What Value Does Alluxio Brings To The Presto Foundation?

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March 31, 2020

Alluxio recently joined the Presto Foundation. We talked to Alluxio CEO, Steven Mih to better understand the Presto Foundation community.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Let’s start with a bit about the Presto Foundation. What is it about? What does it do?

Steven Mih: The Presto Foundation is a project hosted under the Linux Foundation. It was created last year by companies like Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba and Uber. Alluxio is an open source project that is commonly used with Presto, the open source distributed SQL query engine, as well as other projects like Spark and TensorFlow. We support all these different frameworks. And since this was a foundation that was open to all, we decided to join it as one of the companies involved in that foundation.

Swapnil Bhartiya: If you look at the goals of the foundation, what value does Alluxio bring to it?

Steven Mih: The Linux foundation projects are all about open source, it’s helping grow the communities of these projects. With the Presto Foundation being hosted under the Linux Foundation, we work in an open source way to help develop the community and increase the adoption of the Presto project.

Alluxio is often used under Presto, so the value we bring is around accelerating the data to that. We recently developed a preview which now allows users to transform the data into the format that Presto is looking for. So we’re pretty excited about those things and we’ll be talking about that at PrestoCon that’s coming up at the end of March (now cancelled due to Covid-19).

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you also explain how people, companies, developers use Alluxio with Presto and also give examples of some of the major use cases?

Steven Mih: One of the big use cases is that Presto is designed to query anything anywhere. It has connectors to different data sources, which can be in remote places. That’s where Alluxio is co-installed with Presto workers which allows users to make that data to be available and local. The result of that is extremely high performance.

In today’s customer environment, they oftentimes are doing more multi-cloud or hybrid and they have data in different sources. There could be data on prem. They can’t necessarily get to the cloud yet, or vice versa. There may be S3 buckets somewhere that they need access to. Alluxio makes all of that seamless for the Presto users.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you elaborate that a bit?

Steven Mih: You can now have a much local and higher performing system because the data is now cached locally to the Presto clusters. What it means for data in remote places is that the data infrastructure becomes a lot simpler. Without Alluxio with Presto, you’d have to copy that data and make different silos. The copies of that data need to be synchronized; it needs to be maintained. Users end up having a pretty big data wrangling challenge.

We call it the PAS stack, Presto, Alluxio and S3. That stack is becoming much more common now as users can add S3 to it, they can add HDFS to it in remote places and it just operates at a much higher level as if it’s local and very high performance. On top of that, we’ve added even more to this in our developer preview. We’ve added a catalog service as well as transform operations and we are really excited about how that adds to the picture.

WireGuard VPN makes it to 1.0.0—and into the next Linux kernel

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 30, 2020

We’ve been anticipating WireGuard’s inclusion into the mainline Linux kernel for quite some time—but as of Sunday afternoon, it’s official. Linus Torvalds released the Linux 5.6 kernel, which includes (among other things) an in-tree WireGuard. Phoronix has a great short list of the most interesting new features in the 5.6 kernel, as well as a longer “everything list” for those who want to make sure they don’t miss anything.

If this is the first time you’re hearing about WireGuard, the TL;DR is that it’s a relatively new VPN (Virtual Private Network) application that offers a leaner codebase, easier configuration, faster connect times, and the latest and most thoroughly peer-reviewed and approved encryption algorithms.

[Source: Ars Technica]

How to Use Linux’s screen Command

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 30, 2020

With the Linux screen command, you can push running terminal applications to the background and pull them forward when you want to see them. It also supports split-screen displays and works over SSH connections, even after you disconnect and reconnect!

What Is the screen Command? The screen command is a terminal multiplexer, and it’s absolutely packed with options. To say it can do a lot is the granddaddy of understatements. The man page runs to over 4,100 lines.

Take a look at the most common cases in which you would use the screen command.

[Source: How-To Geek]

Linus Torvalds tells devs to put health before next release

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 30, 2020

Linux overseer Linus Torvalds given the world version 5.6 of the Linux kernel, and been awarded the title “social distancing champ”. The latter accolade came from his daughter. But he’s tried to live the values it implies by telling the Linux community not to stress about the pace of kernel development.

“I haven’t really seen any real sign of kernel development being impacted by all the coronavirus activity – I suspect a lot of us work from home even normally,” he wrote.

“I’m currently going by the assumption that we’ll have a fairly normal 5.7 release, and there doesn’t seem to be any signs saying otherwise, but hey, people may have better-than-usual reasons for missing the merge window,” he added.

