Rob Hirschfeld

Rob Hirschfeld has been working in Cloud automation since 1999 where he co-founded one of the first IaaS companies. He is CEO of RackN: a company dedicated to commercial support OpenCrowbar, the bare metal DevOps platform. He is also a long serving OpenStack board member who is passionate about Agile/Lean process and scale data center automation.

It’s Time to Slay the Universal Installer Unicorn

June 8, 2016 by Rob Hirschfeld 1 Comments

While many people want a universal “easy button installer,” they also want it to work on their unique snowflake of infrastructures, tools, networks and operating systems. I call them snowflakes because their small differences expand combinatorially. That divergence turns the idea of a prescriptive reference architecture into a destructive myth that limits community and ecosystem […]

5 Key Aspects of High Fidelity DevOps

May 4, 2016 by Rob Hirschfeld 2 Comments

As much as we talk about how we should have shared goals spanning Dev and Ops, it’s not nearly as easy as it sounds. To fuel a DevOps culture, we have to build robust tooling, also. That means investing up front in five key areas: abstraction, composability, automation, orchestration, and idempotency. Together, these concepts allow […]

What If We Had Git for DevOps?

February 19, 2016 by Rob Hirschfeld 3 Comments

I used to hate Git. Compared to my previous source control systems (SVN, SourceForge and floppies), it was cryptic, opaque and hard to learn. It was comfortable to create a set of files and folder, then snapshot them as a unit. It was simple to understand and improved my individual productivity. But that snapshot created […]

DevOps and the Challenge with Services

January 26, 2016 by Rob Hirschfeld 4 Comments

At RackN, we’ve been working for years to make DevOps portable across platforms. For us, that means the ability to move between clouds and from cloud to metal. Of the several challenges to portability—composability, API heterogeneity, sequence, cross-system dependencies—making configuration management tools work with services has been particularly important, as significant parts of building systems […]

Two paths to metal devops: cloud-like API driven & cluster building

June 19, 2015 by Rob Hirschfeld 1 Comments

I’ve been seeing a rising interest in metal DevOps fueled by containers and scale-out data center platforms (like Hadoop, Ceph & OpenStack) that run at the metal level. While I see this is a growing general trend (Packet, Internap, RackSpace, OpenStack Ironic, MaaS), I’m going to stay firmly within my wheelhouse and use OpenCrowbar as my reference here. […]

Are VMs becoming El Caminos?

March 6, 2015 by Rob Hirschfeld 14 Comments

In 2010, it looked as if virtualization had won. We expected all servers to virtualize workloads and the primary question was which cloud infrastructure manager would dominate. Now in 2015, the picture is not as clear. I’m seeing a trend that threatens the “virtualize all things” battle cry. Really, it’s two intersecting trends: metal is […]