Because purpose plays such an important role in open organizations, I want to share what I’ve learned about how organizations can clarify a purpose, who they serve, how they serve their core customer and what they celebrate externally.
Say it in four sentences
Bloom’s most significant point is that you must be able to state your organization’s purpose in short sentences. A short sentence will simplify complexity and make vagueness turn crystal clear. Bloom looks at a collection of four targeted sentences he calls “the growth discover process,” which he says produces the necessary clarity.
A “who” sentence is about the core customer that most likely will buy your product or service in the quantity required for optimal profit (not a statistic or demographic category, but an imagined person with a personality you can get to know personally).
A “what” sentence is about the uncommon offering that your business has and leverages (your special benefit to the customer you identified in the previous sentence).
A “how” sentence is about the persuasive strategy and actions you employ to convince your core customer (from the first sentence) to believe in your uncommon offering (from the second sentence) versus all competitive offerings (the interaction customers experience with you that differentiates you from all others that is difficult to copy).
An “own it” sentence, as the author calls it, is about a series of imaginative acts and impressions that celebrate your uncommon offering and make it well known to your core customer (your way of showing what you mean to that customer).
The American dream has driven millions upon millions of people to come to a country filled with possibility and opportunity. Sometimes, you get caught up in the gears of enterprise and learn that the machinations of big business tend to run counter to that dream. But, sometimes, you start a company on an ideal and cling to that initial spark no matter what.
That’s what Carl Richell did when he created System76. That was more than a decade ago, when the company’s goal was to sell computer hardware running open source operating systems. System76 has been a bastion of hope for Linux and open source fans, as they’ve proved, year after year, that the dream can be fulfilled, that Linux can be sold on the desktop and laptop space.
The launch of the game-changing System76 Thelio only solidifies this open source dream. CEO Carl Richell oozes the open source ethos, and that ideology comes through, to perfection, in their latest offering, theThelio desktop, a machine as beautiful in design as it is in execution. The Thelio was created, from the ground up, to offer as much open hardware as possible, while delivering a beast of a computer, housed in a chassis that is equal parts form and function. Every detail (from the planetary alignment, marking the date System76 was formed, to the design of the fan output grill, and the ease with which the machine can be upgraded) has been executed to perfection. The Thelio is a hand-crafted computer that any user would be thrilled to own.
What Makes the Thelio So Special?
The easy answer to that question is “everything,” but that serves no purpose, especially for those considering dropping the coin for this desktop beauty. So wherein lies the answer? There are so many ways this new machine exceeds all other desktop computers I’ve seen (which is impressive, considering my daily driver for the last five years has been the—no longer available—System76 Leopard Extreme, which has been truly amazing).
While getting the grand tour of the new System76 headquarters, I was privy to the official Thelio “dog and pony show,” which solidified my assumptions about the company and what they have been and are doing. I was able to watch engineer Ian Santopietro demonstrate how they’ve designed the Thelio in such a way as to optimize air flow through the chassis, so the CPU is capable of running at its listed speed (see video).
Video 1: Air flow has been optimized for the Thelio.
With so many other desktop computers, the listed speed of a CPU is often negated by poorly designed cooling systems and airflows, rendering them incapable of running to spec. The Thelio blows this issue out of the water (or, better yet, out of the back cooling vent). Watching smoke flow through the device was impressive, especially considering how hush-quiet the machine was (with all cores being pushed to the max).
Figure 1: Extra screws are always at the ready.
The ease at which the machine can be upgraded is equally impressive. With a hot-swappable drive-bay that is easily accessible, the Thelio is an upgraders dream come true. And with highly refined tolerances, you can trust that chassis will come apart and slip back together with ease. System76 has added a number of touches most other companies wouldn’t even consider. Take, for instance, the spare drive bolts housed conveniently inside the case (Figure 1). No more will you have to scramble to find that small bag of screws you tossed aside when you unboxed the computer. When you go to add a new drive, you have plenty of screws waiting to be used. A nice touch, for sure.
Those curious about the System76 open source claims for the Thelio can download the files for the chassis, as well as the Thelio Io Daughterboard (Figure 2, from GitHub).
