• Engineering compatibility with the Red Hat Universal Base Image

  The Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) has an end user license agreement which allows partners, customers and community members to deploy it anywhere, but it takes a lot more than a license to create a container base image that's suitable for your enterprise applications. In part, suitability for enterprise deployments comes from the compatibility guarantees of a Linux operating system. No Linux container base image can claim compatibility or supportability everywhere. Compatibility must be engineered into a system like OpenShift, from Kubernetes down to the Linux kernel on the container host.

  People often confuse portability with compatibility. Linux containers are generally considered "portable" because you can often run binaries built for one Linux distribution on another distribution of the same architecture. It's often possible to run containers built from one distribution's userland on another Linux distribution.. This can be described as portability.

  Portability is a design characteristic of operating systems and the filesystems that they use to store files. Engineers have to design this portability into file systems that they work on, it’s not free. But, portability is not the same thing as compatibility.

• OpenShift 4.2: The New Cluster Overview Dashboard

  Red Hat OpenShift 4.2 is a significant release that brings a number of great enhancements to the Web Console UI, but you’ll notice one of the biggest changes as soon as you log in.

  The Cluster Overview Dashboard is the new default landing page of the OpenShift Console and provides a birds-eye view of your cluster’s current health, inventory, capacity, utilization, and activity to make identifying problems and resolving issues easier and faster.

  This post will briefly cover what this dashboard is made of, but we know from using it ourselves these past few months that static screenshots won’t quite do it justice. We’re really excited for you to try this new dashboard out in your own clusters, and our User Experience Design team would love to hear any feedback and suggestions you have for future improvements.

• Writing Summary - late summer 2019

  I've done some (ok, very little) writing for opensource.com in the past and I still have some notes for more articles that keep getting pushed aside. This site is almost 10 years old, community driven (with Red Hat Sponsorship), and tries to cover a variety of open topics, products, projects, and distributions.

  This summer, some of the staff from that project switched over to help Red Hat start a new blog for system administrators called Enable Sysadmin. As the name implies it is focused on system administration topics and as a corporate blog it can also be a bit more Red Hat product specific. In addition to a small staff, a few part time contractors, and a number of Red Hat employee contributors, they do accept and encourage community contributions.

• Red Hat Smart Management October 2019 release

  At Red Hat Summit in May 2019 we introduced Red Hat Smart Management. Red Hat Smart Management combines the flexible and powerful infrastructure management capabilities of Red Hat Satellite with the simplicity of cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It helps users more securely manage any environment supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux—from physical machines to hybrid multiclouds.

  As IT environments continue to grow in complexity, spanning from enterprise datacenters to multiple public clouds, organizations need management solutions that can keep pace with rapidly changing infrastructure. Traditional management solutions often lack the flexibility and oversight needed to manage today’s IT, which can result in organizations using unintegrated tools and processes and struggling to stay proactive in the face of systems management, security and compliance.

• How we brought JavaScript to life for Command Line Heroes

  Animators within Red Hat?s Open Studio help bring Command Line Heroes? artwork more to life. All throughout Season 3, they?ve added movement to our episode pages and created eye-catching trailers for social and Red Hat?s YouTube channel. This post highlights their important contributions to the Command Line Heroes? creative process by looking at their work for Episode 3 of Season 4: Creating JavaScript. Also, designer Karen Crowson talks about the easter eggs in that episode?s artwork.

• Red Hat Ceph Storage RGW deployment strategies and sizing guidance

  Starting in Red Hat Ceph Storage 3.0, Red Hat added support for Containerized Storage Daemons (CSD) which allows the software-defined storage components (Ceph MON, OSD, MGR, RGW, etc) to run within containers. CSD avoids the need to have dedicated nodes for storage services thus reducing both CAPEX and OPEX by co-located storage containerized daemons.

  Ceph-Ansible provides the required mechanism to put resource fencing to each storage container which is useful for running multiple storage daemon containers on one physical node. In this blog post, we will cover strategies to deploy RGW containers and their resource sizing guidance. Before we dive into the performance, let's understand what are the different ways to deploy RGW.

• OpenShift 4.2: New YAML Editor

  Through our built-in YAML editor, users can create and edit resources right in the Red Hat OpenShift Web Console UI. In the latest release, we’ve upgraded our editor to include language server support.

  What is language server support?

  The language server support feature uses the OpenAPI schema from Kubernetes to provide content assist inside the YAML editor based on the type of resource you are editing. More specifically, the language server support offers the following capabilities:

  Improved YAML validation: The new editor provides feedback in context, directing you to the exact line and position that requires attention.
  Document outlining: Document outlines offer a quick way to navigate your code.
  Auto completion: While in the editor, language server support will provide you with valid configuration information as you type, allowing you to edit faster.
  Hover support: Hovering over a property will show a description of the associated schema.
  Advanced formatting: Format your YAML.

