Announcing The Node.js Application Showcase

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January 17, 2018

The stats around Node.js are pretty staggering. There were 25 million downloads of Node.js in 2017, with over one million of them happening on a single day. And these stats are just the users. On the community side, the numbers are equally exceptional.

What explains this immense popularity? What we hear over and over is that, because Node.js is JavaScript, anyone who knows JS can apply that knowledge to build powerful apps — every kind of app. Node.js empowers everyone from hobbyists to the largest enterprise teams to bring their dreams to life faster than ever before.

“The Apache Way” — Open Source Done Well

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Jaxenter

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January 17, 2018

The Apache Software Foundation has been supporting open source for nearly twenty years. But what’s it all about? In this article, Ignasi Barrera goes over the organization and why it has been so successful in creating new technology for the benefit of the whole community.

We strongly believe that good software is built by strong communities. Successful open source projects are the result of the work and collaboration in their communities and the people behind them. It is all about the people. Experience has shown us that helping people work together as peers is key in producing software in a sustainable way, and we have collected the lessons learned all these years in what we call “The Apache Way”.

10 Lessons from 10 Years of AWS (part 1)

By

HackerNoon

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January 17, 2018

I recently presented a talk at the AWS Community Day in Bangalore. The tweet following the talk became my most popular tweet ever and I received quite a few requests for more details.

For the last 10 years, I have had the chance to work in companies that embraced the cloud, and in particular AWS. This two-part blog post is an attempt to share that experience with you. Hope you enjoy! Please do not hesitate to give feedback, share your own stories or simply like 🙂

EMBRACE FAILURE

“It is not failure itself that holds you back; it is the fear of failure that paralyses you.” Brian Tracy

Let me start by saying that scared developers won’t:

* try things out

* won’t innovate as fast as your business would need to

* won’t dare to jump in and fix things when (pardon my French) shit hits the fan

* won’t do more than ask for

* and won’t stay long in the job

Getting Started with Automation: 6 Tips

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The Enterprisers Project

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January 17, 2018

With forward-looking CIOs and their teams embracing automation instead of treating it like a boogeyman, 2018 appears to be an important year for this trend. Red Hat chief technology strategist E.G. Nadhan recently examined six ways automation is likely to impact the enterprise in the year ahead: Think customer experience, for starters.

But what if you’re still largely – if not entirely – mired in manual, legacy processes? Taking the first meaningful, results-oriented steps toward increasing automation can be a significant challenge.

We’re here to help. We asked a variety of automation experts for actionable, results-oriented advice on getting started with automation. Let’s take a closer look at their tips:

New Linux on Azure Training Course Addresses Demand for Skills

By

Sam Dean

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January 16, 2018

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who headed up Microsoft’s cloud division before he became CEO, has been vocal about converging the Azure cloud platform with Linux. In fact, he has noted that about a third of the Azure platform is Linux-based. Moreover, Microsoft has made clear that more than 60 percent of Azure Marketplace images are Linux-based, as ZDNet has reported.

The convergence of Linux and the Azure platform spells big opportunities and is giving rise to many new jobs. On this front, The Linux Foundation has announced the availability of a new training course, Administering Linux on Azure (LFS205). It is more important than ever for Linux and Azure professionals to make sure they know how to manage Linux workloads in an Azure environment, and this $299 course provides the requisite knowledge.

“As shown by The Linux Foundation and Dice’s Open Source Jobs Report, cloud computing skills are by far the most in demand by employers,” said Linux Foundation General Manager for Training & Certification, Clyde Seepersad. “This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, as the world today is run in the cloud. Azure is one of the most popular public clouds, and a huge portion of its instances run on Linux. That’s why we feel this new course is essential to give Azure professionals the Linux skills they need, give Linux professionals the Azure skills they need, and train new professionals to ensure industry has the talent it needs to meet the growing demand for Linux on Azure.”

Not only are many Linux workloads running in Azure environments, but you can choose from most popular Linux distributions to run in this context. Distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise, CentOS, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Debian, Ubuntu, CoreOS, RancherOS, FreeBSD, and more are in the Azure Marketplace.