Figure 2: The Thelio Io daughterboard.
The Io daughterboard offloads control of the cooling, the passing of data from the motherboard to the storage drives, the power switch, the USB system, and more. This means System76 is able to better control how these systems function (it also means users can benefit from the open source nature of that particular piece of hardware).
The Operating System
As with all of the System76 machines, you can purchase the Thelio with one of the following options:
Pop!_OS 18.04 LTS
POP!_OS 18.10
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
I would suggest, however, purchasing the hardware with System76’s own POP!_OS, as it offers more control over, and has been optimized for, the Thelio. Although POP!_OS is designed with creators in mind (i.e. developers), one does not have to be a developer to use the OS. In fact, System76’s version of Linux is a general-purpose operating system, only with a few tweaks and inclusions for creators. No matter which operating system you choose, you can be sure to enjoy an unrivaled experience with the Thelio.
Conclusion
To say the Thelio is impressive is an understatement. This is a machine that could easily be mistaken for something produced by a much, much larger company. But make no mistake about it, few large companies put this level of care and heart into the design and execution of a computer desktop. If you’re looking to purchase one of the most impressive pieces of desktop hardware to date, look no further than System76’s new Thelio.
Web development trends have changed drastically over the last few years and as a web developer, to be at the top of your game, it’s important to stay updated with latest technologies.
JavaScript is the current trending programming language out there; it is without doubt the most popular technology used by full stack developers.
JavaScript web frameworks have become a magical solution to faster web development with absolute efficiency, safety and minimized costs. I am quite sure you have heard about Node JavaScript (commonly referred to as Node.js or simply Node), there is a buzz about it on the Internet.
In this article, I will show you how to get started with developing applications in JavaScript using Node.js in Linux. But first, lets get a brief introduction to Node.js.
The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) Summit 2018 was held at the Club Auto Sport in San Jose, California, last week, a unique and appropriate location given that DPDK is the engine that powers many NFV platforms today, including auto-focused platforms. As presenters shared the latest research and developments with DPDK in an automobile-themed environment, it was clear that the DPDK initiative’s scope is expanding beyond its original Intel roots. While Intel still has an outsized role within the project, DPDK’s home at the Linux Foundation lends more credibility to its outreach efforts.
For those readers who might still be unfamiliar, DPDK is a set of software libraries designed to accelerate packet-processing workloads running on a wide variety of CPU architectures.
Let’s face it, if you’re a Linux administrator, you’re going to work with the command line. To do that, you’ll be using a terminal emulator. Most likely, your distribution of choice came pre-installed with a default terminal emulator that gets the job done. But this is Linux, so you have a wealth of choices to pick from, and that ideology holds true for terminal emulators as well. In fact, if you open up your distribution’s GUI package manager (or search from the command line), you’ll find a trove of possible options. Of those, many are pretty straightforward tools; however, some are truly unique.
In this article, I’ll highlight four such terminal emulators, that will not only get the job done, but do so while making the job a bit more interesting or fun. So, let’s take a look at these terminals.
Tilda
Tilda is designed for Gtk and is a member of the cool drop-down family of terminals. That means the terminal is always running in the background, ready to drop down from the top of your monitor (such as Guake and Yakuake). What makes Tilda rise above many of the others is the number of configuration options available for the terminal (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The Tilda configuration window.
Tilda can be installed from the standard repositories. On a Ubuntu- (or Debian-) based distribution, the installation is as simple as:
sudo apt-get install tilda -y
Once installed, open Tilda from your desktop menu, which will also open the configuration window. Configure the app to suit your taste and then close the configuration window. You can then open and close Tilda by hitting the F1 hotkey. One caveat to using Tilda is that, after the first run, you won’t find any indication as to how to reach the configuration wizard. No worries. If you run the command tilda -C it will open the configuration window, while still retaining the options you’ve previously set.
Available options include:
Terminal size and location
Font and color configurations
Auto Hide
Title
Custom commands
URL Handling
Transparency
Animation
Scrolling
And more
What I like about these types of terminals is that they easily get out of the way when you don’t need them and are just a button click away when you do. For those that hop in and out of the terminal, a tool like Tilda is ideal.
