Dedicated support for Metal OTW – Join the Beta!
The new support experience for Metal users (Beta) is Live! Metal customers have access for the very first time to an Enterprise-compliant support experience. Key Support Center Beta Features: All-New Support Case System – Easily create Metal support cases with our redesigned case submission system. Unified Case Management – View and manage all your support cases for Equinix products in one place. Seamless Collaboration – Seamlessly invite team members to monitor the status for any Metal support case. Realtime Notifications – Receive email notifications whenever your Metal case has been updated. How do I join the beta? It’s easy, fill out this request form! Who and how to access the beta? For qualifying organizations and users, the new support portal can be accessed in two ways: via a link displayed on the support page of Metal console directly via the URL https://customer-support.equinix.com/ and SSO (same credentials as for Metal) Be sure to check out the Support section of our documentation for more details and let us know how you like it!Running Terraform from a restricted environment
When running Terraform to provision and manage Equinix Fabric, Metal, and Network Edge, you may want to run Terraform from a restricted environment. Network filtering ACLs will need a predictable set of IP ranges to permit. This discussion will help you discover the IP services, ports, and address ranges your Terraform runner environment will need access to. We'll also discuss alternative ways to run Terraform configuration. If your ACLs permit the Terraform runner environment outbound HTTPS (TCP 443) and responses, that would cover everything Terraform needs to start provisioning infrastructure on Equinix. We'll assume we don't have unrestricted access and dig in a little further. Upon running, `terraform init`, Terraform will attempt to use DNS (UDP/TCP 53) services and HTTPS services to download provider plugins, such as the Equinix Terraform provider. The default host for fetching these plugins is registry.terraform.io, managed by Hashicorp. This is the defacto hub for public providers and published Terraform modules, although you may run your own local registry service. DNS for the Terraform registry points to CloudFront, a CDN whose addresses may change. If this presents a problem, there are options to download (or mirror) the necessary plugins in advance and use locally distributed copies. https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/cli/plugins Similarly, the DNS service for api.equinix.com, the one base domain that the Terraform Equinix provider will need for API access, resolves to Akamai, another CDN whose addresses may change or depend on where the request originates. As a Terraform configuration grows, you'll likely want to enable SSH access to the Metal and NE nodes being provisioned to automate OS provisioning. The SSH addresses will vary depending on the Metro where services are deployed. One way to ensure that the addresses are predictable in Metal is to provision the servers usingElastic IP addresses. A good follow-up question to this discussion is which ranges are assigned to NE devices and whether these IP addresses can be drawn from a predefined pool like Metal's Elastic IP Addresses. Terraform configurations typically include resources from multiple cloud providers. The node where the configuration is run would need to permit access to the APIs of these other providers. We'll leave the network filters needed by provisioned nodes to another discussion. Depending on your needs, cloud service providers offer managed services for Terraform or OpenTofu (a fork of Terraform persisting the original open-source license). These services can run your Terraform configuration predictably and reliably from a central location. Hashicorp provides the HCP service. https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/cloud-docs/run/run-environment Alternatives include: https://spacelift.io/ https://upbound.io https://www.env0.com/ https://www.scalr.com/ You can run similar CI/CD Terraform configuration control planes in your own backend with opensource tools such as: https://argoproj.github.io/cd/ https://www.crossplane.io/ https://docs.tofutf.io/ These SaaS providers or local solutions will also need access to the cloud provider APIs and nodes. With these providers you have full control of the configuration that is run and you can work these into a GitOps workflow. There are even more alternatives outside of the Terraform ecosystem. However, the Terraform ecosystem is your best option for the richest IaC integration experience with Equinix digital services. Equinix provides several Terraform modules to make it easy to get started. That extended ecosystem includes IaC tools that take advantage of the robust Equinix Terraform provider. These tools includePulumi and Crossplane. TLDR; You'll want to expose select DNS, HTTPS, and SSH access from your Terraform runners. What alternative deployment strategies did I miss? What other network restrictions should be considered?Can Traceroute Podcast Win a Webby? Your Vote Makes the Difference!
