Here is my third and final doodle from the F5 NGINX Sprint 2.0 event that I have been attending with the Tech Field Day Delegates.

During the sessions the specialists at NGINX ran the journey of modernising enterprise applications incorporating the components with NGINX including, NGNIX, NGINX Plus, NGINX App Protect, NGINX Instance Manage, Contoller and much more

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I’ve enjoyed learning about NGINX and the NGINX portfolio during the Sprint 2.0 event. I hadn’t previously had much experience with NGINX, and now after Sprint 2.0, I understand how enterprise organisations are using NGINX’s open source applications and commercial applications to solve day two operational issues.

I think it is excellent for NGINX and their customers that there will be further investment and focus on open source products and engagement. This is clearly an area that attracts new customers through the developer community but then drives new customers to the commercial products when day 2 problems need to be solved by the operations team.

I was also particularly impressed by the F5 integration in the portfolio with technologies such as App Protect but as well as this there is claear delination between NGINX and F5 Big-IP with Big-IP focusing on traditional applications and NGINX on modern adaptable applications.

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With my fellow Tech Field Day delegates, we attended NGINX Sprint 2.0. Below is my first doodle from the first day's sessions.

This doodle covers the changing face of applications and the impact the Covid period has had on transformation. Some of the thoughts NGINX customers Audi and Blackrock had on why they selected NGINX for their modern applications. I particularly liked Blackrocks session that explored their R3SPs for application deployment and how NGINX met these. These were

Resilience

Scale

Security

Stability

Performance

Finally, the doodle shows the significant changes that NGINX has made to their platforms since the last sprint event.

As NGINX is relatively new to me, what impressed me was the ability for their products to support both developers and ops with modern application deployments, allowing scale, simplicity of deployment and flexibility alongside enhanced security thanks to the integrated F5 technologies.

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The below graphic shows the different components within the NGINX portfolio, these include

NGINX Plus - An all in one load balancer, content cache and web server

NGINX Controller - Manage load balancers, API gateways and service mesh deployments at scale

NGINX App Protect - Modern app security powered by F5 WAF technology running on NGINX Plus

NGINX Unit - Dynamic application server with a REST API driven configuration

NGINX Ingress Controller - Ingress load balancing on kubernetes platforms

NGINX Instance Manager - Configure, Scale and manage your open source and enterprise configurations across your business

NGINX Service Mesh - Secure service to service management of both north south and east west traffic in kubernetes environments

NGINX Amplify - Cloud hosts monitoring and statistical analysis for NGINX and NGINX Plus

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You are able to see my first doodle and blog post containing information about the launch of Scality ARTESCA here.

During the second half of the Scality ARTESCA launch we switched from the ActualTechMedia webcast and came over the the Tech Field Day portion. You are able to watch the videos once available here.

The Tech Field Day session started with a discussion led by James Governor and Joey D’Antoni focusing on dev-ops and the edge. There was much discussion around kubernetes and the need for object storage as well as the need to automate processes at the edge. We then saw a demonstration by Scality of the new ARTESCA UI. The UI seemed very mature offering you the ability to not only manage ARTESCA platforms but also Scality RING and other S3 compatible repositories such as AWS and Azure Blob.

Whilst in many cases theses systems will be managed and accessed via API’s by developers and then via DevOps automations I believe certainly at the edge there is a need for a fully featured UI to allow operational troubleshooting and maintenance.

One of the elements that was pleasing to see is that the ARTESCA UI allowed for visibility and reporting of the underlying infrastructure layers including Kubernetes and the HPE hardware status. I was also very impressed by the including analytics, including predicted analytics as well as the integrated object browser where you couldn’t only browse objects but add and edit meta data.

Please see above my doodle from the second part of the Scality ARTESCA launch and below some of the UI screenshots.

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You can learn more about Scality ARTESCA here >> SCALITY ARTESCA | scality

and you can see more from HPE on Scality here >> HPE Object Based Storage for Scality Solutions | HPE

StorPool installs on standard servers, running on Linux it pools all performance and capacity across nodes starting initially from 3 nodes. It offers high throughput with up to 1 million IOPS per node offering in excess of 10million IOPS in a 10 node system, critically with extremely low latency. StorPool is focused on new-age IT workloads including KVM and Kubernetes but also support vSphere and Hyper-V. Due to it’s high performance, low latency and software defined nature StorPool is often utilised by Hosting Providors and MSPs to deliver multi-tenant cloud solutions.

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Pure Storage presented their software defined storage management platform for Kubernetes PortWorx. PortWorx was acquired by Pure Storage in September this year after working closely within many customers utilising PortWorx for Kubernetes projects on top of Pure Storage. PortWorx will continue to be agnostic of the underlying storage platform and offers Kubernetes centric, Backup, DR, Migration, Security and Automation tools alongside software defined storage. Another of it’s USPs is its application centric approach aligned with how containers are deployed apposed to a machine centric approach that other solutions take.

An interesting presentation from a solution that ticks a number of boxes for those looking at storage management solutions for Kubernetes, if you would like to try PortWorx out yourself check out the interactive demos https://central.portworx.com/.

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Here is my first doodle from VMworld 2020 covering the general session with Pat Gelsinger and Sanjay Poonen. There is lots of discussions about VMware’s Any App, Any Cloud, Any Device, with Intrinsic Security vision with a strong focus on abstracting, securing and supporting operations for kubernetes across multi cloud.