Open source transparency comes to root of trust hardware

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November 22, 2019

Geopolitics have put enterprise data centers in the crosshairs of international espionage. From all corners of the globe, hackers of all sorts, including those aligned with national spy agencies, are zeroing in on hardware roots of trust. For any computing platform, the root of trust is the ultimate line of defense against cybersecurity attacks. No matter how secure your operating system and applications appear to be, they are acutely vulnerable if running on a hardware platform whose root of trust has been compromised by an unauthorized party.

[Source: InfoWorld]

Google Cloud launches Bare Metal Solution

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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November 22, 2019

Google Cloud today announced the launch of a new bare metal service, dubbed the Bare Metal Solution. We aren’t talking about bare metal servers offered directly by Google Cloud here, though. Instead, we’re talking about a solution that enterprises can use to run their specialized workloads on certified hardware that’s co-located in the Google Cloud data centers and directly connect them to Google Cloud’s suite of other services. The main workload that makes sense for this kind of setup is databases, Google notes, and specifically Oracle Database.

[Source: TechCrunch]

Goldman Sachs To Open Source Its Software

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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November 22, 2019

Goldman Sachs wants to give away some of its most valuable software. The investment bank spent countless hours over 14 years developing a platform called Alloy to help it access and analyze the growing set of financial databases being created across the firm. Now Goldman is taking the unusual step of making that program, as well as the language underlying it, available to the rest of Wall Street for free as open-source software in collaboration with a nonprofit called Finos.

The software and language “have grown to become critical tools within our firm across the trade lifecycle that help us price, assess and evaluate risk, clear transactions, and perform regulatory reporting,” said Neema Raphael, co-chief data officer at Goldman.

[Source: CNBC]

System76 Will Start Designing And Building Its Own Linux Laptops Beginning January 2020

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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November 22, 2019

Denver-based PC manufacturer and Pop!_OS Linux developer System76 plans to follow-up its custom Thelio desktop PC with an in-house laptop beginning next year according to founder and CEO Carl Richell. During a recent interview, Richell was quick to emphasize that the entire process of designing, prototyping and iterating the final product could take two to three years. But the company is eager to break into this market and put the same signature “stamp” on its laptop hardware that graces its custom-built Thelio desktop.

[Source: Forbes]

Zorin OS 15 Lite Released as a Windows 7 Replacement, Based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Search

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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November 22, 2019

The Zorin OS community announced today the general availability of the Zorin OS 15 Lite edition, an Xfce-based version optimized to run faster than Windows 7 on very old computers. Based on Canonical’s latest long-term supported Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) operating system series, Zorin OS 15 Lite is here packed with some of the most advanced and efficient software components and the latest Xfce 4.14 desktop environment, which provides a user-friendly experience and promises extend the lifespan of your PC for years to come.

[Source: Softpedia]

CloudFormation gets open source CLI to automate external resource creation

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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November 20, 2019

AWS has updated its infrastructure as code product CloudFormation, fitting it with an open source CLI and a registry to get started with custom resource providers. The refresh is meant to let users automate the creation of non-AWS resources and improve resource coverage, both of which seem to have been requested a lot in the past months.

CloudFormation CLI comes with sample code and documentation facilitating the creation of resource providers. To build one, users first have to describe their resource, including attributes and properties, in a schema which conforms to AWS’ Resource Provider Definition Schema.

[Source: DevClass]

Linux Kernel 5.4 to Arrive on November 24th as Linus Torvalds Releases Last RC

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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November 20, 2019

The highly anticipated Linux 5.4 kernel finally has a release date as Linus Torvalds announced over the weekend the last Release Candidate (RC). Last week, Linus Torvalds was considering if there’s need for an eighth Release Candidate (RC) for the upcoming Linux 5.4 kernel series, which is only needed on very busy development cycles, but while things were quite calm he still released the RC8 milestone just to make sure everything is in place and working out-of-the-box because more testing never hurts.

[Source: Softpedia]

Open Invention Network Joins Forces With IBM, Linux Foundation And Microsoft

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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November 20, 2019

Open Invention Network (OIN) is teaming up with IBM, the Linux Foundation and Microsoft to further protect open source software (OSS) from Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) leveraging low quality patents, also called patent trolls. The group will support Unified Patents’ Open Source Zone with a substantial annual subscription. This expands OIN’s and its partners’ patent non-aggression activities by deterring PAEs from targeting Linux and adjacent OSS technologies relied on by developers, distributors and users.

[Source: TFiR]

Google Acquires CloudSimple To Bring VMware Customers To Its Cloud

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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November 20, 2019

Google today has announced it has acquired VMware-as-a-Service provider CloudSimple for an undisclosed sum. This acquisition has some interesting competitive dimensions, particularly relating to Microsoft Azure. CloudSimple is currently the main mechanism for running VMware on Azure and GCP, while VMware on AWS is jointly engineered between VMware and AWS. It’s a more tightly integrated offering, and not subject to this kind of pull-the-rug-out-from-underneath-us maneuver.

[Source: Forbes]

IBM Kicks Up Kubernetes Compatibility With Open Source

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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November 20, 2019

On the first day of KubeCon IBM kicked up its Kubernetes compatibility by announcing two new open source projects — Kui and Iter8 — along with advancements to existing open source Tekton and Razee. IBM has a long history contributing open source code, and today’s announcement comes as the vendor quickly moves to integrate its legacy software portfolio with Red Hat’s Kubernetes-focused OpenShift platform.

The mass migration to containerize and orchestrate applications in hybrid- and multi-cloud environments has seen Kubernetes emerge as the de facto container orchestration platform for cloud-native applications. And as such, vendors are scrambling to re-orient their operations to accommodate the burgeoning Kubernetes ecosystem.

[Source: SDxCentral]