Aterm
Aterm holds a special place in my heart, as it was one of the first terminals I used that made me realize how flexible Linux was. This was back when AfterStep was my window manager of choice (which dates me a bit) and I was new to the command line. What Aterm offered was a terminal emulator that was highly customizable, while helping me learn the ins and outs of using the terminal (how to add options and switches to a command). “How?” you ask. Because Aterm never had a GUI for customization. To run Aterm with any special options, it had to run as a command. For example, say you want to open Aterm with transparency enabled, green text, white highlights, and no scroll bar. To do this, issue the command:
aterm -tr -fg green -bg white +xb
The end result (with the topcommand running for illustration) would look like that shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Aterm with a few custom options.
Of course, you must first install Aterm. Fortunately, the application is still found in the standard repositories, so installing on the likes of Ubuntu is as simple as:
sudo apt-get install aterm -y
If you want to always open Aterm with those options, your best bet is to create an alias in your ~/.bashrc file like so:
alias=”aterm -tr -fg green -bg white +sb”
Save that file and, when you issue the command aterm, it will always open with those options. For more about creating aliases, check out this tutorial.
Eterm
Eterm is the second terminal that really showed me how much fun the Linux command line could be. Eterm is the default terminal emulator for the Enlightenment desktop. When I eventually migrated from AfterStep to Enlightenment (back in the early 2000s), I was afraid I’d lose out on all those cool aesthetic options. That turned out to not be the case. In fact, Eterm offered plenty of unique options, while making the task easier with a terminal toolbar. With Eterm, you can easily select from a large number of background images (should you want one – Figure 3) by selecting from the Background > Pixmap menu entry.
Figure 3: Selecting from one of the many background images for Eterm.
There are a number of other options to configure (such as font size, map alerts, toggle scrollbar, brightness, contrast, and gamma of background images, and more). The one thing you want to make sure is, after you’ve configured Eterm to suit your tastes, to click Eterm > Save User Settings (otherwise, all settings will be lost when you close the app).
Eterm can be installed from the standard repositories, with a command such as:
sudo apt-get install eterm
Extraterm
Extraterm should probably win a few awards for coolest feature set of any terminal window project available today. The most unique feature of Extraterm is the ability to wrap commands in color-coded frames (blue for successful commands and red for failed commands – Figure 4).
Figure 4: Extraterm showing two failed command frames.
When you run a command, Extraterm will wrap the command in an isolated frame. If the command succeeds, the frame will be outlined in blue. Should the command fail, the frame will be outlined in red.
Extraterm cannot be installed via the standard repositories. In fact, the only way to run Extraterm on Linux (at the moment) is to download the precompiled binary from the project’s GitHub page, extract the file, change into the newly created directory, and issue the command ./extraterm.
Once the app is running, to enable frames you must first enable bash integration. To do that, open Extraterm and then right-click anywhere in the window to reveal the popup menu. Scroll until you see the entry for Inject Bash shell Integration (Figure 5). Select that entry and you can then begin using the frames option.
Figure 5: Injecting Bash integration for Extraterm.
If you run a command, and don’t see a frame appear, you probably have to create a new frame for the command (as Extraterm only ships with a few default frames). To do that, click on the Extraterm menu button (three horizontal lines in the top right corner of the window), select Settings, and then click the Frames tab. In this window, scroll down and click the New Rule button. You can then add a command you want to work with the frames option (Figure 6).
Figure 6: Adding a new rule for frames.
If, after this, you still don’t see frames appearing, download the extraterm-commands file from the Download page, extract the file, change into the newly created directory, and issue the command sh setup_extraterm_bash.sh. That should enable frames for Extraterm. There’s plenty more options available for Extraterm. I’m convinced, once you start playing around with this new take on the terminal window, you won’t want to go back to the standard terminal. Hopefully the developer will make this app available to the standard repositories soon (as it could easily become one of the most popular terminal windows in use).