Guess what? We're freaking out (in the best way!) because the Traceroute Podcast just got nominated for aWebby Awardin the Tech category! That's right, we're apparently one of thetop 5 tech podcasts in the WORLD– which is prettywild considering there were over13,000 projectsentered! So, can you help us win this thing?It only takes2 minutestocast your vote here by Thursday, April 18th. Every vote counts! ️
CFP Readiness for Equinix Demo Day
⛔Closing May 5th The May 5th CFP closing date is fast approaching for Demo Day. Submissions and edits to submissions can be made at Equinix Demo Day 2023 Call for Proposals. Whether you've expressed interest, submitted a draft CFP, or already began working on your demo, here are some considerations to make your CFP standout and make your presentations memorable and actionable. 🔨 Nail the theme The event focus is Equinix integration with talks and demos where the code is shown and is user repeatable. Some example scenarios: A product that includes cloud provider integrations giving it the ability to deploy and manage Equinix resources. This may take advantage of public IaC (Infrastructure as Code), Kubernetes controllers, or SDK (Go, Python, Java) tools for Equinix Metal. Prove your project is resilient. Show it. Destroy it. Show how it can be reprovisioned. Can your project be brought back up without careful attention? A user case story or journey is told. How is this story a unique or common experience? How was integration with the platform utilized? What challenges were presented and overcome by this integration? Tell us more about the developer experience. What made Equinix the right choice for this project? What features would have made this smoother? What features made this shine? How did the developer support, the online community, documentation, tools, or platform features provide value to your organization, product, or project. If the product is a managed service or closed source, these examples would help to make the demo more applicable to the event theme: Helper code and documentation (a tool assisted guide or workshop) reproduces the environment and demonstrates applications running on this product integration. A story about the development process of the integration and the lessons learned Additional routes to explore for this event (fitting open source projects well): How does this solution stack up with alternatives in the ecosystem What design and development choices were made for this project How has the community size and adoption changed What are some of the open challenges past or present, how have they been overcome 🧰 Share your Toolbox There are several ways to publish your integration to get early eyes on it and share it with the community. Our first choice for projects like this is GitHub. Consider the following repositories on the Equinix Labs GitHub organization as a place to park your integration or a template for your project: Equinix Workshop - Create a workshop using this template. Once you've customized the project, enable GitHub Pages and the workshop will be publicly hosted and available. Terraform Template - This template bakes in our best practices and is ready-made for publishing an Equinix Terraform module Terraform Equinix Labs - If you want to share your project with other users of Equinix and turn that project into a workshop, take a look here and open a PR adding your project as a sub-module. Terraform Kubernetes Addons - If your project can run in any Kubernetes environment running on Equinix Metal and has Equinix resource requirements, submit your project as an add-on here so others can take advantage of your integration. Do you have another location in mind? Let us know. 🦺 Pass Inspection As the hosts of the event, we believe the value of any particular product can be demonstrated through open integrations. Our particular focus is on the capability to integrate with Equinix in a user demonstrable and reproducible way, along with the capabilities unlocked through those integrations. The review panel will process CFPs with these considerations. Keep in mind, other CFPs will target common user scenarios especially on network Infrastructure and edge compute automation. While event presentations are not in a product competition, for the purposes of the CFP review, there is a competition of compelling stories. The more engaging we believe those stories fit our user and engineering audience, the more they demonstrate the themes of integrations with Equinix in repeatable ways, the better the chance will be for the CFP to be accepted. The best presentations will be ones where the practitioner viewer is compelled to pull down the discussed project and start experimenting with it to deliver their projects. The presentation, including demos or integrations, does not need to be ready at the time the CFP is submitted. A CFP may be tentatively accepted with the recommendation for a different format or criteria for improving the fit. We will be considering alternate presentation formats for CFPs including panels, lightning talks, and workshops. Tentative acceptance communications will start on May 10th with final acceptance communicated on May 12th. 🧱 Build Your Story Once accepted, we want to have the opportunity to field test your work and storytelling in an advocacy stream or a recorded solution demo. The advocacy live stream is the perfect environment for an early, rough-edges, walkthrough. For demo day, we encourage (but do not require) ironed presentation videos to be submitted no later than two weeks ahead of the event. This will help to avoid any on-air mishaps such as a missed step, flakey builds or runs, and network or availability issues. Presentation windows should leave space for discussion during and after. Another format we can explore is to have the recording voiced over live by the presenter with an event host providing real-time feedback. In this case, the sooner pre-recordings can be offered the better. 🏗️ More Opportunities There are more opportunities for collaboration through presentations and demos on Equinix. This includes streams on Equinix Labs Live and recordings targeted at our solution teams. Future events may provide a better audience for talks and demos that we can't fit into this event. 🚧Demo Site The event page for Demo Day 2023 (equinix.com) is up. As the event nears, we'll be reaching out to CFP submitters with more details on preparation and ways to spread the word. If you haven't already, subscribe to the Equinix Developers YouTube channelwhere you can find playlists of our previous live streamed events: Uncensored GIFEE Day Proximity Dates to remember: CFP Closes: May 5, 2023 Tentative Acceptance: May 10, 2023 Acceptance: May 12, 2023 Pre-recordings submitted: June 7, 2023 Live Streaming: June 21, 2023. See you there! Participants must agree to follow a code of conduct.Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) is now LIVE!
