster. It does this through continuous integration and continuous delivery or continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools, which helps monitor, update, and track updates. AWS gives you a set of flexible services that simplify provisioning and managing infrastructure, deploying application code, automating software release processes, and monitoring your application and infrastructure performance.

The DevOps advantage

The DevOps advantage comes down to speed while maintaining quality. The velocity of AWS DevOps helps organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market by proving the following benefits:

• Speed: Get on the market faster and get ahead of competitors. With AWS services there is no infrastructure setup required or software to install, so you can focus on your core product.
• Reliability: Practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery test that each change is functional and safe. This lets you reliably deliver faster while ensuring the quality of updates and changes while keeping your users happy.
• Automation: AWS helps automate processes such as deployments, development & test workflows, container and configuration management. This also cuts down the budget for the deployment and support of IT infrastructure significantly.
• Scale: Automation and consistency help you manage changing systems more efficiently with reduced risk while scaling up.
• Flexibility: Making changes as you go instead of rebuilding your existing infrastructure from scratch lets businesses respond faster to customer and market needs.

AWS DevOps best practices

At Cloudar we put DevOps into practice, working with developers or application engineers throughout the entire project life-cycle. Together we decide on deployment strategies, application design optimization, CI/CD pipelines and monitoring requirements using both AWS native services and third party solutions. All developers have to do is write code, and the pipeline takes care of the rest.

We also provision, configure, and manage your AWS infrastructure resources using code and templates, known as infrastructure as code. This helps you manage your development, testing, and production environments in way that is more repeatable and efficient. We build templates monitoring and enforcing infrastructure compliance so clients can easily keep building and tearing down environments. Everything we set up adheres to AWS the AWS Well Architected Framework guidelines and can be fully managed in our Managed Services offering.

Ready to put DevOps into practice to accelerate your success? We enable your teams to focus on software while automating code deployments, infrastructure, security and systems management. Reach out to us!

The post The deal with DevOps: How AWS helps you deliver faster appeared first on Cloudar.

“VMware is pleased to recognize Cloudar for achieving the VMware Cloud on AWS Master Services Competency. This achievement shows customers that partners like Cloudar are dedicated, invested and have validated expertise in advanced VMware technologies,” said Sandy Hogan, SVP of Worldwide Commercial and Partner Sales, VMware. “We value Cloudar as a VMware partner, and appreciate their efforts in achieving this VMware distinction as they work to increase their service delivery capabilities.” 

VMware Master Services Competencies are designed to help partners demonstrate customer-centric solutions and technical proficiency, with proven success and expertise in a specialized area of business. These competencies also allow partners to differentiate in six specific solution areas. 

VMware partners can achieve VMware Master Services Competencies in: 

● Cloud Management and Automation – Designates expertise in delivery of VMware Cloud Management and Automation solutions and services with deep understanding and execution of cloud management design principles and methodologies. 

● Cloud Native – Designates partner organizational expertise to run and manage VMware Modern Application solutions. Achieving this competency validates partners’ deep understanding of Kubernetes core concepts and proficiency in networking, security and application lifecycle management to ensure the continuous delivery of applications on Kubernetes-based platforms. 

● Data Center Virtualization – Designates expertise in delivery of VMware vSphere environments and digital infrastructure services with deep understanding of and execution in Data Center Virtualization design principles and methodologies. 

● Digital Workspace – Designates partner organizational expertise to design, deliver and support the ongoing management of customer apps, data and virtual desktop solutions whether on-premise or cloud delivered. Achieving this competency validates partners’ deep understanding and execution on VMware Horizon and VMware Workspace ONE end-user computing solutions. 

● Network Virtualization – Designates expertise in the delivery of VMware NSX environments and services with deployment and optimization of NSX environment capabilities. 

● VMware Cloud on AWS – Designates expertise in the delivery of hybrid cloud solutions based on VMware Cloud on AWS. This service provides an operationally consistent and familiar way to run, manage and secure applications in a hybrid IT environment. 

The post Cloudar Achieves VMware Master Services Competency in VMware Cloud on AWS! appeared first on Cloudar.

This article explains how to enable multicast traffic between two (or more) hosts using an n2n L2 tunnel (we use CentOS 6.5).

#First; install compile tools & s3cmd
yum -y install svn make gcc s3cmd

#Download the code
svn co https://svn.ntop.org/svn/ntop/trunk/n2n

#Disable encryption and compression before compiling the binaries; this should improve performance
cd n2n/n2n_v2
sed -i "s/#N2N_OPTION_AES=no/N2N_OPTION_AES=no/g" Makefile
sed -i "s/#define N2N_COMPRESSION_ENABLED 1/#define N2N_COMPRESSION_ENABLED 0/g" n2n.h
make

The make process should now have created two binaries:

• supernode -> to be run on the supernode, used for connection setup and VPN tunnel registration
• edge -> to be run on the nodes that will participate in multicast traffic

#Install the supernode binary on this host
cp ./supernode /usr/bin/

#store binaries in s3

s3cmd put supernode s3://bucketname/files/supernode
s3cmd put edge s3://bucketname/files/edge

# on the edge servers, install the edge binary

s3cmd get s3://bucketname/files/edge /usr/bin/edge
chmod +x /usr/bin/edge

On the supernode, start the supernode process and add it to rc.local so it starts automatically when we start the instance. The deamon is listening on UDP port 1200, so don’t forget to create an AWS Security Group that allows UDP traffic on this port between all nodes that participate in the n2n tunnel (also include the supernode).

#start the supernode and automatically start it on reboot 

supernode -l 1200
echo "supernode -l 1200" >> /etc/rc.local

We then start the edge process on the multicast-enabled nodes. Please note that 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.1.2 are the tunnel’s endpoint addresses which will be associated with the edge0 interface created by the edge process. n2na1 is the hostname of the supernode, the -E parameter allows multicast over the tunnel:

#App server 1

edge -l n2na1:1200 -c Intershop -a 192.168.1.1 -E
echo "edge -l n2na1:1200 -c Intershop -a 192.168.1.1" >> /etc/rc.local

#App server 2

edge -l n2na1:1200 -c Intershop -a 192.168.1.2 -E
echo "edge -l n2na1:1200 -c Intershop -a 192.168.1.2" >> /etc/rc.local

We can verify if edge was started correctly by checking if the edge0 interface was created:

root@Appa1 $ ifconfig edge0
edge0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr c7:5a:4b:ba:34:21
          inet addr:192.168.1.1  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1400  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:5 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:500
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:816 (816.0 B)

At this stage, multicast traffic between both EC2 instance over the edge0 interface should be possible. To make sure that all multicast traffic chooses the edge0 interface, we set up a static route:

#route multicast trough n2n, but during startup, wait 10 secs for the edge0 interface to become available 
route add -net 224.0.0.0 netmask 240.0.0.0 dev edge0
echo "sleep 10" >> /etc/rc.local
echo "route add -net 224.0.0.0 netmask 240.0.0.0 dev edge0" >> /etc/rc.local

Tx to buckhill for their post on n2n

The post Multicast on AWS appeared first on Cloudar.