Rubrik Build Workshop

calendar Jun 3, 2019 · 3 min read · rubrik  ·
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Last week (end of May 2019) I was lucky enough to secure a place at the Rubrik Build Workshop in London. This event, which has been touring round the world, is a day of technical learning focussed on API, SDK, and version control.

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The first thing to acknowledge here is even though Rubrik was hosting the event and the presenters (the awesome pairing of Chris Wahl and Rebecca Fitzhugh) work for the company there was absolutely no sales push. Whilst they used their own APIs and SDKs as examples the majority of the content was very much platform agnostic. Kudos is due here for running this kind of free-of-charge educational event for the tech community without filling it with sales and marketing slides.

The morning started with a session on version control- looking at how git and in particular GitHub – can be used to track and share code. The “RoxieAtRubrik” GitHub account was used in some hands-on demos -we all forked a public project, made changes,  and submitted a pull request. The course material used in the workshops is publicly available via this account- check here: github.com/RoxieAtRubrik

There were some insights into how GitHub is used at Rubrik- there’s unit tests for every single function and in the background they have a CI (Continuous Integration) pipeline at work to make sure releases are up to scratch. Quality control can be tricky on community fed projects where developers may not be subject to traditional corporate control and it’s interesting to see how different teams handle this input.

Our dive into version control was followed by a look at how REST APIs work, using the Rubrik APIs as an example. There was plenty of hands-on activity here, with an online lab provided to simulate communicating with a real world device but in a safe environment.

The schedule of this event was flexible and after a show of hands amongst the 15 delegates we moved on to look at PowerShell, both in general terms for those new to the scripting language but also seeing how the SDK layer of the Rubrik PowerShell module made the API calls we’d looked at previously more user-friendly.

This PowerShell module is open source and available on GitHub- github.com/rubrikinc/rubrik-sdk-for-powershell – and as with all these projects contributions are welcome from the community. There was lots of encouragement from the presenters for customers/users to try these SDKs out and feed back any improvements that could be made, either by submitting an feature request or bug report, or by writing some or all of the addition yourself.

The European leg of the Rubrik Build tour has finished, but they’re off to Australia and New Zealand in June if that’s local to you. Check out build.rubrik.com for details.