Security News

• Sloppy programming leads to OpenSSL woes

• OpenSSL Fixes Critical Bug Introduced by Latest Update

  OpenSSL today released an emergency security update after a patch in its most recent update issued last week introduced a critical vulnerability in the cryptographic library.

• The Internet Of Poorly Secured Things Is Fueling Unprecedented, Massive New DDoS Attacks

  Last week, an absolutely mammoth distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack brought down the website of security researcher Brian Krebs. His website, hosted by Akamai pro bono, was pulled offline after it was inundated with 620Gbps of malicious traffic, nearly double the size of the biggest attack Akamai (which tracks such things via their quarterly state of the internet report) has ever recorded. Krebs was ultimately able to get his website back online after Google stepped in to provide DDoS mitigation through its Project Shield service.

• Trump Offers More Insight On His Cybersecurity Plans: 10-Year-Old Relatives Vs. 400-lb Bedroom Dwellers

  Look, anyone who refers to cybersecurity or cyberwarfare as "the cyber" is probably better off not discussing this. But Donald Trump, in last night's debate, felt compelled to further prove why he's in no position to be offering guidance on technological issues. And anyone who feels compelled to portray hackers as 400-lb bedroom dwellers probably shouldn't be opening their mouth in public at all. With this mindset, discussions about what "the Google" and "the Facebook" are doing about trimming back ISIS's social media presence can't be far behind. Trump did note that ISIS is "beating us at our game" when it comes to utilizing social media. Fair enough.

Servers/Networks

• Docker Doubles Down on Microsoft Windows Server [Ed: recall "DockerCon 2015 Infiltrated by Microsoft"]

  Docker for Windows debuts alongside a new commercial support relationship with Microsoft. For the most part, the Docker container phenomenon has been about Linux, with the majority of all deployments on Linux servers. But that could soon be changing as Docker Inc. today is announcing the general availability of Docker Engine on Windows Server 2016, alongside a new commercial support and distribution agreement with Microsoft. Docker containers rely on the host operating system for certain isolation and process elements in order to run. On Linux, those elements have always been present as part of the operating system, but the same was not true for Windows, which has required several years of joint engineering effort between Docker Inc. and Microsoft.

• Hadoop Sandboxes and Trials Spread Out

  We all know that there is a skills gap when it comes to Hadoop in the Big Data market. In fact, Gartner Inc.'s 2015 Hadoop Adoption Study, involving 284 Gartner Research Circle members, found that only 125 respondents who completed the whole survey had already invested in Hadoop or had plans to do so within the next two years. The study found that there are difficulties in implementing Hadoop, including hardship in finding skilled Hadoop professionals.

• Use models to measure cloud performance

  When I was young, I made three plastic models. One was of a car—a '57 Chevy. Another was of a plane—a Spitfire. And a third was of the Darth Vader TIE Fighter. I was so proud of them. Each one was just like the real thing. The wheels turned on the car, and the plane’s propeller moved when you blew on it. And of course, the TIE Fighter had Darth Vader inside. When I went to work on the internet, I had to measure things. As I discussed in my last post, Measure cloud performance like a customer, when you measure on the internet you need to measure in ways that are representative of your customers’ experiences. This affects how you measure in two ways. The first is the perspective you take when measuring, which I talked about last time. The second way is the techniques you use to perform those measurements. And those techniques are, in effect, how you make a model of what you want to know. Those childhood plastic models turn out to offer some solid guidance after all.

• ODPi Adds Apache Hive to Runtime Specification 2.0

  Today, ODPi announced that the ODPi Runtime Specification 2.0 will add Apache Hive and Hadoop Compatible File System support (HCFS). These components join YARN, MapReduce and HDFS from ODPi Runtime Specification 1.0 With the addition of Apache Hive to the Runtime specification, I thought it would be a good time to share why we added Apache Hive and how we are strategically expanding the Runtime specification.

• Ubuntu’s OpenStack on IBM’s Big Iron

  If I were Red Hat I would be looking over my shoulder right now; it appears that Ubuntu might be gaining. In just a few years the Linux distribution has gone from being non-existent in the enterprise to being a powerhouse. This is especially true in the cloud, where it's a dominant force on both sides of the aisle. Not only is it the most deployed operating system on public clouds, its version of OpenStack accounts for over half of OpenStack cloud deployments, used by the likes of Deutsche Telekom, Bloomberg and Time Warner Cable.

Kubernetes News

• ​Kubernetes 1.4: One DevOps tool to rule all the containers

• Kubernetes 1.4 promises to make container orchestration easier, more powerful

• Canonical Releases ‘Core’ Kubernetes Container Distribution

• Canonical launches Kubernetes public beta distribution

• Canonical steps up enterprise courtship with Kubernetes bundle

• Kubernetes 1.4 makes container orchestration bigger -- and simpler

• Canonical Expands Enterprise Container Portfolio with Commercially Supported Distribution of Kubernetes

• Strategies for Running Stateful Applications in Kubernetes: Volumes

  Mesosphere DC/OS emphasizes running transactional workloads alongside cloud-native applications. Robin Systems, one of the container management companies, is aiming to containerize Oracle and other enterprise databases. The Kubernetes container orchestration engine is gearing up to run stateful workloads through a new concept called Pet Sets, which is a pod of stateful containers. Pet Sets was introduced as an alpha feature in Kubernetes 1.3, released in July. Kubernetes abstracts the underlying infrastructure building blocks into compute, storage and networking. When developers and operations teams get started with Kubernetes, they typically get exposed to objects such as pods, labels, services, deployments and replica sets, which provide a mechanism to deal with compute and networking. When it comes to persistence in Kubernetes, users should get familiar with the concepts of volumes, persistent volumes, persistent volume claims (PVC) and the upcoming Pet Sets. This article will be a first in a series that discusses the strategies and use cases for each of the storage choices available in Kubernetes. In this chapter, we will take a closer look at volumes, that provide the easiest migration path to Kubernetes.

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