Red Hat’s strategy remains unchanged. We are an open source software company looking to deliver open source platforms. Every line of code we have is open source—that will continue to be true going forward. In fact, even for employee contributions, IBM changed their entire contribution policy to match that of Red Hat. The logic of the deal is more around how IBM's go-to-market capability can help us scale faster. Earlier, we just didn't have the size and the scale to really be able to deliver these huge platforms for telcos, etc. IBM is working hard to better optimize their software to run on our platforms.

I think the biggest change really has happened over the last 6-7 years. Open source has grown from basically being used either by hobbyists, or vendors looking to build alternatives to traditional software, to being adopted by large IT users such as Google and Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook—all of whom have started doing most of their own engineering work for their infrastructure and doing it with open source. Open source has also evolved from being a lower-cost alternative and something you might consider if you're a techie, to consume it if I want to innovate. So if you want to do Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML), you're going to use open source. If you're going to use cloud, you're going to use open source; if you're going to do analytics and Big Data, you're going to consume a lot of open source. That’s a fundamental switch in the minds of enterprises. In the context of developers, too, the vast majority of open source is coming from programmers paid by their employers.

• Why Red Hat supports standards and open source

  Red Hat may be synonymous with open source and the developer community, but the company also actively participates within industry standards processes. For example, it is working closely with the operator-led Common NFVi Telco Taskforce (CNTT), which was initiated in the LFN open source community but has now been embraced by the GSMA, as an attempt to harmonise on the many varied NFV infrastructure solutions and architectures. Furthermore, Red Hat supports the move for greater alignment in NFV software platform domain.

• Overview of Node-RED 1.0 Release

  Low-code, visual-based programming environments are opening doors for new types of application developers. At the same time, new event-driven architectures are making such environments more responsive.

  Node-RED, a visual flow-based programming tool, is one such environment attuned to these new development styles. After years of refinement, the open source Node-RED recently hit maturity with a 1.0 release.

  I chatted with Nicholas O’Leary of IBM, who has pioneered the development of Node-RED. In this article, we’ll discover what this new release encompasses. We’ll also peek into the history of Node-RED, look into some fascinating IoT use cases and estimate the future Node-RED roadmap.

• Girls Who Code wins IBM's first $50K Open Source Community Grant

  Girls Who Code were the winners of the first $50,000 IBM Open Source Community Grant. Girls Who Code is a nonprofit organization working to increase the number of women working in computer science.

  Girls Who Code helps girls to learn more about computer science through after-school classes and summer courses. Along with the advancement of IT knowledge, women also gain confidence in their capabilities.

• IBM launches grant to promote diversity in the open source community

  Announced at this week's All Things Open conference in Raleigh, NC, the grant -- which will be awarded quarterly -- will see the winner receive $25k in cash and $25k in Cloud Credits in order to support their efforts dedicated to education and skill building for women, minorities, and/or under-served communities.

  The inaugural grant is going to Girls Who Code, a non-profit organization working to increase the number of women working in computer science.

  [...]

  Other finalists in this quarter's grant competition were Outreachy (Organized by the Software Freedom Conservancy), which sets up three-month paid internships on open source projects for people who ordinarily might not have those opportunities. And PyLadies, an international mentorship group of the Python Software Foundation, helping women become active in the Python open-source community.

• Ex-IBM Director Joins Open-Source Blockchain Platform

  ennifer Trelewicz, the former Director of the Systems & Technology Laboratory at IBM, has just joined the open-source and fully decentralised blockchain software, Credits.

  According to AMB Crypto, Trelewicz has taken the post of Chief Business Officer, under which she is responsible for the external business sector of the firm.

• IBM Group Sales Down Again But Cloud And Open Source Business Is Positive

  Third quarter results at IBM showed group sales were down 3.9% to $18bn, although revenue from the acquired Red Hat was up a handy 20%.

  That group drop though masked progress being seen in the cloud, with Cloud & Cognitive Software up 7.8% to $5.3bn. This part of the business includes cloud and data platforms that include Red Hat offerings, cognitive applications and transaction processing platforms.

  The Global Technology Services segment – that includes infrastructure and cloud services and technology support services – was down 4.1% to $6.7bn. And Global Business Services, which includes consulting, application management and global process services was up 2.2% to $4.1bn – with consulting actually up 5% when broken down.

• IBM Poised for Another Sales Slide Despite Red Hat Deal: What to Watch

  International Business Machines Corp. is expected to report third-quarter earnings after the market closes Wednesday. The results, which follow a string of quarterly revenue declines, will be the company’s first since it closed its $34 billion purchase of open-source software giant Red Hat. Here’s what to look for: