Blockchain Beyond the Hype: What is the Strategic Business Value?

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June 21, 2018

Companies can determine whether they should invest in blockchain by focusing on specific use cases and their market position.

Speculation on the value of blockchain is rife, with Bitcoin—the first and most infamous application of blockchain—grabbing headlines for its rocketing price and volatility. That the focus of blockchain is wrapped up with Bitcoin is not surprising given that its market value surged from less than $20 billion to more than $200 billion over the course of 2017.1Yet Bitcoin is only the first application of blockchain technology that has captured the attention of government and industry.

Blockchain was a priority topic at Davos; a World Economic Forum survey suggested that 10 percent of global GDP will be stored on blockchain by 2027.2Multiple governments have published reports on the potential implications of blockchain, and the past two years alone have seen more than half a million new publications on and 3.7 million Google search results for blockchain.

Linux and Open-Source Jobs Are in More Demand Than Ever

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ZDNet

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June 21, 2018

Do you want a tech job? Then, it’s time to move away from Windows and head toward Linux and open source. According to The Linux Foundation and Dice‘s 2018 Open Source Jobs Report, 87 percent of hiring managers are having trouble finding open-source talent, while hiring open-source talent is now a priority for 83 percent of employers.

“Open source technology talent is in high demand, as Linux and other open source software dominates software development,” said Linux Foundation’s executive director, Jim Zemlin, in a statement. “I am encouraged that that companies are recognizing more and more each day that open-source technology is the way to advance their businesses. The Linux Foundation, our members, and the open source ecosystem are focused on ensuring training and certification opportunities are highly accessible to everyone who wants to seek them out.”

5 Pillars of Learning Programming

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D Zone

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June 21, 2018

Learning how to program is hard. I often find that university courses and boot camps miss important aspects of programming and take poor approaches to teaching rookies.

I want to share the 5 basic pillars I believe a successful programming course should build upon. As always, I am addressing the context of mainstream web applications.

A rookie’s goal is to master the fundamentals of programming and to understand the importance of libraries and frameworks.

Advanced topics such as the cloud, operations in general, or build tools should not be part of the curriculum. I am also skeptical when it comes to Design Patterns. They presume experience that beginners never have.

Test-Driven Development (TDD)

TDD brings a lot of benefits. Unfortunately, it is an advanced topic that beginners are not entirely ready for.

Beginners shouldn’t write tests. This would be too much for their basic skill levels. Instead, they should learn how to use and work with tests.

Anatomy of a Perfect Pull Request

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OpenSource.com

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June 21, 2018

Writing clean code is just one of many factors you should care about when creating a pull request.

Large pull requests cause a big overhead during the code review and can facilitate bugs in the codebase.

That’s why you need to care about the pull request itself. It should be short, have a clear title and description, and do only one thing.

Why should you care?

A good pull request will be reviewed quickly
It reduces bug introduction into codebase
It facilitates new developers onboarding
It does not block other developers
It speeds up the code review process and consequently, product development

Google’s Fuchsia Adds Emulator for Running Linux Apps

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Eric Brown

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June 20, 2018

Google has added a Guest app to its emergent and currently open source Fuchsia OS to enable Linux apps to run within Fuchsia as a virtual machine (VM). The Guest app makes use of a library called Machina that permits closer integration with the OS than is available with typical emulators, according to a recent 9to5Google story.

Last month, Google announced a Project Crostini technology that will soon let Chromebook users more easily run mainstream Linux applications within a Chrome OS VM. This week, Acer’s Chromebook Flip C101 joined the short list of Chromebooks that will offer Linux support later this year.

While it’s encouraging that Chrome OS will soon support Linux apps is addition to Android, it’s not entirely surprising — since Android and Chrome OS are based on Linux. Yet, one of the first things Google emphasized when it revealed Fuchsia in 2016 was that it’s not based on the Linux kernel.

To some, Fuchsia seemed to be something of a betrayal considering how Linux not only forms the basis for Android and Chrome OS but also the Google enterprise platforms. Why add another Windows or iOS when we were getting so close to everyone sharing a common Linux foundation?

No doubt, Google has some very good reasons for avoiding Linux. One reason may be the age and complexity of Linux. By starting from scratch, Google can escape that aspect and deliver more elegant, up-to-date code with fewer targets for hackers. Google is also baking secure updates deeply into the OS, and unlike Linux, is isolating applications from having direct kernel access.