And Many More
As you probably expected, there are quite a lot of terminals available for Linux. These four represent (at least for me) four unique takes on the task, each of which do a great job of helping you run the commands every Linux admin needs to run. If you aren’t satisfied with one of these, give your package manager a look to see what’s available. You are sure to find something that works perfectly for you.
The Linux Foundation’s Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) is well into its third 6-month release (Casablanca came out in Dec ’18), and while the project has evolved since its first release, there is still some confusion about what it is and how it’s architected. This blogs takes a closer look at ONAP, under-the-hood, to clarify how it works.
To start, it is important to consider what functionality ONAP includes. I call ONAP a MANO++, where ONAP includes the NFVO and VNFM layers as described by ETSI, but goes beyond by including service assurance/automation and a unified design tool. ONAP does not include the NFVI/VIM or the NFV cloud layer. In other words, ONAP doesn’t really care whether the NFV cloud is OpenStack, Kubernetes or Microsoft Azure. Nor does ONAP include VNFs. VNFs come from third-party companies or open source projects but have VNF guidelines and onboarding SDKs that ease the deployment. In other words, ONAP is a modular platform for complete Network Automation.
OK, end of background. On to four themes:
MODEL DRIVEN
Model-driven is a central tenet of ONAP. If anything, one might complain about there being too much model-driven thinking but not too little! There are models for:
VNF descriptor
Network service descriptor
VNF configuration
Closed-loop automation template descriptor
Policy
APP-C/SDN-C directed graphs
Orchestration workflow
The big bang (just kidding)
So on and so forth
The key idea of a model driven approach is to enable non-programmers to change the behavior of the platform with ease. And ONAP embraces this paradigm fully.
DEVICE ORIENTATION
ONAP goes through great pains of creating a hierarchy and providing the highest level of abstraction to the OSS/BSS layers to support both a cloud-based and device-based networking approach. The below show a couple of examples.
Service Orchestration & LCM (the left-hand side item feeds into the right-hand side item):
VF ⇛ Module ⇛ VNF ⇛ Network/SDN service ⇛ E2E network service ⇛ Product (future) ⇛ Offer (future)
With upcoming MEC applications, the million dollar question is, will ONAP orchestrate MEC applications as well? This is to be determined, but if this happens, ONAP will be even further from device-orientation than it already is.
CLOUD NATIVE
ONAP Casablanca is moving towards an emphasis on cloud native; so what does that mean for virtual network functions (VNFs), or ONAP’s ability to provide an operational layer for NFV? To break it down more specifically:
Can VNFs be cloud native? Yes! In fact they can be, and ONAP highly encourages, I daresay, insists upon it (see ONAP VNF Development requirements here). Cloud-native or containerized network functions (CNFs) are just around the corner and they will be fully supported by ONAP (when we say VNF, we include CNFs in that discussion).
ONAP documentation includes references to VNFs and PNFs – does that mean there is no room for CNFs?ONAP refers to VNFs and PNFs since they constitute higher level services. This would be tantamount to saying that if AWS uses the words VM or container, they need to be written off as outmoded. Moreover, new services such as 5G are expected to be built out of physical network functions (PNFs) — for performance reasons — and VNFs. Therefore, ONAP anticipates orchestrating and managing the lifecycle of PNFs.
Is the fact that VNFs are not always written in a cloud-native manner mean that ONAP has been mis-architected? It is true that a large number of VNFs are VNFs-in-name-only (i.e. PNFs that have been virtualized, but not much else); however, this is orthogonal to ONAP. As mentioned above, ONAP does not include VNFs.
LACK OF INNOVATION
We’ve also heard suggestions that ONAP lacks innovation. For example, there have been questions around the types of clouds supported by ONAP in addition to OpenStack and different NFVI compute instances in addition to virtual machines. In fact, ONAP provides tremendous flexibility in these areas:
Different clouds —There are two levels at which we can discuss clouds. First, clouds that ONAP can run on, and second clouds that ONAP can orchestrate VNFs onto. Since ONAP is already containerized and managed using Kubernetes, the first topic is moot. ONAP can already run on any cloud that supports k8s (which is every cloud out there). For the second use case, the ONAP Casablanca release has experimental support for Kubernetes and Microsoft Azure. There is no reason so believe that this new cloud types like AWS Outpost etc. can’t be supported.
