Alessandro Arrichiello

Solution Architect, Red Hat inc.

Alessandro Arrichiello

Alessandro Arrichiello is a Solution Architect for Red Hat Inc. He has a passion for GNU/Linux systems, which began at age 14 and continues today. He worked with tools for automating Enterprise IT: configuration management and continuous integration through virtual platforms. He’s now working on distributed cloud environments involving SaaS, PaaS (OpenShift & Kubernetes), IaaS (OpenStack), IoT/Edge Computing and Automation.

Areas of Expertise

RHEL, Containers, Cloud, Openstack, Openshift, ManageIQ, Storage

Recent Posts

From zero to Quarkus and Knative: The easy way

From zero to Quarkus and Knative: The easy way

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By Alessandro Arrichiello

You’ve probably already read about Quarkus, but you may not know that the superfast startup speed of Quarkus makes it the best candidate for working with Knative and serverless for your Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) projects.

Quarkus, also known as Supersonic, Subatomic Java, is a Kubernetes native Java stack tailored for GraalVM and OpenJDK HotSpot, crafted from the best-of-breed Java libraries and standards. Knative is a Kubernetes-based platform to build, deploy, and manage modern serverless workloads. You can learn more in this article series.

This article does not provide a full deep dive on Knative or Quarkus. Instead, I aim to give you a quick and easy way to start playing with both technologies so you can further explore on your own.

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IoT edge development and deployment with containers through OpenShift: Part 2

IoT edge development and deployment with containers through OpenShift: Part 2

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By Alessandro Arrichiello

In the first part of this series, we saw how effective a platform as a service (PaaS) such as Red Hat OpenShift is for developing IoT edge applications and distributing them to remote sites, thanks to containers and Red Hat Ansible Automation technologies.

Usually, we think about IoT applications as something specially designed for low power devices with limited capabilities.  IoT devices might use a different CPU architectures or platform. For this reason, we tend to use completely different technologies for IoT application development than for services that run in a data center.

In part two, we explore some techniques that allow you to build and test contains for alternate architectures such as ARM64 on an x86_64 host.  The goal we are working towards is to enable you to use the same language, framework, and development tools for code that runs in your datacenter or all the way out to IoT edge devices. In this article, I’ll show building and running an AArch64 container image on an x86_64 host and then building an RPI3 image to run it on physical hardware using Fedora and Podman.

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IoT edge development and deployment with containers through OpenShift: Part 1

IoT edge development and deployment with containers through OpenShift: Part 1

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By Alessandro Arrichiello

Usually, we think about IoT applications as something very special made for low power devices that have limited capabilities. For this reason, we tend to use completely different technologies for IoT application development than the technology we use for creating a datacenter’s services.

This article is part 1 of a two-part series. In it, we’ll explore some techniques that may give you a chance to use containers as a medium for application builds—techniques that enable the portability of containers across different environments. Through these techniques, you may be able to use the same language, framework, or tool used in your datacenter straight to the “edge,” even with different CPU architectures!

We usually use “edge” to refer to the geographic distribution of computing nodes in a network of IoT devices that are at the “edge” of an enterprise. The “edge” could be a remote datacenter or maybe multiple geo-distributed factories, ships, oil plants, and so on.

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Managing containerized system services with Podman

Managing containerized system services with Podman

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By Alessandro Arrichiello

In this article, I discuss containers, but look at them from another angle. We usually refer to containers as the best technology for developing new cloud-native applications and orchestrating them with something like Kubernetes. Looking back at the origins of containers, we’ve mostly forgotten that containers were born for simplifying application distribution on standalone systems.

In this article, we’ll talk about the use of containers as the perfect medium for installing applications and services on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) system. Using containers doesn’t have to be complicated, I’ll show how to run MariaDB, Apache HTTPD, and WordPress in containers, while managing those containers like any other service, through systemd and systemctl.