🚀 Exciting News! You’ve got a simpler way to connect your services deployed across Equinix products. Give Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) a shot and help shape the future of VRF! 🛠️ Configure VRF through the API or UI directly, making connectivity easier than ever! 📚 For more information on what VRF is and how to use it, check out our deploy documentation page: https://deploy.equinix.com/developers/docs/metal/layer2-networking/vrf/ 🗣️ Your feedback matters! Whether it's good or bad, share your thoughts with us. We're eager to hear from you and will use your input to shape the future of VRF. Help us make it even better!Exciting week here at Equinix! Don't Miss Demo Day or the Community Live Stream!
Hey Community! As we work on finishing the year strong, I have a few events that might be of interest. First, Demo Day is tomorrow Dec 12th, 2023. On Thursday, we'll also have a community live stream withTom_McLaughlinspecial guest! Check out the home page for the event schedule and mark you calendars. A huge shoutout to the team for the awesome work they've put into the event. I'll tag a few of them here incase anyone has questions:stevemar,waltribeiro,CrayZeigh, Marques Be sure to also catch the Community Live Stream on Thursday withwaltribeiro,Tom_McLaughlin, & myself. See you there!What's the difference between Playground, Sandbox, and Production?
You might be deploying on Network Edgetoday to run through Charles_Randall's tutorial. While reading up on Network Edge atDeveloper Platform, then perhaps you're thinking "what's the difference between Playground, Sandbox, and Production?". In short: Playground is a test environment to test Equinix APIs, using static data without integrating within the actual API. Sandbox is a mock test environmentto test Equinix APIs, using synthetic data (not production data)to integrate with Equinix APIs before moving to Production. Production is the live environment.Which Youtube video tutorials would you like to watch?
Which Equinix topics, partnerships, or services would you like us to cover in future videos at EquinixDevelopers? This week Chris Privitere joined the Youtube livestream to walk us through Kubernetes Metrics Server. We're always looking to keep giving back to the community.Could our mistakes be as important to technological development as our ideas?
No matter the layers in your stack there’s one inevitability about all of our systems: errors. Misunderstandings, miscalculations, and mishaps are so much a part of the human experience, they can’t help but get baked into the increasingly complex socio-technical systems that we create. Historically we’ve always aimed to reduce our bug counts or have fewer incidents, but what if we instead, thought of these errors as opportunities to better refine our understandings of how our systems interact with the world around them? Maybe, in fact, our mistakes are at least as important to technological development as our innovative ideas? In this fascinating episode of Traceroute, we start back in 1968, when “The Mother of All Demos” was supposed to change the face of personal computing…before the errors started. We’re then joined by Andrew Clay Shafer, a DevOps pioneer who has seen the evolution of “errors” to “incidents” through practices like Scrum, Agile, and Chaos Engineering. We also speak with Courtney Nash, a Cognitive Neuroscientist and Researcher whose Verica Open Incident Directory (VOID) has changed the way we look at incident reporting.Podcast | Traceroute - Episode 8: When the lights go out
Synopsis How do we make technology that lasts? In this episode, Grace Ewura-Esi and Shweta Saraf join Producer John Taylor as he talks with two cutting-edge technologists who are trying to extend the life of the hardware infrastructure around us. From a cell phone tower that can be installed on your roof (and repaired just as easily), to a clock that is built to last ten thousand years, we uncover the common threads that run through technology that’s built to last. Woven in this framework is the story of Sandra Rodriguez, who worked tirelessly to restore civilization—as well as hope itself—to the island of Puerto Rico with the help of the only piece of hardware infrastructure that withstood the powerful forces of Hurricane Maria in 2017. Let us know your thoughts below!
