• What is Cloud Native?

  Cloud native is more than just a buzzword, though. It's an approach used by some of the largest organizations on the planet, including Walmart, Visa, JP Morgan Chase, China Mobile, Verizon and Target, among others. Cloud native is an approach that enable developers and organization to be more agile, providing workload portability and scalability.

• What is Kata Containers and why should I care?

  Kata Containers can significantly improve the security and isolation of your container workloads. It combines the benefits of using a hypervisor, such as enhanced security, and container orchestration capabilities provided by Kubernetes.

  Together with Eric Erns from Intel, we have recently performed a webinar in which we presented the benefits of using Kata Containers in a Charmed Kubernetes environment. In this blog, we aim to highlight the key outcomes from this webinar.

• An idiot's guide to Kubernetes, low-code developers, and other industry trends

  As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.

• A blueprint for OpenStack and bare metal

  The bare metal cloud is an abstraction layer for the pools of dedicated servers with different capabilities (processing, networking or storage) that can be provisioned and consumed with cloud-like ease and speed. It embraces the orchestration and automation of the cloud and applies them to bare metal workload use cases.

  The benefit to end users is that they get access to the direct hardware processing power of individual servers and are able to provision workloads without the overhead of the virtualization layer—providing the ability to provision environments in an Infrastructure-as-code methodology with separation of tenants and projects.

• Software Development, Microservices & Container Management – Part III – Why Kubernetes? A Deep Dive into Kubernetes world

  Together with my colleague Bettina Bassermann and SUSE partners, we will be running a series of blogs and webinars from SUSE (Software Development, Microservices & Container Management, a SUSE webinar series on modern Application Development), and try to address the former questions and doubts about K8s and Cloud Native development and how it is not compromising quality and control.

• Epic Performance with New Tuning Guide – SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on AMD EPYC* 7002 Series Processors

  EPYC is AMD’s flagship mainstream server microprocessors and supports 1-way and 2-way multiprocessing. The first generation was originally announced back in May 2017 and replaced the previous Opteron server family with the introduction of the Zen microarchitecture for the mainstream market.

• Content Lifecycle Management in SUSE Manager

  Content Lifecycle management is managing how patches flows through your infra in a staged manner. In ideal infra, latest patches will always be applied on development servers. If everything is good there then those patches will be applied to QA servers and lastly to production servers. This enables sysadmins to catch issues if any and hence preventing patching of prod system which may create downtime of live environments.

  SUSE Manager gives you this control via content lifecycle. In this, you create custom channels in SUSE Manager for example dev, qa and prod. Then you register your systems to those channels according to their criticality. Now whenever channels gets the new patches it will be available to respective systems (registered to those channels) to install. So if you control channels you control the patch availability to systems.

  In content lifecycle management, suse manager enables you to push patches to channels manually. Like on first deploy all latest patches will be available to dev channels and hence dev systems. At this stage, if you run update commands (zypper up, yum update) they will show latest patches only on dev servers. QA and prod servers wont show any new patches.

• The Early History of Usenet, Part VII: Usenet Growth and B-News

  For quite a while, it looked like my prediction — one to two articles per day — was overly optimistic. By summer, there were only four new sites: Reed College, University of Oklahoma (at least, I think that that's what uucp node uok is), vax135, another Bell Labs machine — and, cruciallyy, U.C. Berkeley, which had a uucp connection to Bell Labs Research and was on the ARPANET.

  In principle, even a slow rate of exponential growth can eventually take over the world. But that assumes that there are no "deaths" that will drive the growth rate negative. That isn't a reasaonable assumption, though. If nothing else, Jim Ellis, Tom Truscott, Steve Daniel, and I all planned to graduate. (We all succeeded in that goal.) If Usenet hadn't shown its worth to our successors by then, they'd have let it wither. For that matter, university faculty or Bell Labs management could have pulled the plug, too. Usenet could easily have died aborning. But the right person at Berkeley did the right thing.

  Mary Horton was then a PhD student there. (After she graduated, she joined Bell Labs; she and I were two of the primary people who brought TCP/IP to the Labs, where it was sometimes known as the "datagram heresy". The phone network was, of course, circuit-switched…) Known to her but unknown to us, there were two non-technical ARPANET mailing lists that would be of great interest to many potential Usenet users, HUMAN-NETS and SF-LOVERS. She set up a gateway that relayed these mailing lists into Usenet groups; these were at some point moved to the fa ("From ARPANET") hierarchy. (For a more detailed telling of this part of the story, see Ronda Hauben's writings.) With an actual traffic source, it was easy to sell folks on the benefits of Usenet. People would have preferred a real ARPANET connection but that was rarely feasible and never something that a student could set up: ARPANET connections were restricted to places that had research contracts with DARPA. The gateway at Berkeley was, eventually, bidirectional for both Usenet and email; this enabled Usenet-style communication between the networks.

