On Friday, we deployed an update to Sample Exchange on VMware {code} that allows you to select any VMware product or SDK when contributing a sample. As a result, developers looking for samples for VMware products and services will have an easier time finding relevant content. Continue reading
VMware Code has a terrific set of Developer Center microsites already available for vRealize Automation, NSX, Workspace ONE, and Apteligent. Each of these Developer Centers give easy access to documentation, developer and automation tools, code samples, and more. As of today, we are happy to announce the brand-new microsite dedicated to VMware Cloud on AWS!
The VMware Code Developer Center microsite for VMware Cloud on AWS gives direct access to those resources developers and automation specialists desire most! There’s an overview featuring what’s available through the VMware Cloud on AWS service as well as some videos that dive right into the available APIs and tooling available. This is followed up by a more detailed overview of the available core capabilities. Then, the key use cases are outlined along with the ability to find out more information about each of them and what kind of development efforts are estimated.
The Developer Resources section has a ton of great information available. This section gives direct links to the SDKs and CLIs that support VMware Cloud on AWS. There is also a detailed list of documentation and blog posts to help better understand each aspect of the service as well as how to quickly and easily get started using each of those SDKs and CLIs. Lastly, this section features code that’s been contributed by both VMware and the community to the VMware Code Sample Exchange in a variety of formats. From PowerCLI to Python, CloudFormation to Terraform, there’s some great resources already available and we more than welcome additional contributions!
The last section is dedicated to Community! Community involvement is an important aspect of the automation and developer resources and this section includes links to get involved directly. Joining VMware Code allows for access to an active Slack group with over 5,000 members, receive regular newsletters with the latest VMware information, and access to the developer forums!
Check out the VMware Code Developer Center microsite for VMware Cloud on AWS today!
Let us know in the comments what you think and/or if there’s anything missing that you may be looking for.
VMware Cloud on AWS does a tremendous job at enabling our automation experts, developers, and DevOps teams. With a robust set of RESTful APIs, open-sourced SDKs, then capping it all off with the Developer Center located directly in the Cloud Console, access has never been easier. One of the key features of VMware Cloud on AWS is the more frequent update cadence. This allows us to release enhancements on a more regular basis, of which the Developer Center is also included.
With that said, I am happy to announce some of the latest updates to the Developer Center!
The API Explorer is one of the easiest ways to start learning, modeling, and even using the VMware Cloud on AWS RESTful APIs. It has received several extremely nice updates! After clicking on the “API Explorer” tab, you’ll notice immediately how the layout has been changed. The new side bar allows us to easily switch between the API namespaces as well as auto-populate parameter fields. These may seem like minor updates, but they really help to streamline its usage.
Let’s take an example: we need to list out the logical networks within a particular SDDC, in this case the “CPBU-TMM” SDDC.
If you’re consuming the REST calls directly through an SDK, REST API client, or a programming language, you will need to perform the following calls to retrieve that information:
If you’re using the API Explorer, thanks to the new side menu, we can consolidate that down to a single call!
From the above example, you can also see the other new addition in the form of a yellow warning bar. This is just a friendly reminder that the API Explorer is running against your live environment. If you make an API call in the API Explorer, that call will actually run. If you delete something, it really will get deleted! Just keep that in mind as you’re exploring these APIs.
The Code Samples section has also received some updates! This section has been updated to reference the VMware Code Sample Exchange. Therefore, as samples are added to the VMware Code Sample Exchange, those samples will start being populated within the Code Samples tab. We can see several examples which have been created in the example below.
The last of the updates is to the SDKs section. The layout has been updated to match the look and feel of the other tabs. It’s the same great information, just with a consistent look and feel!
The VMware Cloud on AWS Developer Center is a great resource which provides a central location to access all kinds of automation and developer based information. The Developer Center is also receiving updates on a regular basis to provide optimized access to all of those resources. The latest update adds a redesigned API Explorer, integrated Code Samples with the VMware Code Sample Exchange, and a consistent theme through all of the available sections.
Let us know in the comments what your favorite feature of the Developer Center is and what functionality you’re most looking forward to us adding!
On March 19th, 2018, at the Galloway in the 1931 Conference Centre in the Netherlands, VMware {code} and NLVMUG held their first Hackathon with the theme “Fun, Beers and Gyros.” Sixteen participants in three teams worked diligently from 1:30 in the afternoon for six hours until 8:30 at night, only taking a break to eat some delicious gyros, reenergize with some sugar and caffeine, or grab stickers and souvenirs from the giveaway table.
