• Red Hat Launches OpenShift Service Mesh to Accelerate Adoption of Microservices and Cloud-Native Applications

  Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh to connect, observe and simplify service-to-service communication of Kubernetes applications on Red Hat OpenShift 4, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform. Based on the Istio, Kiali and Jaeger projects and enhanced with Kubernetes Operators, OpenShift Service Mesh is designed to deliver a more efficient, end-to-end developer experience around microservices-based application architectures. This helps to free developer teams from the complex tasks of having to implement bespoke networking services for their applications and business logic.

• CUDA 10.1 U2 Adds RHEL8 Support, Nsight Compute Tools For POWER

  NVIDIA last week quietly released a second update to CUDA 10.1.

  CUDA 10.1 Update 2 brings Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 support, continued POWER architecture support improvements, and other additions.

• IBM Stock and Jim Whitehurst’s Toughest Test

  What analysts say they want from IBM stock is Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst in current CEO Virginia Rometty’s chair. They want Red Hat running IBM.

  That wasn’t the promise when this deal was put together. The promise was that Red Hat would get autonomy from IBM, not that IBM would lose its autonomy to Red Hat. But Whitehurst’s concept of an Open Organization has excited analysts who don’t even know what it is.

  If IBM became an Open Organization, these analysts think, it would replace the top-down structure IBM has used for a century with an organic system in which employees and customers are part of the product design process. Instead of selling gear or even solutions, IBM would become a corporate change agent.

• Going to VMWorld? Learn to help data scientists and application developers accelerate AI/ML initiatives
  

  IT experts from around the world are headed to VMworld 2019 in San Francisco to learn how they can leverage emerging technologies from VMware and ecosystem partners (e.g. Red Hat, NVIDIA, etc.) to help achieve the digital transformation for their organizations. Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) is a very popular technology trend, with Red Hat OpenShift customers like HCA Healthcare, BMW, Emirates NBD, and several more are offering differentiated value to their customers. Investments are ramping up across many industries to develop intelligent digital services that help improve customer satisfaction, and gain competitive business advantages. Early deployment trends indicate AI/ML solution architectures are spanning across edge, data center, and public clouds.

• RHELvolution 2: A brief history of Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases from RHEL 6 to today

  In the previous post, we looked at the history of Red Hat Enterprise Linux from pre-RHEL days through the rise of virtualization. In this one we'll take a look at RHEL's evolution from early days of public cloud to the release of RHEL 8 and beyond.

The new Linux kernel security update is marked by the Red Hat Product Security team as having an "Important" security impact due to the fact that it patches several critical flaws, including the Spectre SWAPGS gadget vulnerability (CVE-2019-1125) affecting x86 processors.

Also patched are a security vulnerability (CVE-2019-5489) leading to page cache side-channel attacks, an issue in the Salsa20 encryption algorithm that could allow local attackers to cause a denial of service (CVE-2017-17805), and a flaw (CVE-2018-17972) that let unprivileged users inspect kernel stacks of arbitrary tasks.

• Troubleshooting Red Hat OpenShift applications with throwaway containers

  Imagine this scenario: Your cool microservice works fine from your local machine but fails when deployed into your Red Hat OpenShift cluster. You cannot see anything wrong with the code or anything wrong in your services, configuration maps, secrets, and other resources. But, you know something is not right. How do you look at things from the same perspective as your containerized application? How do you compare the runtime environment from your local application with the one from your container?

  If you performed your due diligence, you wrote unit tests. There are no hard-coded configurations or hidden assumptions about the runtime environment. The cause should be related to the configuration your application receives inside OpenShift. Is it time to run your app under a step-by-step debugger or add tons of logging statements to your code?

  We’ll show how two features of the OpenShift command-line client can help: the oc run and oc debug commands.

• What piece of advice had the greatest impact on your career?

  I love learning the what, why, and how of new open source projects, especially when they gain popularity in the DevOps space. Classification as a "DevOps technology" tends to mean scalable, collaborative systems that go across a broad range of challenges—from message bus to monitoring and back again. There is always something new to explore, install, spin up, and explore.

• How DevOps is like auto racing

  When I talk about desired outcomes or answer a question about where to get started with any part of a DevOps initiative, I like to mention NASCAR or Formula 1 racing. Crew chiefs for these race teams have a goal: finish in the best place possible with the resources available while overcoming the adversity thrown at you. If the team feels capable, the goal gets moved up a series of levels to holding a trophy at the end of the race.

  To achieve their goals, race teams don’t think from start to finish; they flip the table to look at the race from the end goal to the beginning. They set a goal, a stretch goal, and then work backward from that goal to determine how to get there. Work is delegated to team members to push toward the objectives that will get the team to the desired outcome.

  [...]

