Guest: Rob Hirschfeld (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Company: RackN (Twitter)
Show: To The Point
Keyword: Infrastructure as code (IaC) 

RackN Co-Founder and CEO Rob Hirschfeld joins us on TFiR to talk about why scalability is important in data operations. “Scalability is one of the biggest challenges and we hear customers complain about complexity all the time,” says Hirschfeld.

“When you look at Day 2 operations, the thing that gets really powerful here is not that we can run a whole bunch of tasks on a system. But it’s actually that we can do the same operation that we would do if we were provisioning it. Or we can encapsulate it into infrastructure as code so that operation is a standardized piece of work, and then everybody can see it and you can reuse it. It takes down to do Day 2 operation if you only do it at the team level, right? The goal here is that your platform team or your SREs can actually start applying the same logic and the same work across your organization and you can’t do that if you’ve got anything that’s custom,” explains Hirschfeld.

About Rob Hirschfeld: Rob has been in the cloud and infrastructure space for 20 years and has done everything from start-ups working with early ESX betas to serving four terms on the OpenStack Foundation Board and as an executive at Dell. As leader on the2030.cloud, he believes that the technology of running data centers and applications on cloud is just part of the bigger story. He trained as an Industrial Engineer and carries a passion for applying Lean and Agile processes to software delivery. Rob has received degrees from Duke University and Louisiana State University.

About RackN: RackN was founded with the vision of operators working together to improve IT operations through shared software and community regardless of infrastructure type. The company believes that operators should be able to maintain control, consistency and choice over their infrastructure without requiring prescriptive appliances or managed offerings.