A gyro learning, coding, and connecting
Hard at work coding before breaking into the soda
The giveaway table, moments before becoming completely empty
Each of the three teams had their own unique visions for their projects. At the end of the night, three judges, Boudewijn Aelbers, Joep Piscaer, and Wouter Kursten awarded the teams a retro gaming console for their hard work.
Vintage game console
Taking home the prize for Best in IOT, the team from PQR created a way to integrate vRealize Automation with the Homey home automation controller to initiate a deployment using voice commands. They used a Philips Hue lightbulb to indicate the status of the deployment based on its color and a moving Lego Mindstorms robot that would move an object to a different zone on the table to represent the stage of deployment. And, as an added bonus, if would throw the object off the table if the VM request was requested.
Lego Mindstorm robot built by the PQR team
The team from ITQ won Best in Cloud Native for their project that created a way to deploy a Minecraft server using BOSH through voice commands via an Amazon Echo. Taking it one step further, they then deployed a Kubernetes cluster using BOSH and initiated it using more voice commands. The Minecraft character Steve guides the user through the deployment process on a custom interface created by the team.
Steve from Minecraft guiding deployment
The third and final team came from DICTU and won the prize for Most Innovative. They created a way to fully automate deployment of a secure tenant and infrastructure (IaaS) in which everything was secured, error-free, and auditable. The deployed virtual machines were encrypted using VM Encryption with HyTrust as the key management and were micro-segmented using NSX. Intra-VM and vMotion traffic were encrypted using SSL to further increase security. Finally, the team used vRealize Network Insight and vRealize Operations to monitor the security on that infrastructure.
Every team impressed the judges with their projects, and with the help of food, drink, and innovation, the energy brought back the strong community feeling of the early days of the NLVMUG UserCon. Overall, the team behind the Hackathon thought it turned out to be a resounding success, and they are looking forward outdoing themselves next year.
The Hackathon was a huge success, we set out to create a fun and relaxed time and going back to the core of the VMUG community, which worked out exceptionally! Next year is going to be even more awesome.
– Martijn Smit, NLVMUG Hackathon Organizer & NSX Specialist, VMware
The participants were very enthusiastic; the comradery was great to see. If it’s up to me there will be an even greater, bigger hackathon in 2019!
–Erik Scholten, Cloud Management Specialist, VMware
Interested in running your own Hackathon in your region? Contact us at code@vmware.com or @vmwarecode for more information about our VMware {code} Experiences.
Photo credits: Alex Muetstege, TAM
The latest release of VMware Cloud on AWS is here and it has something quite exciting built in for the automation experts, developers and DevOps teams. As part of this release, we are introducing a brand-new Developer Center. This area is a great resource allowing developers to get up and running quickly with VMware Cloud on AWS.
Developers can gain access to this information front and center as a new tab in the VMware Cloud on AWS console!
The VMware Cloud on AWS Developer Center consists of several sections, each with the goal of helping to make the development and automation experience and learning easier.
The API Explorer section brings easy access to interact directly with the RESTful APIs available from the Cloud Services API and the VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) API. These APIs are presented by way of an interactive API browser with some very nice integrations making it easy to work with VMC. The API Explorer being internal to the Cloud console allows us to use the existing refresh token to authenticate. We can also automatically populate certain fields, such as the Organization ID, to help improve the experience of learning and using these APIs. Learning the API and seeing the responses from within the API Explorer could not be easier with the ability to “Execute” these APIs and see the live responses.
The next section is focused on code samples. These are curated directly from the samples written by both VMware and the community in a variety of formats. These samples could be written in Python, PowerShell, be a Postman collection or other integration code samples provided on the VMware Code Samples Exchange.
There is a wide variety of software development kits (SDKs) available to interact with the VMware Cloud on AWS APIs and the deployed SDDC products. The SDK section provides easy access to each of these open-sourced SDKs that are available on GitHub. There are also links to the documentation, samples, and even the ‘Getting Started’ blog post for each SDK!
The last section is called Downloads. This section is where there will be a wide variety of resources available. There will be command line resources like Datacenter CLI (DCLI) and PowerCLI. Also, there will be links to provisioning tool resources from Terraform and CloudFormation.
The VMware Cloud on AWS Developer Center is a fantastic new resource that’s presented front and center in the Cloud console! Whether you’re an automation expert, developer, on a DevOps team, or a mix of all the above, this is going to be the best place to get up and running with the VMware Cloud on AWS APIs. You will be able to use the integrated API Explorer for discovery, access the open-sourced SDKs that can be used against this endpoint, have links to VMware and community contributed code samples, and direct links to download other related resources like PowerCLI and CloudFormation templates.
