Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu Linux, was an early backer of OpenStack as well as containers. This week, Shuttleworth's company Canonical announced new commercial support for Kubernetes, which is a widely deployed container orchestration and management engine.

In an interview with Datamation Shuttleworth emphasized that it's important to understand the different use cases for containers and what the different types of container systems are all about.

• Linux servers deliver greater performance and efficiency 'than available on any x86-based server'

• What are configuration management tools?

  For most people, computers don't stay the same. Software is added, removed, and updated. Configurations are changed. Think about the changes you've made to your computer since the first time you booted it up. Now imagine making those changes to 10, 100, or 1,000 more computers. Configuration management tools are what make implemententing and enforcing these changes possible.

• 5 new OpenStack tutorials and guides

• Ericsson: The Journey to a DevOps Future in SDN

  There are big transformations going on in the world today that are driving rapid changes to the business of networks, said Santiago Rodriguez, VP of Engineering and head of the product development unit SDN & Policy Control at Ericsson, in his keynote Tuesday at OpenDaylight Summit.

  “Society is transforming, the way we do business is transforming, and accordingly the way we build our networks is transforming,” Rodriguez said.

  The three pillars of this network transformation include: 5G, virtualization and open source.

• OpenDaylight sets product quality label, metrics for SDN solutions

  Initial OpenDaylight-based products expected to receive the "Powered by OpenDaylight" mark are offerings from Brocade, Ericsson, HPE, Inocybe and Serro.

• Telstra Sees Quadrupled Data Capacity by 2020

  The latter service led Telstra to re-think its fiber deployment strategy, choosing to use pre-provisioned fiber connections to data centers in advance of customer demand, because the company knew that demand was coming, Blackall said. The strategy worked well with Telstra's acquisition of Pacnet, which had already deployed SDN capabilities to connect its 27 points of presence around Asia.

• FAQ: What's so special about 802.11ad Wi-Fi?

  Here are the broad strokes about 802.11ad, the wireless technology that’s just starting to hit the market.

• 2.5 and 5 Gigabit Ethernet Now Official Standards

  In 2014, multiple groups started efforts to create new mid-tier Ethernet speeds with the NBASE-T Alliance starting in October 2014 and MGBASE-T Alliance getting started a few months later in December 2014. While those groups started out on different paths, the final 802.3bz standard represents a unified protocol that is interoperable across multiple vendors.

  The promise of 2.5 and 5 Gbps Ethernet is that they can work over existing Cat5 cabling, which to date has only been able to support 1 Gbps. Now with the 802.3bz standard, organizations do not need to rip and replace cabling to get Ethernet that is up to five times faster.

  "Now, the 1000BASE-T uplink from the wireless to wired network is no longer sufficient, and users are searching for ways to tap into higher data rates without having to overhaul the 70 billion meters of Cat5e / Cat6 wiring already sold," David Chalupsky, board of directors of the Ethernet Alliance and Intel principal engineer, said in a statement. "IEEE 802.3bz is an elegant solution that not only addresses the demand for faster access to rapidly rising data volumes, but also capitalizes on previous infrastructure investments, thereby extending their life and maximizing value."

• A quick fix for stupid password reset questions

  It didn’t take 500 million hacked Yahoo accounts to make me hate, hate, hate password reset questions (otherwise known as knowledge-based authentication or KBA). It didn't help when I heard that password reset questions and answers -- which are often identical, required, and reused on other websites -- were compromised in that massive hack, too.

  Is there any security person or respected security guidance that likes them? They are so last century. What is your mother’s maiden name? What is your favorite color? What was your first pet’s name?

• French hosting provider hit by DDoS close to 1TBps

  A hosting provider in France has been hit by a distributed denial of service attack that went close to one terabyte per second.

  Concurrent attacks against OVH clocked in at 990GBps.

  The attack vector is said to be the same Internet-of-Things botnet of 152,464 devices that brought down the website of security expert Brian Krebs.

  OVH chief technology officer Octave Klaba tweeted that the network was capable of attacks up to 1.5TBps.

• Latest IoT DDoS Attack Dwarfs Krebs Takedown At Nearly 1Tbps Driven By 150K Devices

  If you thought that the massive DDoS attack earlier this month on Brian Krebs’ security blog was record-breaking, take a look at what just happened to France-based hosting provider OVH. OVH was the victim of a wide-scale DDoS attack that was carried via network of over 152,000 IoT devices.

  According to OVH founder and CTO Octave Klaba, the DDoS attack reached nearly 1 Tbps at its peak. Of those IoT devices participating in the DDoS attack, they were primarily comprised of CCTV cameras and DVRs. Many of these types devices' network settings are improperly configured, which leaves them ripe for the picking for hackers that would love to use them to carry our destructive attacks.

• 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.