Introducing Agones: Open Source, Multiplayer, Dedicated Game-Server Hosting Built on Kubernetes

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March 16, 2018

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.

How to Build Something ‘Useful’ With a Raspberry Pi

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The Verge

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March 16, 2018

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.)

Lessons Learned from Growing an Open Source Project Too Fast

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The Linux Foundation

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March 16, 2018

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.

Developers Love Trendy New Languages but Earn More with Functional Programming

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ArsTechnica

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March 16, 2018

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.

Top 10 Reasons to Attend Open Networking Summit NA

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The Linux Foundation

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March 15, 2018

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.

Inside the Distros: A Year in Linux Development

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ComputerWeekly

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March 15, 2018

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).

The big brands in enterprise Linux include Canonical with its Ubuntu OS, Red Hat with its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and SuSE with SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). Other growing names spanning the free and open source category include Linux Mint, CentOS, Fedora, Mandriva, ReactOS, Solus and Chrome OS from Google.

CNCF to Host NATS

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Cloud Native Computing Foundation

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March 15, 2018

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.

Defining the Spectrum of Cloud Deployment Technologies

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The New Stack

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March 15, 2018

We’ve come far from a simplistic separation between on-premises and cloud. Today, it’s about on-premises versus a range of different cloud options. Indeed, the cloud can be a confusing place for newcomers and veterans alike, with new options cropping up every few months, and the landscape always shifting towards the newer and better.

But how do you choose between good, better and best? Let’s compare the various cloud deployment technologies available today and find the common ground and what separates them from each other.

Bare Metal in the Cloud

A bare metal server in the cloud is the closest alternative to a hardware server. Bare metal cloud delivers the real hardware server experience, but instead of the server being hosted in your own datacenter, it’s in a vendor-provided cloud.

38-Year-Old Code-Writing Tool Released for General Use

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Phys,org

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March 15, 2018

One of the world’s early computer software editors, developed by the University of Adelaide and still in use today, is being released by the University for free use by developers around the world. Under open source licence, beneficial features of “Ludwig” as a software development tool that are not found in other text and code editors will be now open to all developers.

Ludwig, a “full screen” editor, was originally designed by Computer Science staff to enable software development on the University’s first VAX (Virtual Address eXtension) interactive computers, bought in 1979 to replace the previous computer systems of punch cards, printed output, and batch processing.

Read more at PhysOrg

Development Versions of Oracle Linux UEK now available on GitHub

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Oracle

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March 15, 2018

The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) is a Linux kernel built by Oracle and supported via Oracle Linux support. Its focus is performance, stability, and minimal backports by tracking the mainline source code as closely as is practical. UEK is well–tested and used to run Oracle’s Engineered Systems, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and large enterprise deployments for Oracle customers.

We’re posting the source on GitHub for our weekly development builds. Building from this repository requires additional dependencies which are indicated on the GitHub README file. The source for production builds will continue to be available via git here.