Video: Container Mythbusters

Michael Jennings has been a UNIX/Linux sysadmin and software engineer for over 20 years. He has been the author of or a contributor to numerous open source software projects, including Charliecloud, Mezzanine, Eterm, RPM, Warewulf/PERCEUS, and TORQUE. Additionally, he co-founded the Caos Foundation, creators of CentOS, and has been the lead developer on 3 separate Linux distributions. He currently serves as the Platforms Team Lead in the HPC Systems group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, responsible for managing some of our nation’s most powerful supercomputers and is the primary author/maintainer for the LBNL Node Health Check (NHC) project. He is also the Vice President of HPCXXL, the extreme-scale HPC Users group.

Assessing App Portfolios for Onboarding to OpenShift

Most professionals who’ve spent enough time in the IT industry have seen organizational silos in action. The classic silos are the ones created by Development and Operations organizations; silos we aim to break down through DevOps-style collaboration. But how many organizations pursuing digital transformation are continuing that siloed thinking when it comes to evaluating the application portfolio for cloud migration and modernization?

Application Development, Database Operations, Infrastructure, and the various lines of business have portions of the application portfolio for which they take responsibility. When organizations think about modernization, they need to deemphasize the silos and develop a comprehensive approach that evaluates the entire portfolio, and the teams that support those applications. Otherwise, they’re leaving money on the table in the form of missed opportunities for cost savings and application improvements that generate revenue and increase customer engagement.

A comprehensive approach takes into account the full range of workloads supported by the IT organization and starts making tough decisions about: which workloads can/should be modernized, which should be rehosted to take advantage of more efficient cloud platforms, and which should be left as is or even retired because they’re outlived their usefulness.

Big Blue Finally Brings IBM i To Its Own Public Cloud

Well, that took quite a long time. After what seems like eons of nudging and cajoling and pushing, IBM is making the IBM i operating system and its integrated database management system, as well as the application development tools and other systems software, available on its self-branded IBM Cloud public cloud.

Big Blue previewed its plans to bring both IBM i and AIX to the IBM Cloud at its annual Think conference in Las Vegas, on scale out machines aimed at small and medium businesses as well as to customers who want to run clusters of machines, and on scale up systems that have NUMA electronics that more tightly cluster them into shared memory systems.

DigitalOcean launches its managed database service

DigitalOcean started as an affordable but basic virtual private server offering with a pleasant user interface. Over the last few years, the company started adding features like object and block storage, load balancers and a container service. Today, it’s expanding its portfolio once again by launching a feature that was sorely missing in its lineup: a managed database service.

The first edition of these DigitalOcean Managed Databases only supports PostgreSQL, the popular open-source relational database. Later this year, it’ll add MySQL and Redis support (likely in Q2 or Q3). As for other databases, the company says that it’ll listen to customer feedback and use that to prioritize other offerings.

InfluxData Secures $60 Million in Series D Funding to Bring the Value of Time Series to the Enterprise Mainstream

InfluxData raises $60 million for time-series database software

The amount of data generated today boggles the mind — U.S. companies alone produce 2.5 quintillion bytes daily, enough to fill ten thousand Libraries of Congress in a year — and much of it is of the time-series variety (i.e., data points indexed in time order). Given the sheer volume, it’s no wonder that only 12 percent of companies say they’re analyzing the data they have, according to Forrester Research.

That’s one of the reasons Paul Dix — who’s helped to build software for startups, large companies, and organizations like Microsoft, Google, McAfee, Thomson Reuters, and Air Force Space Command — founded Y Combinator- and Bloomberg Beta-backed InfluxData (formerly Errplane) in 2012. The San Francisco startup develops an open source time series platform, InfluxDB, that is optimized to handle metrics and events in DevOps, internet of things (IoT), and real-time analytics domains. And after a banner year that saw revenue double, InfluxDB 2.0 launch in alpha, and Flux — a functional language for both querying and processing data — debut in technical preview, the startup is gearing up for growth.

Why you should use SQLite

Lift the hood on most any business application, and you’ll reveal some way to store and use structured data. Whether it’s a client-side app, an app with a web front-end, or an edge-device app, chances are it needs an embedded database of some kind.

SQLite is an embeddable open source database, written in C and queryable with conventional SQL, that is designed to cover those use cases and more. SQLite is designed to be fast, portable, and reliable, whether you’re storing only kilobytes of data or multi-gigabyte blobs.

NFV, virtualized central offices, and the Need for VNF Data Protection

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is designed to provide value around modularity and flexibility. NFV can allow different radio access networks and customer applications to run on one physical network so that the 5G revolution becomes a reality. Critical enterprise compliance requirements, including data protection and disaster recovery, must still be met during this race to modernization.

Little Backup Box: A Handful of Improvements and a Dash of PHP

My every Little Backup Box improvement project starts with the same thought, It does the job but... This time around I wanted to fix and improve several things. Firstly, since the DLNA feature wasn't working at all, I removed it altogether a while ago. Subsequently, I missed the ability to browse and view freshly backed up photos on many occasions. Secondly, I'm not a big fan of Python. There is no particular reason for that, I just never really warmed up to the language. On the other hand, PHP has always been my personal favorite and go-to scripting language, no matter what some professional developers think of it. So I wanted to swap the Python-based Little Backup Box web interface with a simpler, and arguably more elegant, version written in PHP. Finally, Little Backup Box theoretically can be installed on any Linux machine running a Debian-based Linux distribution. But due to some values hard-wired in the scripts, deploying Little Backup Box on any system other than Raspbian requires some manual tweaking. This is something I wanted to fix as well.