[Source: The Register]

Open Source Fonts Are Love Letters to the Design Community

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 30, 2020

Font families can sell for hundreds of dollars. Gotham, a popular typeface used by President Barack Obama’s campaign and many others, costs nearly $1,000 to license a complete set of 66 different styles. But The League of Moveable Type, gives all of its fonts away for free. What’s more, it makes them open source, so that other people can modify the fonts and make their own versions of them.

And people have. Raleway, designed by Matt McInerney and released in 2010, was expanded from a single weight into a family with nine weights, from “thin” to bold to “black,” each with matching italics, in 2012 by Pablo Impallari, Rodrigo Fuenzalida, and Igino Marini. It’s now one of the most popular font families on Google Fonts, a collection of free fonts hosted by the search giant.

[Source: WIRED]

Developers take on COVID-19 with open-source projects, hackathons

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 30, 2020

In the past few weeks the coronavirus pandemic has taken hold in the United States, and the disease will continue to have a massive impact around the world for the foreseeable future. But even in the midst of panic and uncertainty, communities are coming together to do what they can. People are 3D printing face shields and sewing masks for healthcare workers, offering to buy groceries and household supplies for the elderly or immunocompromised, and even donating their computer’s GPU power to the cause.

And developers aren’t absent from this list of people trying to do whatever they can to help. A quick glance into the trending section of GitHub shows that a good portion are COVID-19-related, and there are a number more than that living on GitHub. While medical professionals are on the front lines of the COVID-19 fight, developers are fighting the disease from their computers.

[Source: SDTimes.com]

Some Of The Features To Look Forward To With Linux 5.7

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 27, 2020

With the Linux 5.7 cycle kicking off in April with its merge window opening upon the release of Linux 5.6, here is a look at some of the changes and new features that have been on our radar for this next version of the Linux kernel.

Among the items we have been tracking that should be landing in Linux 5.7 based upon being queued in the respective “-next” trees, those items tentatively for the 5.7 kernel include the likes of: The new Samsung-developed Microsoft exFAT file-system driver is queued and ready to go. This replaces the current staging exFAT driver.

[Source: Phoronix]

The Warren Campaign Is Gone—but Its Tech May Live On

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 27, 2020

Before it ended earlier this month, Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign developed a reputation for two things: detailed plans to solve concrete problems, and a robust ground game. Those attributes came together on the campaign’s tech team, which built a grassroots organizing machine on the back end. That wasn’t enough to win Warren the nomination, but veterans from the team are trying to make sure their work wasn’t all for nothing. They’re making seven in-house software projects available to everyone for free on GitHub, the most popular destination for open-source software on the web, in the hope that other Democratic campaigns can build on what they developed during the campaign.

“We believe we’ll be the biggest open-sourcing of political tech that has happened,” said Mike Conlow, who was the campaign’s chief technology strategist. Few political campaigns are big and well-funded enough to develop their own software. Fewer still make that software open source.

[Source: WIRED]

Coronavirus Will Change The Way We Build IT Infrastructure

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 27, 2020

COVID-19 has disrupted business-as-usual for organisations globally. While the long-term ramifications of the corona pandemic are yet to be ascertained, there are crucial lessons for businesses, vendors, and technology leaders to learn from the fallout.

In an exclusive interaction with TFIR, Rob Hirschfeld, Founder & CEO, RackN, shares his thoughts on how the corona scourge will impact business and technology, and how corporates can be better prepared to overcome the impending challenges.

“COVID-19 has led to a lockdown. As a result, all IT has to be rethought with the lens of – “I can’t get there, I can’t touch the gear, I can’t send people out”. Against such a backdrop, we have to build systems that are much more resilient, efficient, self-automated and self-repairing. There has to be more out-of-the-box capability,” says Hirschfeld.

[Source: TFiR]

The exFAT filesystem is coming to Linux

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 27, 2020

When software and operating system giant Microsoft announced its support for inclusion of the exFAT filesystem directly into the Linux kernel back in August, it didn’t get a ton of press coverage. But filesystem vendor Paragon Software clearly noticed this month’s merge of the Microsoft-approved, largely Samsung-authored version of exFAT into the VFS for-next repository, which will in turn merge into Linux 5.7—and Paragon doesn’t seem happy about it.

Yesterday, Paragon issued a press release about European gateway-modem vendor Sagemcom adopting its version of exFAT into an upcoming series of Linux-based routers. Unfortunately, it chose to preface the announcement with a stream of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Steve Ballmer’s letterhead in the 1990s.

[Source: Ars Technica]