Keiran Shelden On Monday, I took part in the Rubrik Build roadshow. This was an awesome opportunity to learn about working with Open Source projects and how to contribute from writing code, to writing/editing documentation, testing and version control and much more using GitHub, but that wasn’t all. Back in February, Rebecca Fitzhugh, Chris Wahl and their teams at Rubrik launched “Build” as project to bring awareness and education to working with open source projects and APIs. These events are not meant to be focused on Rubrik, but the lessons do connect to a Rubrik cluster as the API docs and software is readily available.
I came across Build back when it launched in February and I have been a member of their slack group since it’s birth. After joining and looking through the plethora of content readily available through build.rubrik.com. I decided that I would attempt to write my first full script from scratch, just to put up on Github. Having always struggled with starting scripts from scratch, I started with planning out each step, in fact, I stepped through the process manually and event created a blog post about those steps – then Roxie set the challenge.
https://twitter.com/RoxieAtRubrik/status/1120415276795928576
I knew what I wanted to achieve and after having looked through several PowerShell scripts already up on the Build github repo, I had an idea on how it should look. After a couple of weeks writing and testing, I had a full script ready to put up.
Once I had my script up publicly on Github, I linked it to the Build slack group where I got some great feedback, and even one of the main Rubrik PowerShell maintainers made a comment he was going to take part of my script and incorporate it into some of his.
https://twitter.com/RoxieAtRubrik/status/1127946416523886592
There was one hiccup with the Rubrik PowerShell module, but I’ll talk a little bit about that later.
That is only a basic outline of my story of getting started, but without the Build community, I would not have dived as deep into APIs and scripting as quickly as I did here.
So tracking back to the Build event, this was jam packed full of information, the session kicked off with Rebecca talking about the project, the idea behind it and the future outlook of build. She went as far as to talk not only about working with GitHub and the scripts and repositories available, but also the process and level of alerting her team receives when an issue is submitted on GitHub. This showed the level dedication the team has to ensuring that it’s contributors are looked after and have a fantastic experience while contributing. I found out first hand during my first script how enthusiastic the team is in helping as I was unable to find a call within the SDK to install a Volume Filter Driver. I went ahead and posted in the slack group about what I was trying to achieve and said that I was unable to find how to perform this particular action, and in no time, there was a response from Andy Draper who immediately went out of his way to write and test a call. I have since been informed that it is currently being worked on to be added to the SDK.
After the first lesson and practice modules of using Github and how forks, branches, conflicts, etc. work, Chris then kicked off the main part of talking about APIs and about the different ways you might come across APIs and how to use them. The lesson took you through how to use the API Explorer (Similar to VMware’s API Explorer if you have ever use that). The lessons took you through how to authenticate using cURL and how to use tokens within the Rubrik cluster when making a call using an API.
Chris then followed up with a crash course in PowerShell and giving a fairly in-depth look into how PowerShell came about and how easy it is to work with. This then went into discussing the different components and how modules are used and how easily they can be created.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the sessions, I learnt a lot about automation, APIs and working with the Open Source community that I didn’t know beforehand. I highly suggest that If you are a novice or even an intermediate at working with APIs and Automation that you seek out when Rubrik Build is coming to a city near you and get over to it and see for yourself what it is all about.
If you are unable to make it to a Build event, then get involved through the build online community and start looking at how you can contribute to the wider Open Source Community. There are use cases available on the website so you can get a good idea on where you can get started.
You can find out more about Rubrik and Build by checking out the videos from Cloud Field Day 5
