When two good things get together, they can create something even better.
That’s the case with quantum information—the marriage of quantum physics and computing theory. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has contributed to much of its history and is helping to shape its future.
“We have been there from the beginning,” says NIST physicist Carl Williams, who has directed much of the agency’s efforts in this field since the early 2000s. “We can now see quantum information moving from a purely scientific field to a technological one.”
In the not-too-distant future, a quantum version of a traditional computer could perform sophisticated simulations that could lead to new drugs and high-tech materials. In the longer term, a more powerful quantum computer, if it can be built, could quickly break the digital security that currently protects online banking and shopping.
Most people are introduced to Docker and Linux containers as a way to approach solving a very specific problem they are experiencing in their organization. The problem they want to solve often revolves around either making the dev/test cycle faster and more reliable while simultaneously shortening the related feedback loops, or improving the packaging and deploying of applications into production in a very similar fashion. Today, there are a lot of tools in the ecosystem that can significantly decrease the time it takes to accomplish these tasks while also vastly improving the ability of individuals, teams, and organizations to reliably perform repetitive tasks successfully.
That being said, tools have become such a big focus in the ecosystem that there are many people who haven’t really spent much time thinking about all the ways containers alone can provide interesting solutions to problems that can occur in the course of any technical task.
Here are three reasons to consider using Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry together.
Containerization is the new virtualization: Containers present a new way to virtualizing compute resources that is faster and more efficient than traditional virtual machines. Containers are also much easier to build and deploy, thanks to tools like Docker and other container engines. Now, with the rapid technological advancement and market adoption of Kubernetes, the industry is driving toward de facto standardization of a new, container-centric infrastructure platform. Kubernetes is here to stay, and organizations will soon be able to count on Kubernetes as an omnipresent layer in any system infrastructure.
For Cloud Foundry users, the increasing availability of high value, container-based infrastructure, like Kubernetes, is an exciting development.
You may think you’re new to Linux, but you’re really not. There are 3.74 billion global internet users, and all of them use Linux in some way since Linux servers power 90% of the internet. Most modern routers run Linux or Unix, and the TOP500 supercomputers also rely on Linux. If you own an Android smartphone, your operating system is constructed from the Linux kernel.
But there’s a difference between using Linux-based technologies and using Linux itself. If you’re interested in Linux, but have been using a PC or Mac desktop, you may be wondering what you need to know to use the Linux command line interface (CLI). You’ve come to the right place.
In other words, Linux is everywhere.
The following are the fundamental Linux commands you need to know. Each is simple and easy to commit to memory.
You’ve heard about Cloud Foundry, and you know it’s growing fast and might be something you’re interested in. But what exactly is Cloud Foundry? One possible short answer is Yet Another Cloudy Thingy, because there sure are a lot of cloud projects. A better short answer is Platform as a Service (Paas), for building, managing, and deploying cloud-native applications.
In this series, you will learn about Cloud Foundry and how to get started using it to develop applications. In the first three blogs, we’ll cover basic concepts, terminology, a technical overview and architecture, and in the last two blogs we’ll learn how to write and push an app to a Cloud Foundry instance. The information in this series is based on the Cloud Foundry for Developers (LFD232) training course from Cloud Foundry and The Linux Foundation. You can download a sample chapter from the course here.
What is PaaS?
PaaS describes a complete infrastructure for developing, managing, and deploying applications. It bundles servers, networks, storage, operating systems, middleware, databases, and development tools into a scalable, centrally-managed hardware and software stack. PaaS can be specialized, for example for mobile application development, or generalized, supporting a wide range of platforms and development environments. PaaS may be on premises, or pay-as-you-go from a public service provider, or a combination of both. Some popular commercial PaaS hosts are Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, Red Hat’s OpenShift Online, Microsoft Azure, and Salesforce.
The goal is to streamline application development and management by relieving developers from the hassle of building and maintaining their own development and deployment environments. A PaaS host looks the same to the user, whether it is local or remote: all you need is computer and a network connection to access everything you need.
Cloud Foundry
There is a ton of information on cloudfoundry.org, but you have to dig to find out what Cloud Foundry is. It is a platform for building PaaS projects; it is not a standalone product but must run on top of an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) platform. Cloud Foundry was created at VMware in 2009 and was designed to run on VMware vSphere.
Cloud Foundry morphed and grew until it was spun off as an independent non-profit Linux Foundation project. It uses Open Container Initiative and lot of other cloud technologies including Docker, Kubernetes, and BOSH. Cloud Foundry also runs on OpenStack and aims to be platform-neutral, running on any IaaS. If you want to try building your own Cloud Foundry instance, follow these instructions on OpenStack.org. If you want to jump right into application development and not hassle with building your own PaaS, CloudFoundry.org maintains a list of certified providers, where you can get started for free or low-cost.
