Every year, Stack Overflow conducts its developer survey and shares its results with the public for analysis. Expanding its reach, this year over 100,000 developers took part in the 30-minute survey and told how they learn new technologies, which tools they use to get their work done, and what they look for while hunting some job.
The most popular development platform
If you look at this year’s data, you’ll notice that 48.3% developers responded with Linux as the platform they have done development work for this year. It was followed by Windows Desktop and Server with 35.4%.
One of the main advantages of embracing containers is “lightweight virtualization.” Since each container is just a thin layer around the containerized processes, the user gains enormous efficiencies, for example by increasing the container density per host, or by spinning containers up and down at a very fast pace.
However, as the troubleshooting story in the article will show, this lightweight virtualization comes at the cost of sharing the underlying kernel among all containers, and in some circumstances, this can lead to surprising and undesirable effects that container users typically don’t think about.
This troubleshooting tale is rather involved. I’ve started from the basics and worked up to the more complex material in the hope that readers at all levels can get value out of it.
This article was sponsored by Huawei and written by Linux.com.
The 2018 Open Networking Summit (ONS) is almost here. We spoke to Bill Ren, Vice President Network Industry & Ecosystem Development at Huawei recently to glean some insights on ONAP since Huawei is a founding member and top contributor to this project.
“SDN/NFV solutions have been in the market for many years but we did not see massive deployment due to lack of working standards and automation,” Bill said.
Bill Ren, VP, Network Industry & Ecosystem Development, Huawei Technologies Co.,Ltd.
“We believe open source will help produce de facto standards faster. We need to bring automation and intelligence into networking, we need a full end to end automation platform and that is why ONAP is particularly important for networking.”
Here is what Bill had to say about the ONAP’s growing role in open networking.
Linux.com: How does adopting ONAP as a standard help all operators and vendors to innovate?
Bill:ONAP can help to set up a common framework for all operators as an onboarding resource, or to design and deploy service, manage and control the network, collect data from networks, and manage policy. Adopting ONAP as a standard means that operators can focus on service innovation rather than on the software platform itself. And, vendors can focus on innovation as ONAP removes the difficulty of OSS integration and brings an open unified marketplace for all vendors.
Linux.com: Huawei leads five of 28 ONAP projects, including SO, VNF SDK, Modeling, Integration and ONAP CLI. Why did Huawei choose those projects? What benefits do you see in those projects?
Bill: Huawei treats open source as a strategic tool to build a healthy telecom industry, and we set up a dedicated management team for networking open source projects like ONAP. We chose to lead some of these projects because they are key elements in building a healthy ecosystem. Take modeling for example. Modeling aims to build common information model for network resource and service across the whole industry. This will result in simple and quick resource onboarding and OSS/BSS integration. VNF SDK aims to build common VNF packaging and marketplace. Integration aims to support multi-cloud and multi-vendor environments. SO is the core component in ONAP that links other components so that they work together.
Huawei also chose to lead these key projects because we, as an end-to-end telecom solution leader, have the necessary resources, expertise and experience to significantly contribute. For example, we can involve our global expertise in SDOs for modelling project. And we can involve our key customer to discuss use case, requirements and POC/trials. Huawei believes an open healthy ecosystem will enlarge the total market and ultimately benefit Huawei’s business.
Linux.com: What benefits do you see in being involved in the ONAP community?
Bill: We learned a lot. ONAP brings really good architecture for network automation and this will benefit our related products. ONAP brings operator and vendor together and this will help us to understand requirements much better. ONAP will even bring a chance to try some new business model in certain area like service or cloudification. I believe we will see more and more benefits over time. I believe we will see more and more benefits over time.
Linux.com: Your keynote at Open Networking Summit is “Make Infrastructure Relevant to a Better Future.” Explain that please. What has Huawei done along these lines and how well is it working?
Bill: Yes. Building an open ecosystem and accelerating operational transformation is our industry strategy. Infrastructure operators need operational transformation to be more deeply relevant to a better digital intelligent society. And open source is the strategy tool for that. My keynote at ONS will address this point.
Basically, we believe all partners in our industry, including SDOs and open source projects, operators and vendors can work together to build an open and intent-driven cloud-friendly network to empower the digital life and vertical digitalization. I am happy to see that most network related open source projects are now merged into Linux Foundation Networking (LFN) umbrella and SDOs like MEF/TMF are cooperating with LFN. I would say it moves on the right direction.
Linux.com: What are your thoughts on the Linux Foundation Networking umbrella overall?
