• Kontron Acquires Inocybe Technologies to Boost Cloud Native Networking Stack

  Kontron announced on Aug. 1 that it is acquiring privately-held networking vendor Inocybe Technologies. Financial terms of the deal have not been publicly disclosed.

  Inocybe is well known in the open source networking community for its support and contributions, particularly to the OpenDayLight (ODL) Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller. Inocybe has also been a leading contributor to the OpenSwitch project as well.

• How to Lead a Disaster Recovery Exercise For Your On-Call Team

  On-call teams at startups have three big problems: they’re small, they cover a wide breadth of infrastructure, and the last two points usually imply that they lack the bandwidth to maintain and write documentation for a suite of DevOps tools. At SigOpt, our on-call team tackles these challenges with a biannual “disaster recovery exercise”, or simulated outage.

  In this blog post I will show you what a disaster recovery exercise is, how it can diagnose weak points in your infrastructure, and how it can be a learning experience for your on-call team. I hope that by the end you’ll consider running a disaster recovery exercise for your on-call team!

• Istio Service Mesh Advances to Production

  Istio, the “service mesh” intended to connect application components and thereby boost the capabilities of the Kubernetes cluster orchestrator, has advanced over the past year as a way of managing increasingly popular micro-services.

  Partners Google Cloud, IBM (NYSE: IBM), ride sharer Lyft and Red Hat’s CoreOS unit along with other open source developers announced the 1.0 release of Istio on Tuesday (July 31). Among the goals is simplifying enterprise deployment of micro-services and allowing developers to add, change and route them within cloud-native applications. This, proponents said, can be done without having to update code or rebuild the underlying application containers.

• Meet Serverless Inc. - The Startup That Aims To Accelerate Serverless Computing

• Google advances Istio – this could be bigger than Kubernetes and serverless

  As modern digital computing infrastructure continues to evolve, new layers of automation enable increasingly rapid change and adaptation. Once containerization had made it possible to deploy new capabilities in seconds, then the advent of Kubernetes and similar tools added a layer of orchestration to co-ordinate container deployments at scale. A by-product was the easy abstraction of functions into a ‘serverless’ model, where the service was just there, on demand, in the infrastructure. Now a new layer known as the ‘service mesh’ is coming into being to add governance, management and communication across all of these capabilities. This week saw the release of version 1.0 of a new open source framework for service mesh known as Istio, backed, like Kubernetes before it, by Google, along with IBM.

• Advanced HPC Announces Its Exclusive Platinum Partnership with BeeGFS

  Christopher M. Sullivan is the Assistant Director for Biocomputing at Oregon State University and directs the Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing (CGRB). He says BeeGFS has given CGRB a way to distribute their research across a parallel system while keeping the storage space looking like a single container. “BeeGFS is a robust solution that expands our storage space, gives us higher performance with phenomenal management and all at a cost-effective price.”

Patents and open-source projects are always a messy combination it seems. A recent discussion on the pgsql-hackers mailing list highlights some of the problems that can result even when a patent holder wants to make their patents available to a project like PostgreSQL. Software patents are a minefield in many ways—often projects want to just avoid the problems entirely by staying completely away from code known to be covered by patents.

It started with a post from Takayuki Tsunakawa, who wondered how his employer, Fujitsu, could submit patches to PostgreSQL that implement various patented (and patent applied-for) techniques: "we'd like to offer our company's patents and patent applications license to the PostgreSQL community free of charge". He suggested three possibilities for how that might be accomplished: by way of a patent pool such as the one run by the Open Invention Network, doing an explicit patent grant (such as that in section 3 in the Apache v2 license), or by a patent promise like Red Hat's, but only for PostgreSQL.

I love Docker. At first it seemed a bit silly to me for a small-scale implementation like my home setup, but after learning how to use it, I fell in love. The standard features are certainly beneficial. It's great not worrying that one application's dependencies will step on or conflict with another's. But most applications are good about playing well with others, and package management systems keep things in order. So why do I docker run instead of apt-get install? Individualized system settings.

With Docker, I can have three of the same apps running side by side. They even can use the same port (internally) and not conflict. My torrent client can live inside a forced-VPN network, and I don't need to worry that it will somehow "leak" my personal IP data. Heck, I can run apps that work only on CentOS inside my Ubuntu Docker server, and it just works! In short, Docker is amazing.

I just wish I could remember all the commands.

Don't get me wrong, I'm familiar with Docker. I use it for most of my server needs. It's my first go-to when testing a new app. Heck, I taught an entire course on Docker for CBT Nuggets (my day job). The problem is, Docker works so well, I rarely need to interact with it. So, my FIFO buffer fills up, and I forget the simple command-line options to make Docker work. Also, because I like charts and graphs, I decided to install a Docker GUI. It was a bit of an adventure, so I thought I'd share the ins and outs of my experience.

• IBM & Google Launch 'Istio' Cloud Software, but Amazon & Microsoft Skip the Party

  Istio, an open source project backed by IBM, Google, Red Hat and others for connecting, managing and securing Kubernetes containers, hits version 1.0 Tuesday. But can Istio become ubiquitous without support from market leaders Amazon Web Services and Microsoft?

  Istio, also backed by Lyft Inc. and Pivotal , is a "service mesh," picking up where Kubernetes leaves off. Kubernetes provides orchestration to run multiple containers, manage their lifecycle, keep them available and scale them up and down as needed. Istio is software for managing how containers interact with each other.

• The Istio service mesh hits version 1.0

• What is Istio? The latest open source project out of Google

• Istio sets sail as Red Hat renovates OpenShift container ship

  Red Hat is celebrating the 1.0 release of Istio, the open source microservices management project, and the arrival of version 3.10 of its OpenShift software container platform.

  Istio's 1.0 release received mention at Google Cloud Next last week, but the official bits are expected on Tuesday. The software serves as a management mechanism for distributed microservices, providing capabilities like traffic management, service identity and security, policy enforcement and telemetry among apps running across multiple Kubernetes clusters and hosts.

• IBM, Google, Red Hat push Istio to 1.0 release

  IBM launched Istio along with Google Cloud and Lyft a little more than a year ago. The goal of Istio is to give developers a vendor-neutral way to connect, secure and manage networks of various microservices.

  Managing microservices is a critical issue since enterprises are increasingly built on them. By breaking services and applications into smaller parts developers can be more agile. The issue is that managing various microservices requires a good bit of choreography.