The Foundation certifies these projects, which must meet certain standards. The Cloud Foundry license is the Apache License 2.0, a permissive license that allows releasing modified code under different licenses, and grants permissive patent rights. The Foundation also offers developer certifications, and administers the Cloud Foundry Certified Developer Exam.
The Cloud Foundry Foundation owns the trademarks and manages the project, which is not a small task, as contributors and supporters include some industry heavyweights. The Foundation’s job is to be neutral and ensure that no single entity can control the code. There are a host of “intellectual property” (I loathe the term, but we’re stuck with it) issues to navigate and harmonize. If this sort of thing interests you, visit Cloud Foundry Foundation to learn all about governance, their board of directors, membership, and a host of other tasks and issues that the Foundation manages.
“Every Business is a Software Business”
This is a popular quotation now, and while I don’t agree completely with it, it is true that most businesses must be tech-savvy about custom app development. Cornelia Davis of Pivotal says: “You are either building a software business, or losing to someone who is.” Some classic examples are Netflix vs. Blockbuster, Uber and Lyft vs. cab and limo companies, Airbnb vs. the hotel/motel industry.
Not everyone is entirely happy with this invasion of software into everything. Every restaurant, store, and product now has its own app, and more and more devices want to yap at us all the time. Remember Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Murderer”? Albert Brock is fed up with the incessant din of modern society, people calling him on his wrist radio, and even his house nags him, so he embarks on a crusade of destruction to shut everything up. Quite prescient for 1953.
But, this is the state of our world now, and this is where the growth and opportunities are for software developers. And, to keep up with these modern times, over the next four parts of this series, you’ll learn how to get started with using Cloud Foundry as your development platform. Join me as we get started learning and building.
We’ve probably all heard the DevOps principle “you build it, you run it.” In theory, DevOps makes each team responsible for both the development and operation of its code, giving DevOps teams complete responsibility — and complete visibility and transparency — for the entire value stream, including not just coding, testing, securing, and complying, but even the business results of the code when it is running in production. But IT operations includes much more than the limited “ops” functions we typically fold into a DevOps team. I’m talking about things like ticket management, incident handling, user management and authorization, backups and recovery, network management, security operations, infrastructure procurement and cost optimization, compliance reporting, and much more. In today’s IT organization, where do these responsibilities fall? And how can we improve these operations and perhaps even apply DevOps and Agile principles to them?
This post, the first in a series on how to best think about operations in the cloud, will explore that set of operations functions that is not typically assigned to DevOps teams. We will also talk about how organizations not yet using DevOps can still benefit from streamlined operations when they migrate their applications as-is to the cloud.
The handy auditd package can help track down weaknesses in your system before, during, or after an attack.
Thanks to the unremitting, ever-present threat of a multitude of attacks to which a Linux system can be subjected, it’s critical to capture important changes and events made by users and processes on your running systems.
Highlighting such changes could potentially point toward something as innocuous as a simple misconfiguration but, equally, might proactively help stop an impending attack dead in its tracks. Additionally, having trustworthy, detailed logging data is exceptionally useful for post-event forensic analysis, especially when you are trying to discern how an attacker originally managed to compromise your system and get a foothold.
One such package I have been using recently on a large AWS server estate is called auditd . Its man page states: “auditd is the userspace component to the Linux Auditing System.”
ONAP and Kubernetes, two of the fastest growing and in demand open source projects, are coming together at Open Networking Summit this week. To ensure ONAP runs on Kubernetes in any environment, ONAP is now a part of the new Cross-Cloud CI project that integrates, tests and deploys the most popular cloud native projects.
The opening ONS keynote from Arpit Joshipura, GM Networking & Orchestration at Linux Foundation, will demonstrate and test ONAP 1.1.1 and 1.95 Kubernetes deployed across all public, private clouds and bare metal. For end users, the integration of open networking and cloud native technologies provides seamless portability of applications.
Version 2.17.0 of the Git source-code management system is out. It includes a long list of relatively minor tweaks. “Since Git 1.7.9, ‘git merge’ defaulted to –no-ff (i.e. even when the side branch being merged is a descendant of the current commit, create a merge commit instead of fast-forwarding) when merging a tag object. This was appropriate default for integrators who pull signed tags from their downstream contributors, but caused an unnecessary merges when used by downstream contributors…
The latest feature release Git v2.17.0 is now available at the usual places. It is comprised of 516 non-merge commits since v2.16.0, contributed by 71 people, 20 of which are new faces.
A couple of months ago I did a performance comparison between some of the top free DNS Resolvers available. It was just after Quad9 had launched and I was trying to decide which one to use and recommend to families and friends. Google, OpenDNS, Quad9, .. some many options… I love options …
And things just got better. CloudFlare, one of the companies that know the most about Internet performance recently launched their own free DNS resolver. It supports DNS over TLS and DNS over HTTPS by default, which makes it even more interesting.