  Race teams practice pit stops all week before the race. They do weight training and cardio programs to stay physically ready for the grueling conditions of race day. They are continually collaborating to address any issue that comes up. Software teams should also practice software releases often. If safety systems are in place and practice runs have been going well, they can release to production more frequently. Speed makes things safer in this mindset. It’s not about doing the “right” thing; it’s about addressing as many blockers to the desired outcome (goal) as possible and then collaborating and adjusting based on the real-time feedback that’s observed. Expecting anomalies and working to improve quality and minimize the impact of those anomalies is the expectation of everyone in a DevOps world.

• Deep Learning Reference Stack v4.0 Now Available

  Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to represent one of the biggest transformations underway, promising to impact everything from the devices we use to cloud technologies, and reshape infrastructure, even entire industries. Intel is committed to advancing the Deep Learning (DL) workloads that power AI by accelerating enterprise and ecosystem development.

  From our extensive work developing AI solutions, Intel understands how complex it is to create and deploy applications for deep learning workloads. That?s why we developed an integrated Deep Learning Reference Stack, optimized for Intel Xeon Scalable processor and released the companion Data Analytics Reference Stack.

  Today, we?re proud to announce the next Deep Learning Reference Stack release, incorporating customer feedback and delivering an enhanced user experience with support for expanded use cases.

• Clear Linux Releases Deep Learning Reference Stack 4.0 For Better AI Performance

  Intel's Clear Linux team on Wednesday announced their Deep Learning Reference Stack 4.0 during the Linux Foundation's Open-Source Summit North America event taking place in San Diego.

  Clear Linux's Deep Learning Reference Stack continues to be engineered for showing off the most features and maximum performance for those interested in AI / deep learning and running on Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs. This optimized stack allows developers to more easily get going with a tuned deep learning stack that should already be offering near optimal performance.

• Red Hat Integration delivers new Kubernetes Operators and expands data integration capabilities with latest release

  We are pleased to announce the Q3 release of Red Hat Integration, which brings us further in our alignment around Red Hat OpenShift as the platform of choice for developing and deploying cloud-native applications across hybrid cloud environments, as well as helping customers get their integrations up and running easier and faster.

  As modern IT continues its rapid evolution, it becomes important that the cloud-native solutions supporting this transformation keep pace, enabling IT organizations to truly benefit from this constant innovation. To help customers take full advantage of this, we've updated, tested and certified every single component in Red Hat Integration with the latest version of OpenShift: Red Hat OpenShift 4.

• The Linux Foundation Announces New Open Hardware Technologies and Collaboration

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced that the OpenPOWER Foundation will become a project hosted at The Linux Foundation. The project includes IBM’s open POWER Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and contributed Source Design Implementations required to support data-driven hardware for intensive workloads like Artificial Intelligence (AI).

  OpenPOWER is the open steward for the Power Architecture and has the support of 350 members, including IBM, Google, Inspur Power Systems, Yadro, Hitachi, Wistron, Mellanox, NVIDIA, and Red Hat.

  The governance model within the Linux Foundation gives software developers assurance of compatibility while developing AI and hybrid cloud native applications that take advantage of POWER’s rich feature set and open compute hardware and software ecosystems.

  As the demand rises for more and more compute-intensive workloads like AI and in-memory analytics, commodity systems vendors have struggled with the looming predictions of the end of Moore’s Law. Central processing units (CPUs) may no longer handle the rising demands alone, and data-centric systems are built to maximize the flow of data between CPUs and attached devices for specialized workloads. By hosting OpenPOWER at The Linux Foundation, a cross-project, cross-community collaboration, it will accelerate development of hardware and software to support data-centric systems, by making it available to a growing global audience.

  “The OpenPOWER community has been doing critical work to support the increasing demands of enterprises that are using big data for AI and machine learning workloads. The move to bring these efforts together with the worldwide ecosystem of open source developers across projects at The Linux Foundation will unleash a new level of innovation by giving developers everywhere more access to the tools and technologies that will define the next generation of POWER architecture,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation.

• Raptor Computing Systems Planning To Launch New ATX POWER9 Board With OpenCAPI

  In addition to the news out of the OpenPOWER Summit in San Diego that the POWER ISA is going open-source and the OpenPOWER Foundation becoming part of the Linux Foundation, Raptor Computing Systems shared they plan to launch a new standard ATX motherboard next year that will feature OpenCAPI connectivity.

  Built off the successes of their Talos II high-end server motherboard and lower-cost Blackbird desktop motherboard designs, there is apparently a new motherboard design for POWER9 being worked on that could launch in early 2020.

• Why you should be developing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

  With a $0 Red Hat Developer membership, you get access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) at no cost. We have downloads available for RHEL versions starting as far back as 7.2, and as current as RHEL 8.1 Beta. The subscription costs nothing, and there are no additional costs for any of the software or content we make available through the program.