Open for now

Back in 2016, we thought Google might be skipping over Linux to shift to a proprietary OS that it could control the way Apple dictates all things iOS. That may still happen, but for now Fuchsia is an open source project.

Some also speculated at time that considering the trim little microkernel, Google was bypassing Linux due to its inability to scale downward into the MCU realm. Yet, MCU-based IoT does not appear to be the current focus of Fuchsia. Several reports, including a TechRadar post last week, have said that Fuchsia is intended to replace both Android and Chrome OS, and the combined platform will eventually be called Google Andromeda.

Earlier this year, 9to5Google reported that Fuchsia would include separate UIs — an Armadillo UI for phones and a Capybara UI for desktops — and like Android Things and other new Android variants, would tightly integrate Google Assistant voice technology. Essentially, this is the same idea that was behind Microsoft’s failed plan to offer a common Windows for phones and laptops, or Canonical’s defunct “convergence” version of Ubuntu.

Guest ex Machina

Whatever Fuchsia’s destiny, Google needs to attract mature applications, as well as developers, and the best way to do that is to add Linux app compatibility. The new Guest app, which initially supports Linux-based platforms including Debian, works with the Machina library to accomplish this in a way that goes beyond what you can get from QEMU, suggests 9to5Google.

Google describes Fuchsia’s Machina as “a library that builds on top of the Zircon hypervisor to provide virtualized peripherals that integrate with a garnet system.” Zircon is the Fuchsia microkernel, based on Little Kernel (LK), and formerly called Magenta. Garnet is the layer that sits directly atop Zircon and offers device drivers, the Escher graphics renderer, Fuchsia’s Amber updater, and the Xi Core engine for the Xi text and code editor. Other layers include Peridot for app design, and on top, Topaz, a Flutter-supported app layer.

Machina adopts the Virtio virtualization standard, which is also used by the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). It makes use of Virtio’s vsock virtual socket, “which can open direct channels between a host operating system and its guest, to allow for conveniences that would be otherwise impossible,” says 9to5Google.

This extra effort will likely enable fast mouse performance, automatically adjusted screen resolution, and support for multiple displays, file transfers, and copy and paste, says the story. This appears to be much like the allegedly superior emulation that is expected with Google’s Project Crostini for running Linux apps on Chrome OS. The news of the Guest app follows earlier reports that suggested that Google is building an Android Runtime into Fuchsia rather than depending on emulation to run Android apps.

App emulators should be viewed with some skepticism. Most of the mobile Linux OS contenders promised some sort of Android app compatibility, but they have generally failed to deliver. Still, by building emulation deeply into the stack from the start rather than adding an emulator on later, Fuchsia may well offer Linux developers an emulator that they can live with.

Join us at Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Edinburgh, UK on October 22-24, 2018, for 100+ sessions on Linux, Cloud, Containers, AI, Community, and more.

8 Surprising Facts about Real Docker Adoption

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Datadog Blog

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June 20, 2018

With thousands of companies using Datadog to monitor their infrastructure and applications, we can see software trends emerging in real time. Today we’re excited to share our latest research into Docker adoption and usage.

Increasingly, Docker is not being run as a standalone technology but as part of a larger containerization strategy, which includes automated orchestration of workloads. Roughly half of the companies that monitor Docker with Datadog now also monitor an orchestrator such as Kubernetes or Mesos, or a hosted orchestration platform from AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.

In AWS environments, where Elastic Container Service (ECS) enables users to launch a container cluster in a matter of clicks, orchestration is especially prevalent. Roughly 70 percent of companies running both Docker and AWS infrastructure are also using orchestration. ECS continues to lead in AWS organizations, with 45 percent market share, but Kubernetes has also made steady gains and is now running in 30 percent of AWS Docker environments. With the recent launch of Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), we expect Kubernetes adoption to accelerate in AWS over the coming months.

This Week in Numbers: Discrimination in the Tech Industry

By

The New Stack

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June 20, 2018

Regardless of their sex, one in three people would recommend an employer even if they had seen discrimination while working there. That is one takeaway from the Dice Diversity and Inclusion Report 2018. Based on a survey of US and UK tech professionals using Dice or and eFinancialCareers, the report looked at discrimination based on gender, age and politics.

The study found that 85 percent of women believe gender discrimination exists in the tech industry while only 62 percent of men feel likewise. In other words, twice as many men don’t see sexism. The results mirror many other studies that show men are much less likely to see sexism as a problem. This dynamic also plays out in regards to racism, with black and brown people much more likely to be concerned. Which leads us to ask, why wasn’t discrimination based on ethnicity discussed? The omission is striking!