Different compute types — Currently, ONAP instantiates VNFs that are packaged as VMs. With this, ONAP already supports unikernels (i.e. ridiculously small VMs) should a VNF vendor choose to package their VNF as a unikernel. Moreover, ONAP is working on full K8s support that will allow container and Kata Container based VNFs. The only compute type that I think is not on the roadmap is function-as-a-service (aka serverless). But with an NFV use case I don’t see the need to support this compute type. Maybe if/when ONAP supports MEC application orchestration, it will need to do so. I don’t view this as a showstopper. When the time comes, I’m sure the ONAP community will figure out how to support function-as-a-service — it’s not that hard of a problem.
Different controllers — Through the use of message bus approach, ONAP has a set of controllers optimized for layers of SDN/NFV (physical, virtual, application).
In summary, it is always important to make sure you are aware of ONAP’s ability to support a model driven, service oriented, cloud native, transformative future. Hopefully this blog clarifies some of those points.
This article was written by Amar Kapadia and was previously published at Aarna Networks.
This week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 in Seattle was the biggest ever! This sold-out event featured four days of information on Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, OpenTracing, Fluentd, gRPC, containerd, and rkt, along with many other exciting projects and topics.
More than 100 lightning talks, keynotes, and technical sessions from the event have already been posted.
The 8,000 attendees attending the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s(CNCF) KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Kubernetes conference this week in Seattle demonstrated the exponential growth in interest in this complex, technical combination of open source technologies.
I attend many technology conferences, most recently a blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), and Internet of things conference (see my article from that event). Compared to blockchain in particular as well as AI, my first KubeCon takeaway is that Kubernetes actually works. …
For my seventh takeaway, I saved the most remarkable for last: women are leading the Kubernetes charge. Yes, you read that right. While the audience at KubeCon was perhaps 90% male, the keynote speakers were more than half female.
The state of open source in 2018, and especially, the IBM’s Red Hat purchase, were discussed in this podcast with Rachel Stephens, an analyst with of RedMonk, and Michael Coté, director, marketing, at Pivotal Software, hosted by Libby Clark, editorial director, and Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief, of The New Stack.
Indeed, 2018 is even being touted at the “year of open source” in many circles, Stephens said. “The mega acquisitions and just tends to really validate open-source as the method of building in the future and as a viable approach for building your stack. And I think, at the same time, we contrast that with some kind of clouds on the horizon in terms of the growing tension between an ability to run an open source business in the face of cloud providers.”
While many Embedded Linux Conference talks cover emerging technologies, some of the most useful are those that survey the embedded development tools and techniques that are already available. These summaries are not only useful for newcomers but can be a helpful reality check and a source for best practices for more experienced developers.
In “Strategies for Developing and Deploying your Embedded Applications and Images,” Mirza Krak, an embedded developer at Mender.io, surveys the many options for prepping and deploying software on devices. These range from cross-device development strategies between the desktop and embedded platforms to using IDEs to working with Yocto/OE-Core with package managers. Krak, who spoke at this October’s ELC Europe conference in Edinburgh, also covered configuration management tools, network boot utilities, and update solutions such as swupdate and Mender.
Basic desktop/embedded cross development
It’s easier to do your development on a desktop PC rather than directly on an embedded device, said Krak. Even if your device can run the required development software and distributions, you cannot easily integrate all the tools that are available on the desktop. In addition, compile times tend to be very slow.
On the desktop, “everything is available to you via apt-get install, and there is high availability of trace and debug tools,” said Krak. “You have a lot more control when doing things like running a binary, and you can build, debug, and test on the same machine so there are usually very short development cycles.”
Eventually, however, you’ll probably need to do some cross-device development. “You can use some mock hardware to do some basic sanity testing on the desktop, but you are not testing on the hardware where the software will run, which may have some constraints.”
A typical approach for cross-device development is to run Yocto Project or Buildroot on your PC and then cross compile and transfer the binaries to the embedded device. This adds to the complexity because you are compiling the code on one device and you may need to transfer it to multiple devices for testing.