Additionally, we’ll explore Podman, which Red Hat has developed jointly with the Fedora community. If you don’t know what Podman is yet, see my previous article, Intro to Podman (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6) and Tom Sweeney’s Containers without daemons: Podman and Buildah available in RHEL 7.6 and RHEL 8 Beta.

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Intro to Podman (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 Beta)

Intro to Podman (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 Beta)

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By Alessandro Arrichiello

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.6 Beta was released a few days ago and one of the first new features I noticed is Podman. Podman complements Buildah and Skopeo by offering an experience similar to the Docker command line: allowing users to run standalone (non-orchestrated) containers. And Podman doesn’t require a daemon to run containers and pods, so we can easily say goodbye to big fat daemons.

Podman implements almost all the Docker CLI commands (apart from the ones related to Docker Swarm, of course). For container orchestration, I suggest you take a look at Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift.

Podman consists of just a single command to run on the command line. There are no daemons in the background doing stuff, and this means that Podman can be integrated into system services through systemd.

We’ll cover some real examples that show how easy it can be to transition from the Docker CLI to Podman.

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Customizing an OpenShift Ansible Playbook Bundle

Customizing an OpenShift Ansible Playbook Bundle

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By Alessandro Arrichiello

Today I want to talk about Ansible Service Broker and Ansible Playbook Bundle. These components are relatively new in the Red Hat OpenShift ecosystem, but they are now fully supported features available in the Service Catalog component of OpenShift 3.9.

Before getting deep into the technology, I want to give you some basic information (quoted below from the product documentation) about all the components and their features:

  • Ansible Service Broker is an implementation of the Open Service Broker API that manages applications defined in Ansible Playbook Bundles.
  • Ansible Playbook Bundles (APB) are a method of defining applications via a collection of Ansible Playbooks built into a container with an Ansible runtime with the playbooks corresponding to a type of request specified in the Open Service Broker API specification.
  • Playbooks are Ansible’s configuration, deployment, and orchestration language. They can describe a policy you want your remote systems to enforce, or a set of steps in a general IT process.

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Understanding Ansible Tower Isolated Nodes

Understanding Ansible Tower Isolated Nodes

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By Alessandro Arrichiello

Today I want to talk of one of the great, brand new features that Ansible Tower introduced in version 3.2: Ansible Tower Isolated Nodes.

Thanks to this feature, you’ll be able to create an isolated (Ansible-Tower) node in a restricted network that will manage automation jobs for the main tower, reporting results!

To quote the release statement:

“A Tower Isolated Node is a headless Ansible Tower node that can be used for local execution capacity, either in a constrained networking environment such as a DMZ or VPC, or in a remote data center for local execution capacity. The only prerequisite is that there is SSH connectivity from the Tower Cluster to the Isolated Node. The Tower Cluster will send all jobs for the relevant inventory to the Isolated Node, run them there, and then pull the job details back into Ansible Tower for viewing and reporting.”

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OpenShift 3.6 – Release Candidate (A Hands-On)

OpenShift 3.6 – Release Candidate (A Hands-On)

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By Alessandro Arrichiello

Hi, Everybody!

Today I want to introduce you to some features of OpenShift 3.6 while giving you the chance to have a hands-on experience with the Release Candidate.

First of all:

  1. It’s a Release Candidate and the features I’ll show you are marked as Tech Preview, so use them for testing purpose ONLY!
  2. We cannot use Minishift just because there is no Minishift updated yet. Anyway, I’ll show how could use its base iso-image.
  3. I don’t want to use ‘oc cluster up’ in a virtual machine just because setting up a virtual machine, to run it, would be a waste of time.

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The CoolStore Microservices Example: DevOps and OpenShift

The CoolStore Microservices Example: DevOps and OpenShift

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By Alessandro Arrichiello

An introduction to microservices through a complete example

Today I want to talk about the demo we presented @ OpenShift Container Platform Roadshow in Milan & Rome last week.

The demo was based on JBoss team’s great work available on this repo:
https://github.com/jbossdemocentral/coolstore-microservice

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