On Thursday we’re hosting the Kubernetes Meetup group at VMware HQ for our final VMware {code} Experience of 2017! We’ll be hearing from speakers Murat Karslioglu, a VP at CloudByte, Chris Marino, CEO at New Networking Co, and Nikhil Jindal, a Software Engineer at Google on the topics of containerized storage, high performance networking with EC2, and setting up a multicluster ingress. Sound intriguing? Wait until we tell you that we ordered extra BBQ chicken pizza!
The event will kickoff with an opportunity to grab some beer & pizza, and a chance to get to know your neighbor. Please see the complete schedule below. If you’re planning to attend in person make sure to register on Meetup. Can’t make it in person? Not a problem! You can join us and thousands of your others virtually for the livestream on the VMTN Facebook page. See you Thursday!
EVENT DETAILS:
Thursday, December 14th, 2017
6:00 – 9:00 pm
Prom C Cafeteria, VMware HQ
Watch the livestream on the VMTN Facebook page
Register to Attend on Meetup
SCHEDULE:
6:00 – 6:15 – Networking
6:15 – 6:25 – Introductions
6:25 – 7:20 – 1st talk: Containerized Storage for Containers
10 minute break
7:30 – 8:00- 2nd talk: High Performance Networking in EC2
8:00-8:10 – Demo: Multi-Cluster Ingress Demo
VMware {code} is a free developer program that provides access to a growing community of developers and experts. If you are an existing Developer Center user or partner program member, you can join the new VMware {code} program using your MyVMware account. If you do not have one, register below to access SDKs and participate in developer forums.
VMware {code} Meetup attendees enjoy some beer and pizza while listening to the sessions (Photo credit: Chuck Potter)
Thanks to everyone who attended the VMware {code} sponsored OpenStack Meetup last Wednesday! We had over 50 people join us in person to eat pizza, drink beer, and network at VMware HQ, and almost 1,500 virtual attendees watching the livestream on the VMTN Community Facebook page. Watch the full event below.
Thanks for the great footage OpenTechTV!
Sabari Murugesan (@neosab87), OpenStack Staff Engineer at VMware, led a great session on running Kubernetes on OpenStack. In this session Sabari covered ease of deployment of Kubernetes on OpenStack, the flexible control plane, and the advantages of the cloud provider interface.
Sabari Murugesan – Staff Engineer at VMware (Photo credit: Chuck Potter)
Know what you need before you need it.
Dustin Kirkland (@DustinKirkland), VP of Product Development at Ubuntu, spoke about how to maximize developer velocity with containers, and identified countless cases of where Ubuntu has enabled companies in the container space.
Dustin Kirkland – VP of Product Development at Ubuntu (Photo credit: Chuck Potter)
Trade winds have been used by captains of sailing ships to cross the world’s oceans for centuries.
Please find the slides for Sabari and Dustin’s presentations below:
The sessions were followed by some Q&A with Dustin, as well as 30 minutes of networking with the speakers. Our next VMware {code} Experience is coming up on December 14th, covering Containerized Storage, HighPerf Networking w/ EC2, and MultiCluster Ingress Demo. We hope to see you there!
Join the VMware {code} program for free to chat with other developers on our Slack channel, and to be notified about future VMware {code} Experiences, including Meetups, hackathons, trainings, and more!
As part of vSphere 6.5 we revolutionized the programmatic interaction of the product by enabling new REST based APIs and Open Sourced SDKs to provide a developer and automation experience which delighted users. Continuing this work and moving into the cloud we are looking to provide an equal if not better experience with VMware Cloud on AWS.
The new vSphere 6.5 REST APIs which are used to manage both new features of the 6.5 release and some existing features were modernized to provide a superior experience, continuing with this experience, the VMware Cloud on AWS APIs are RESTful, making use of CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) based actions and utilizing JSON formatted inputs and outputs for the data structure. The documentation for these APIs will also be available in numerous ways both online and inline.
There are three main APIs, among several others, which users should be aware of that allow you to programmatically access the VMware Cloud on AWS features and surrounding areas to work with the environment and automate or develop to succeed in your use cases:
We will be taking a bit deeper look at the first three in the following sections.
The Cloud Services Platform (CSP) APIs are available for all cloud services which are offered by VMware. They contain the core features that customers will use when working with multiple cloud services from VMware.