According to the Dice survey, more tech professionals experienced or witnessed discrimination due to age compared to gender, political affiliation, or sexual orientation. …In fact, among those 55 or older, 88 percent are worried that their age can hurt their continuing career.

The Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin

By

O'Reilly

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June 20, 2018

Blockchain technologies have been made popular by the creation of bitcoin, but how exactly can a blockchain benefit an enterprise? A blockchain provides an immutable store of facts. This model delivers significant value in the face of regulatory oversight by providing irrevocable proof that transactions occurred. Some even refer to these uses of a blockchain as enterprise resource planning (ERP) 2.0.

The foundational pieces that comprise a blockchain model are already in place in one fashion or another within most enterprises. They have not, however, been pieced together with the required technology components to produce the benefits of a blockchain. There are three main components required to deliver these benefits: a shared distributed ledger, smart contracts, and consensus….

These three components individually exist in some fashion in different parts of an organization, but they have not been assembled into something as well-packaged and overarching as a blockchain. Ledgers exist within accounting systems, smart contracts or FaaS exist within production software environments, and consensus algorithms exist in many places, including within expense reporting systems.

The key for an enterprise is to focus not just on the blockchain concept or isolated blockchain technology, but to understand how to integrate a blockchain’s key components into their environment.

A Broad Overview of How Modern Linux Systems Boot

By

UTCC

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June 20, 2018

For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, today I feel like writing down a broad and simplified overview of how modern Linux systems boot. Due to being a sysadmin who has stubbed his toe here repeatedly, I’m going to especially focus on points of failure.

The system loads and starts the basic bootloader somehow, through either BIOS MBR booting or UEFI. This can involve many steps on its own and any number of things can go wrong, such as unsigned UEFI bootloaders on a Secure Boot system. Generally these failures are the most total; the system reports there’s nothing to boot, or it repeatedly reboots, or the bootloader aborts with what is generally a cryptic error message.
On a UEFI system, the bootloader needs to live in the EFI system partition, which is always a FAT32 filesystem. Some people have had luck making this a software RAID mirror with the right superblock format; see the comments on this entry.
The bootloader loads its configuration file and perhaps additional modules from somewhere, usually your /boot but also perhaps your UEFI system partition. Failures here can result in extremely cryptic errors, dropping you into a GRUB shell, or ideally a message saying ‘can’t find your menu file’. The configuration file location is usually hardcoded, which is sometimes unfortunate if your distribution has picked a bad spot.

Open Source Skills Soar In Demand According to 2018 Jobs Report

By

The Linux Foundation

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June 19, 2018

Linux expertise is again in the top spot as the most sought after open source skill, says the latest Open Source Jobs Reportfrom Dice and The Linux Foundation. The seventh annual report shows rapidly growing demand for open source skills, particularly in areas of cloud technology.

Key findings of the report include:

Linux tops the list as the most in-demand open source skill, making it mandatory for most entry-level open source careers. This is due in part to the growth of cloud and container technologies, as well as DevOps practices, all of which are typically built on Linux.
Container technology is rapidly growing in popularity and importance, with 57% of hiring managers seeking those skills, up from 27% last year.
Hiring open source talent is a priority for 83% of hiring managers, up from 76% in 2017.
Hiring managers are increasingly opting to train existing employees on new open source technologies and help them gain certifications.
Many organizations are getting involved in open source with the express purpose of attracting developers.

Career Building

In terms of job seeking and job hiring, the report shows high demand for open source skills and a strong career benefit from open source experience.

87% of open source professionals say knowing open source has advanced their career.
87% of hiring managers experience difficulties in recruiting open source talent.

Hiring managers say they are specifically looking to recruit in the following areas:

Diversity

This year’s survey included optional questions about companies’ initiatives to increase diversity in open source hiring, which has become a hot topic throughout the tech industry. The responses showed a significant difference between the views of hiring managers and those of open source pros — with only 52% of employees seeing those diversity efforts as effective compared with 70% of employers.

Overall, the 2018 Open Source Jobs Report indicates a strong market for open source talent, driven in part by the growth of cloud-based technologies. This market provides a wealth of opportunities for professionals with open source skills, as companies increasingly recognize the value of open source.

The 2018 Open Source Jobs Survey and Report, sponsored by Dice and The Linux Foundation, provides an overview of the latest trends for open source careers. Download the complete Open Source Jobs Report now.

This article originally appeared at The Linux Foundation.