Guest: Rob Hirschfeld (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Company: RackN (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

RackN was founded to solve the complexities and challenges in physical infrastructure automation with a software platform that creates a decentralized control plane to enable IT teams to maintain distributed, multi-vendor operations with consistent control.

One of their flagship tools is the RackN Digital Rebar, which creates reusable, standardized processes for platform and infrastructure teams, enabling both self-management and control at scale.

V4.8 of Digital Rebar is now available and is, according to Rob Hirschfeld, co-founder and CEO of RackN, a significant addition to the Digital Rebar release cycle. The new release introduces infrastructure pipelines as a formalized concept, which includes concepts for clusters as a standalone infrastructure pipeline, as well as target and resource brokers as an infrastructure pipeline target. Hirschfeld explains, “Not only can we run an ongoing Day 2 life cycle against machines of multiple types, we can actually pull them together as clusters and then manage the life cycle of a cluster as a separate entity.” This allows RackN to have these critical abstraction points for massive deployments at scale.

The use cases for Digital Rebar include customers who want to run their own infrastructure, their own automation and are very protective of their data, secrets, and identities. They have customers in the financial, telco, service provider, media, and game sectors, as well as companies working with CI/CD.

As to the next release of Digital Rebar, Hirschfeld says of the items on their roadmap “SAML integration, enhanced single sign-on,  and our ability to use external secrets. So attached to customers existing external secret vaults so they do not have to store information in digital rebar.” Hirschfeld adds, “Both of those point to how an enterprise product is part of an environment and actually needs to not just do the work that it has to do, but be a good citizen within an IT environment and I’m proud of how much work we’ve done adding that also into this release.”

The summary of the show is written by Jack Wallen

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Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, I’m the CEO Swapnil Bhartiya , and welcome to TFiR newsroom and today we have with us once again, Rob Hirschfeld CEO and co-founder of RackN and today we are going to talk about digital rebar version 4.8, which was recently released. Before we talk about this specific release, I want to talk a bit about what digital rebar is.

Rob Hirschfeld: Thank you Swapnil, digital rebar is our platform for helping companies automate their data centers. You might even think of it as like a programming platform for automation that makes it easy to use, reuse and manage infrastructure is code automation across every type of infrastructure, Bare-metal, Edge, cloud and Virtual.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Now let’s talk about this release. Tell me what’s new there.

Rob Hirschfeld: V4.8 for us is a really significant addition into the digital rebar release cycle. This release has us introducing infrastructure pipelines as a formalized concept, and that includes concepts for clusters as a standalone infrastructure pipeline, target and resource brokers as an infrastructure pipeline target. So not only can we run a ongoing day, two life cycle against machines of multiple types, we can actually pull them together as clusters and then manage the life cycle of a cluster as a separate entity and the same goes with a resource broker. So that allows us to have these critical abstraction points for massive deployments at scale, where you can say, I need to manage a cluster and target your automation logic calls at the cluster level, and then have it reliably collect resources from different cloud or physical infrastructures, and then manage those across their life cycle as independent entities. It, it really brings together work that we’ve been doing for years into a consistent repeatable codeable API.

Swapnil Bhartiya: How much of these features also kind of reflect the feedback that you receive from either your customers or the trend that you’re seeing in this space? Because you and I, we sit down and talk about the trends. So how much that reflects on this release.

Rob Hirschfeld: It’s a nice thing about, about 4.8 product that represents years of enterprise deployments. So included in this are, how do you get to 10,000 machines per endpoint, not even per digital rebar customer. We have customers way past that, but per individual endpoints where they’re getting to scale on individual endpoints. But the thing that is really important here is that we have been working with global scale companies with sites that are globally distributed and managed by relatively small teams and they have been coming back to us and saying, I don’t want to repeat automation, I don’t want custom anything. I want to be able to have each site be completely described by immutable infrastructure is code constructs and then I want to use rack ends VMware deployment, rack ends Linux deployment, or windows deployment.

They don’t want to invent their own processes and so what infrastructure pipelines reflects is this years of dialogue with how our customers want to have repeatable automation, but want it to be standardized and follow best practices so that they’re not inventing that. So it’s an amazing amount of engineering, both from the technical side of it. But the process side that is reflected in how digital rebar 4.8 is put together and, and I’m really proud of that part of how all these things go.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you share some of the uses you can or cannot, you may or may not name some users, but if you can share, Hey, these are where people are using this rebar

Rob Hirschfeld: So I can’t name users, part of what rack end provides because this is software, not a managed service is autonomy. Our customers want to run their own infrastructure, want run their own automation and they’re very protective of their data and their secrets and their identities. I can give you a little bit of a hint though. We are in multiple top 10, top five banks doing financial institutions, telcos have been using our software to do their Edge 5G deployments and rollouts, service providers have been using us at global scale to manage VMware and other workflows and automation, media companies use us for rendering farm media and game companies use us for rendering game farms and C.I.C.D infrastructure. So it sort of runs the gamut on how our systems are used to create C.I.C.D for infrastructure, our infrastructure pipelines.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. Of course, I’m pretty sure that as soon as you folks release 4.8 , you started working on 4.9. There are a lot of things that you can not share at this point, but if I ask you what kind of roadmap you have or what other things that you are working on next.

Rob Hirschfeld: So what we find as we add these types of infrastructure pipeline innovations, our customers always ask us to make them longer and deeper. So what you’ll find us doing is using these new cluster constructs to really build deeper and deeper integrations into say like a Kubernetes cluster automation system, deeper integrations into the way that we use and manage Terraform and Ansible to make those systems actually do even more out of the box and what we’re also doing is moving on the infrastructure side into broader infrastructure pipelines for networking and storage. So what you’ll see for companies that are managing their own infrastructure, you’ll see Switch integrations and storage integrations as part of those standard pipelines. So we’re actually helping customers build switch [inaudible 00:05:49] install switches, install storage, manage storage and then stitch it all together into a single infrastructure deliverable, even then going past like a VMware install and then managing the VMware install on top of it.

So what we find is our pipelines are consistently getting more resilient inside the pipeline, but longer as our customers pull us into more and more pieces and parts. So in addition to the infrastructure pipelines and clusters and resource brokers pieces, there are some critical enterprise features that are coming in 4.8. One of them is Saml integration. So single sign on, enhanced single sign on from that perspective and our ability to use external secrets, so attached to customers existing external secret faults and not have to store information in digital rebar, both of those point to how an enterprise product is part of an environment and actually needs to not just do the work that it has to do, but be a good citizen within an I.T environment and I’m proud of how much work we’ve done adding that also into this release.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Rob, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about this release and usual I’d love to have you back on the show. Thank you.

Rob Hirschfeld: Thank you. I appreciate the time.

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