In the context of VMware Cloud on AWS, the main use of the CSP APIs will be to serve as the authentication point. Once authenticated, the authorization token will be valid against this API as well as the VMware Cloud on AWS API. The CSP API also serves as the main point for Organization (Org) and VMware Cloud on AWS console user management. Some of the methods include displaying all the users within an Org, adding users to an Org, and removing users from an Org.
The VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) API will be the endpoint for most actions available within the VMware Cloud on AWS console. This API, which is currently in Technical Preview, allows for SDDC management actions like creating or removing SDDCs with a single API call, adding or removing the elastic hardware provided by the VMC service and adding the ESXi hosts to our SDDC, and handling network operations for the SDDC. We can also gather task based information on items which take place in the VMC environment.
Access to the VMC API is also be available in multiple ways. First off, since this API is RESTful, it can be consumed with your preferred programming language or client which can talk REST. The open-sourced vSphere Automation SDKs can be used as well and are available in programming languages like Python, Java, Ruby, and more. This API can then be explored through a built in API Explorer. The features of VMC can also be accessed through the command line with PowerCLI 6.5.4 and a technical preview of the new version of Datacenter CLI (DCLI). DCLI, which is available as a separate download, can be installed on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. More posts are planned to explain these areas in depth in the future so stay tuned!
The last of the APIs are the vSphere APIs. These are the same APIs you already know and love! You will be able to consume these APIs in the exact same way you already do with our on-premises offerings of vSphere. With VMware Cloud on AWS being a managed environment you will of course have limited permissions and certain key differences on areas which you should deploy to but we will dig into these in a future blog post.
We just reviewed the three API endpoints you will want to become familiar with when accessing VMware Cloud on AWS. The CSP API, which serves as the main authentication point and management point for Orgs and console users. There is the VMC API that is the SDDC management point. Lastly, there are the deployed SDDC APIs themselves which will be the vSphere APIs which hopefully you are already familiar with.
In the next blog, we will cover how to get started using each of these APIs!
Developers are a critical part of the success of any organization in tech, and VMware is no different.
Our developer community plays an especially important role. At VMware {code}, we want to ensure we are taking every step possible to support you and improve your experience.
We just launched our first developer survey in a long time to learn more about your preferences and areas of interest. Please help us by sharing your feedback.
Larry McDonough, Director Product Management, Ecosystem Tools here at VMware and a longtime speaker at developer relations conferences, had this to add:
VMware’s 1st product, released back in May 1999, was Workstation – designed by developers for developers. Our business has grown quite a lot since those days and along the way, we spun out Pivotal Software, a PaaS company aimed at improving on developer productivity and we focused ourselves back on the IaaS layer. But, as technologies continue to evolve and new innovations come along like containers, cloud native applications, and DevOps, we find ourselves building APIs and tools again for developers. That’s why we’re reaching out with this survey. We’d like to hear from you about what you’re building, what you need, and how we can best help you.
Participation should only take about 10 minutes. Those who complete the survey will be entered into a random drawing to win one (1) pair of Bose Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphones. Sweet!
Thanks in advance for your valuable time and input.
Last Thursday, we got to host our first community meetup of the fall season. The format was decidedly more hands-on than usual (similar to the pre-hackathon training sessions we offered at VMworld in Las Vegas), and the 75+ people audience really seemed to enjoy it.
A few photo impressions below.
VMware {code} – Learn. Code. Connect.
VMware {code} – Learn. Code. Connect.
VMware {code} – Learn. Code. Connect.
VMware {code} – Learn. Code. Connect.
We asked Paulo Renato (LinkedIn), Cloud Architect at Microsoft Azure and one of the co-organizers of the Microsoft Azure Open Group, to give a quick recap of the event:
We showed to our community an easy and quick way to set up a Kubernetes cluster using Azure Container Services configured via Azure Cloud Shell, and more important, how to integrate it with Nirmata, an essential solution to manage modem apps. More than just showing technology, we also tried to share our passion about Open Source Software, integration with partner solutions, and our efforts to share with the community.
Jim Bugwadia (@JimBugwadia), Founder and CEO at Nirmata and one of the presenters, had this to add:
Kubernetes is awesome, but can be complex to get started with. What we wanted to do is help our community members get going with Kubernetes quickly, so they can independently explore and learn. At the meetup, we had over 50 new clusters created on Azure and managed via Nirmata! We certainly took a lot of notes on how to improve the experience for the next time. The best part of the evening for me, was the strong positive validation on the solution sets.
The slides for both presentations are available on Github:
Join the VMware {code} program for free to be notified about future events. See you again next time!
If you’d like us to support more of these events, please give us a few minutes of your time and take our developer survey. Thank you very much!