• Analysts Say Kubernetes Is a Services-Building Opportunity for the Channel

• KubeCon Showed Kubernetes Is Big, but Is It a Unicorn?

• Oracle, Red Hat See the Value of Kubernetes for Channel Partners

• IBM ships out two new open-source tools for Kubernetes developers

  Taking center stage at the Kubecon + CloudNativeCon co-located events in San Diego today, IBM Corp. announced two new open-source tools for the Kubernetes ecosystem, as well as updates to two of its existing projects.

  The new tools include Kui, which is meant to ease the oftentimes “chunky experience” developers have to deal with when working with hybrid or multicloud application deployments. There’s also Iter8, which is a tool for collecting data and telemetry generated by the open-source software service mesh Istio.

• Red Hat: Platform For E2E Processes And Digital Excellence

  For many years, Linux was the only open source component in the SAP community. Now Red Hat is launching a complete open source platform. Peter M. Faerbinger spoke to Jochen Glaser about this unique solution.

• Red Hat: The Goal Is Digital Excellence

  SAP is building the intelligent enterprise. Red Hat stands fully behind this strategy. The upcoming modernization will involve drastic changes. They relate to the migration to Hana and the migration of existing SAP applications, including custom code, to S/4.

• Digital transformation: 3 people pain points

  Considering the insatiable customer appetite for better and more efficient service, digital transformation is now a bit of an arms race: Companies that resist it risk being left behind by their competitors and customers.

  During my long tenure as an IT leader, I’ve found that the biggest challenges in any company change always boils down to people. In today’s world, where the modus operandi is to get things done as quickly as possible, it can be easy to lose sight of the things that will help a project go well.

Linux system administration is a job. It can be fun, frustrating, mentally challenging, tedious, and often a great source of accomplishment and an equally great source of burnout. That is to say, it's a job like any other with good days and with bad. Like most system administrators, I have found a balance that works for me. I perform my regular duties with varying levels of automation and manual manipulation and I also do a fair amount of research, which usually ends up as articles. There are two questions I'm going to answer for you in this article. The first is, "How does one become a system administrator?," and second, "What does a Linux system administrator do?".

• Tales From The Sysadmin: Dumped Into The Grub Command Line

  Today I have a tale of mystery, of horror, and of hope. The allure of a newer kernel and packages was too much to resist, so I found myself upgrading to Fedora 30. All the packages had downloaded, all that was left was to let DNF reboot the machine and install all the new packages. I started the process and meandered off to find a cup of coffee: black, and darker than the stain this line of work leaves on the soul. After enough time had elapsed, I returned, expecting the warming light of a newly upgraded desktop. Instead, all that greeted me was the harsh darkness of a grub command line. Something was amiss, and it was bad.

  (An aside to the reader, I had this experience on two different machines, stemming from two different root problems. One was a wayward setting, and the other an unusual permissions problem.)

  How does the fledgling Linux sysadmin recover from such a problem? The grub command line is an inscrutable mystery to the uninitiated, but once you understand the basics, it’s not terribly difficult to boot your system and try to restore the normal boot process. This depends on what has broken, of course. If the disk containing your root partition has crashed, then sorry, this article won’t help.

• Top Kubernetes Operators advancing across the Operator Capability Model

  At KubeCon North America 2019 we highlighted what it means to deliver a mature Kubernetes Operator. A Kubernetes Operator is a method of packaging, deploying and managing a Kubernetes application. The key attribute of an Operator is the active, ongoing management of the application, including failover, backups, upgrades and autoscaling, just like a cloud service.

  These capabilities are ranked into five levels, which are used to gauge maturity. We refer to this as the Operator Capability Model, which outlines a set of possible capabilities that can be applied to an application. Of course, if your app doesn’t store stateful data, a backup might not be applicable to you but log processing or alerting might be important. The important user experience that the Operator model aims for is getting that cloud-like, self-managing experience with knowledge baked in from the experts.

• Red Hat simplifies transition to open source Kafka with new service registry and HTTP bridge

  Red Hat continues to increase the features available for users looking to implement a 100% open source, event-driven architecture (EDA) through running Apache Kafka on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The Red Hat Integration Q4 release provides new features and capabilities, including ones aimed at simplifying usage and deployment of the AMQ streams distribution of Apache Kafka.

  [...]

  In addition to the registry itself, users can leverage the included custom Kafka serializers and deserializers (SerDes). These SerDes Java classes allow Kafka applications to pull relevant schemas from the Service Registry instead of requiring the schemas to be bundled with the applications.

  Correspondingly, the registry has its own REST API to create, update, and delete artifacts as well as managing global and per-artifact rules. The registry API is compatible with another Kafka provider’s schema registry to facilitate a seamless migration to AMQ Streams as a drop-in replacement.