Bill: I look forward to LFN speeding the building of the open source networking ecosystem, and Telco operation transformation. I would like to see LFN work out a clear technical vision, flexible full stack architecture, cross-domain common models, harmonized SDO cooperation and faster production and field trials. I recommend LFN set up a strong Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) team, unified use case committee, and unified verification programs. I believe our industry has found a better way to work together, and I look forward to another quick change and successful year for our industry.
It’s no surprise that game server scaling is usually done by proprietary software—most orchestration and scaling systems simply aren’t built for this kind of workload.
Many of the popular fast-paced online multiplayer games such as competitive FPSs, MMOs and MOBAs require a dedicated game server—a full simulation of the game world—for players to connect to as they play within it. This dedicated game server is usually hosted somewhere on the internet to facilitate synchronizing the state of the game between players, but also to be the arbiter of truth for each client playing the game, which also has the benefit of safeguarding against players cheating.
Dedicated game servers are stateful applications that retain the full game simulation in memory. But unlike other stateful applications, such as databases, they have a short lifetime. Rather than running for months or years, a dedicated game server runs for a few minutes or hours.
Dedicated game servers also need a direct connection to a running game server process’ hosting IP and port, rather than relying on load balancers.
In honor of Pi Day, Chaim Gartenberg and I cooked up a tiny little Raspberry Pi project for yesterday’s episode of Circuit Breaker Live.
We started with a simple concept: a button that says “Why?” when you press it, in honor of our favorite podcast. So we knew we’d need a button, some sound files, a little bit of Python code, and, of course, a Raspberry Pi.
A new Pi is $35, but we found an old Raspberry Pi 2 in my desk drawer, which was up to the task. (Newer Pis have built-in Wi-Fi and faster processors, but for our simple button project we didn’t need internet or extra horsepower.)
Are you managing an open source project or considering launching one? If so, it may come as a surprise that one of the challenges you can face is rapid growth. Matt Butcher, Principal Software Development Engineer at Microsoft, addressed this issue in a presentation at Open Source Summit North America. His talk covered everything from teamwork to the importance of knowing your goals and sticking to them.
Butcher described a case study involving Kubernetes Helm, a package system for Kubernetes. Helm arose from a company team-building hackathon, with an original team of three people giving birth to it. Within 18 months, the project had hundreds of contributors and thousands of active users.
Developer Q&A site Stack Overflow performs an annual survey to find out more about the programmer community, and the latest set of results has just been published.
JavaScript remains the most widely used programming language among professional developers, making that six years at the top for the lingua franca of Web development. Other Web tech including HTML (#2 in the ranking), CSS (#3), and PHP (#9). Business-oriented languages were also in wide use, with SQL at #4, Java at #5, and C# at #8. Shell scripting made a surprising showing at #6 (having not shown up at all in past years, which suggests that the questions have changed year-to-year), Python appeared at #7, and systems programming stalwart C++ rounded out the top 10.
In just 2 weeks, you could be one of 2,000 architects, developers, and thought leaders from over 300 companies coming together to drive the future of networking integration, acceleration and deployment.
Top 10 Reasons to Attend
1. Visionary Keynotes Speakers: Thought leaders from Alibaba, Amazon Web Services, Amdocs, AT&T, Google, Huawei, Intel, Orange, Red Hat, Ticketmaster, Uber and more will deliver talks on the future of networking.
2. Networking Demos: LF Networking will showcase 8 community-driven demos (OPNFV, OpenDaylight, OpenvSwitch, ONAP, and DPDK) in the technology showcase. Additional demos will be featured at the Open Networking Foundation booth, the Acumos Project booth, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation booth, and across sponsor booths. Additional demos will be on-hand Tuesday and Wednesday as part of SOSR.
Linux will turn 30 in three years. We look at how far the major Linux distributions – or distros – have come over the past year and what they might be able to bring in the future
If the collective roadmap progressions of the major open source distributions (distros) throughout 2017 show anything, it is the importance of applying automation intelligence and cloud network orchestration to the total stack of functions that go towards making up an enterprise-grade Linux operating system (OS).
Today, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to accept NATS as an incubation-level hosted project, alongside Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing, Fluentd, Linkerd, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt, CNI, Envoy, Jaeger, Notary, TUF, Rook and Vitess.
Built from the ground up to be cloud native, NATS is a mature, seven-year-old open source messaging technology that implements the publish/subscribe, request/reply and distributed queue patterns to help create a performant and secure method of InterProcess Communication (IPC). Simplicity, performance, scalability and security are the core tenets of NATS.
The project consists of a family of open source components that are tightly integrated but can be deployed independently. NATS is based on a client-server architecture with servers that can be clustered to operate as a single entity – clients connect to these clusters to exchange data encapsulated in messages.