You can use the secure copy (scp) command or transfer data by USB stick. However, “It’s a lot of manual work and prone to error, and it’s hard to replicate across many devices,” said Krak. “I’m surprised at how many people don’t go beyond this entry point.”
IDEs and Package Managers
An easier and more reliable approach is to use an IDE such as Eclipse or Qt Creator, which have plug-ins to cross compile. “IDEs usually have post-build hooks that transfer the binary to the device and run it,” said Krak. “With Qt Creator, you can launch the debug server on the device and do remote debugging remotely.”
IDEs are great for simpler projects, especially for beginning or casual developers, but they may lack the flexibility required for more complex jobs. Krak generally prefers package managers — collections of tools for automating the processing of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing software — which are much the same as those you’d find on a desktop Linux PC.
“Package managers give you more sanity checks and controls, and the ability to state dependencies,” said Krak. Package managers for embedded targets include deb, rpm, and opkg, and you can also turn to package utilities like apt, yum, dnf, pacman, zipper, and smart.
“If you’re compiling your Debian application in a build system you could say ‘make dpkg’, which will package your binary and any configuration files you might have,” said Krak. “You can then transfer the binary to your device and install. This is less error prone since you have dependency tracking and upstream and custom package feeds.”
Package managers are useful during prototyping and early development, but you typically won’t make them available to the embedded end user, said Krak. In addition, not all embedded devices support platforms such as Ubuntu or Raspbian that include package managers.
Krak typically works with a Yocto Project/Open Embedded environment and uses the OE-core Angstrom distribution, which maintains opkg package feeds. “You can include meta-angstrom in your Yocto build and set DISTRO = ‘angstrom’ to you get package feeds,” said Krak. “But there’s a lot more to Angstrom that you may not want, so you may want to create a more customized setup based on Poky or something.”
Yocto generates package feeds when you do an image build, giving you a choice of rpm, deb, or ipk. Yet, “these are only packages, not a complete package feed,” said Krak. To enable a feed, “there’s a bitbake package-index command that generates the files. You expose the deploy server where all your packages are to make it available on your device.”
While this process handles the “service side” package feed, you still need tools on your embedded device. Within Yocto, “there’s an EXTRA_IMAGE_FEATURES setting you can set to package-management,” said Krak. “There’s also a recipe in meta-openembedded/meta-oe called distro-feed-configs.bb. If you include it in your build it will generate the config files needed for your package manager.”
Config management, network boot, and update solutions
Krak went on to discuss configuration management tools such as CFEngine, Puppet, Chef, and Ansible. “These are very common in the enterprise server world if you need to manage a fleet of servers,” said Krak. “some apply workflows to embedded devices. You install a golden image on all your devices, and then set up connectivity and trust between the CM server and device. You can then script the configuration.”
Krak also surveyed solutions for more complex projects in which the application extends beyond a single binary. “You may be developing a specialized piece of hardware for a very specific use case or perhaps you depend on some custom kernel options,” said Krak.
Network booting is useful here because you can “deploy all the resources necessary to boot your device,” said Krak. “On boot, the system fetches the Linux kernel device tree and file system, so you just need to reboot the device to update the software. The setup can be complex, but it has the advantage of being easily extended to boot multiple devices.”
Typical network booting schemes such as PXELINUX and PXE boot use a tftp server setup on a laptop where you put the build artifacts you want to deploy. Alternatively, you can script it using the NFS root file-system.
A final alternative for complex systems is to use an update solution such as Mender, rauc, or swupdate. “You can use these early in the development process to deploy your builds,” said Krak. “If you build the same device in production, you can use the same software to test it throughout the development process, which builds confidence. Some use image-based updates, which is nice because your devices are stateless, which simplifies testing. Updaters fit well into development workflow and make it easier to integrate build artifacts. They often have features to avoid bricking devices.”
As a developer for Mender.io, Krak is most familiar with Mender, which provides an A/B image update strategy. “You have two copies of the OS and you do image-based updates so you always update the whole system,” explained Krak. You can watch the complete presentation below.