What is Oracle Linux? And where to Download it

Oracle Linux is based on and fully compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux ( source code and binaries ). It has the exact same package as the same version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and has the exact same source code as the Red Hat distribution. There are approximately 1000 packages in the distribution. Even if the source code of the two is compared byte by byte, there is no difference. The only change is to remove the trademark and copyright information. So, that’s why we can call it an Oracle Enterprise Linux.

Oracle Linux, the first version of Oracle released in early 2006, one of the Linux distributions, to better support Oracle software and hardware support. Because of the enterprise-level support plan UBL (Unbreakable Linux) provided by Oracle, many people called it an indestructible Linux.

Linux chops are crucial in containerized world, says Red Hat executive

How are companies in 2019 going to make multicloud a practical reality? The jury seems to have selected containers (a virtualized method for running distribute applications). This is why legacies and startups alike are flooding the market with container products. Which should companies choose?

Ever see those Red Hat Inc. T-shirts that say “Containers Are Linux”? That pretty much sums up Red Hat’s bid for the containerization championship.

“As you move into that space of Kubernetes, and containers and orchestration, you really want someone who knows Linux,” said Stefanie Chiras (pictured), vice president and general manager of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux business unit, known as RHEL, at Red Hat.

Chiras spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think event in San Francisco. They discussed RHEL 8 and the crucial importance of Linux for containers. (* Disclosure below.)

Red Hat Delivers Unified Integration Platform for Cloud-Native Application Development

Red Hat Extends Datacenter Infrastructure Control, Automation with Latest Version of Red Hat CloudForms

The long, slow death of commercial Unix [Ed: Microsoft propagandist Andy Patrizio should also do an article about the death of Windows Server.]

In the 1990s and well into the 2000s, if you had mission-critical applications that required zero downtime, resiliency, failover and high performance, but didn’t want a mainframe, Unix was your go-to solution.

If your database, ERP, HR, payroll, accounting, and other line-of-business apps weren’t run on a mainframe, chances are they ran on Unix systems from four dominant vendors: Sun Microsystems, HP, IBM and SGI. Each had its own flavor of Unix and its own custom RISC processor. Servers running an x86 chip were at best used for file and print or maybe low-end departmental servers.

What is Server Virtualization: Is It Right For Your Business?

In the modern world of IT application deployment, server virtualization is a commonly used term. But what exactly is server virtualization and is it right for your business?

Server virtualization in 2019 is a more complicated and involved topic than it was when the concept first started to become a popular approach nearly two decades ago. However, the core basic concepts and promises remain the same.

Transitioning Red Hat SSO to a highly-available hybrid cloud deployment

About two years ago, Red Hat IT finished migrating our customer-facing authentication system to Red Hat Single Sign-On (Red Hat SSO). As a result, we were quite pleased with the performance and flexibility of the new platform. Due to some architectural decisions that were made in order to optimize for uptime using the technologies at our disposal, we were unable to take full advantage of Red Hat SSO’s robust feature set until now. This article describes how we’re now addressing database and session replication between global sites.

Red Hat named to Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list

People come to work at Red Hat for our brand, but they stay for the people and the culture. It's integral to our success as an organization. It's what makes the experience of being a Red Hatter and working with other Red Hatters different. And it's what makes us so passionate about our customers’ and Red Hat’s success. In recognition of that, Red Hat has been ranked No. 50 on Fortune Magazine's list of 100 Best Companies to Work For! Hats off--red fedoras, of course--to all Red Hatters!

News from Fedora Infrastructure

One of the first tasks we have achieved is to move as many application we maintain to use CentOS CI for our Continuous Integration pipeline. CentOS CI provides us with a Jenkins instance that is running in an OpenShift cluster, you can have a look at the this instance here.

Since a good majority of our application are developed in Python, we agreed on using tox to execute our CI tests. Adopting tox on our application allows us to use a really convenient way to configure the CI pipeline in Jenkins. In fact we only needed to create .cico.pipeline file in the application repository with the following.

Mirantis to Help Build AT&T's Edge Computing Network for 5G On Open Source

The two companies hope other telcos will follow AT&T's lead in building their 5G networks on open source software.

The Telecom Industry Has Moved to Open Source

The telecom industry is at the heart of the fourth industrial revolution. Whether it’s connected IoT devices or mobile entertainment, the modern economy runs on the Internet.
However, the backbone of networking has been running on legacy technologies. Some telecom companies are centuries old, and they have a massive infrastructure that needs to be modernized.
The great news is that this industry is already at the forefront of emerging technologies. Companies such as AT&T, Verizon, China Mobile, DTK, and others have embraced open source technologies to move faster into the future. And LF Networking is at the heart of this transformation.
“2018 has been a fantastic year,” said Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking at Linux Foundation, speaking at Open Source Summit in Vancouver last fall. “We have seen a 140-year-old telecom industry move from proprietary and legacy technologies to open source technologies with LF Networking.”

Monroe Electronics Releases Completely Redesigned HALO Version 2.0

With improvements including a new web-based interface and its shift to a unified web-server platform, HALO V2.0 simplifies and streamlines all of these critical processes. The new web-based interface for HALO V2.0 allows users to work with their preferred web browser (e.g., Chrome, Firefox, Safari). The central HALO server now runs on a Linux OS (Ubuntu and CentOS 7) using a PostgreSQL database.

PostgreSQL 11.2, 10.7, 9.6.12, 9.5.16, and 9.4.21 released

The PostgreSQL project has put out updated releases for all supported versions. "This release changes the behavior in how PostgreSQL interfaces with 'fsync()' and includes fixes for partitioning and over 70 other bugs that were reported over the past three months."