The new LFS205 course covers how to deploy virtual machines in Azure, discussing different deployment scenarios. Once the VMs are available in Azure, students need to know how to manage them in an efficient way, which is covered next. The last part of the course teaches how to troubleshoot Linux in Azure, and how to monitor Linux in Azure using various open source tools. Importantly, the course also delves into container management.

As noted here, experience with cloud infrastructure tools and open source technologies can make a substantial compensation difference for everyone from sysadmins to c-suite technology leaders. Dice data scientist Yuri Bykov has said, “as businesses have begun relying more upon open source solutions to support their business needs…employers are looking for individuals with cloud computing and networking experience and a strong working knowledge of configuration management tools.”

The new LFS205 course is taught by Sander van Vugt, author of many Linux-related video courses and books as well as course developer for The Linux Foundation. He is also a managing partner of ITGilde, a large co-operative in which about a hundred independent Linux professionals in the Netherlands have joined forces. The $299 course fee provides unlimited access to the course for one year and to all content and labs materials.

To find more open source focused training and certification opportunities, check out this post for ways to fast-track your education and certification. The Linux Foundation also offers much coursework for extending your Linux-specific skills, ranging from Developing Applications for Linux to Linux Performance Tuning.

Learn more about the Administering Linux on Azure (LFS205) course and sign up here.

7 Open-Source Serverless Frameworks Providing Functions as a Service

By

eWeek

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January 16, 2018

With virtualization, organizations began to realize greater utilization of physical hardware. That trend continued with the cloud, as organizations began to get their machines into a pay-as-you-go service. Cloud computing further evolved when Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched its Lambda service in 2014, introducing a new paradigm in cloud computing that has become commonly referred to as serverless computing. In the serverless model, organizations pay for functions as a service without the need to pay for an always-on stateful, virtual machine.

Containers versus Operating Systems

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Dave Cheney

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January 16, 2018

The most popular docker base container image is either busybox, or scratch. This is driven by a movement that is equal parts puritanical and pragmatic. The puritan asks “Why do I need to run init(1) just to run my process?” The pragmatist asks “Why do I need a 700 meg base image to deploy my application?” And both, seeking immutable deployment units ask “Is it a good idea that I can ssh into my container?” But let’s step back for a second and look at the history of how we got to the point where questions like this are even a thing.

In the very beginnings, there were no operating systems. Programs ran one at a time with the whole machine at their disposal. While efficient, this created a problem for the keepers of these large and expensive machines. To maximise their investment, the time between one program finishing and another starting must be kept to an absolute minimum; hence monitor programs and batch processing was born.

Understanding Feature Engineering (Part 1) — Continuous Numeric Data

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Towards Data Science

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January 16, 2018

Any intelligent system regardless of complexity needs to be powered by data. At the heart of any intelligent system, we have one or more algorithms based on machine learning, deep learning or statistical methods which consume this data to gather knowledge and provide intelligent insights over a period of time. Algorithms are pretty naive by themselves and cannot work out of the box on raw data. Hence the need for engineering meaningful features from raw data is of utmost importance which can be understood and consumed by these algorithms.

Any intelligent system basically consists of an end-to-end pipeline starting from ingesting raw data, leveraging data processing techniques to wrangle, process and engineer meaningful features and attributes from this data. Then we usually leverage techniques like statistical models or machine learning models to model on these features and then deploy this model if necessary for future usage based on the problem to be solved at hand. A typical standard machine learning pipeline based on the CRISP-DM industry standard process model is depicted below.

MapR: How Next-Gen Applications Will Change the Way We Look at Data

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The New Stack

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January 16, 2018

The data landscape is changing right in front of our eyes. We are seeing gargantuan growth in total volume of data; we are generating and consuming massive amounts of video, images, sensor inputs of all sorts.

Moreover, “the type of data that’s growing most rapidly are not the data sets we think of historically as part of the legacy enterprise IT stack,” said Crystal Valentine, vice president of technology strategy at MapR Technologies, in this newest edition of The New Stack Makers podcast.

The Brutal Lifecycle of JavaScript Frameworks

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Stack Overflow

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January 15, 2018

JavaScript UI frameworks and libraries work in cycles. Every six months or so, a new one pops up, claiming that it has revolutionized UI development. Thousands of developers adopt it into their new projects, blog posts are written, Stack Overflow questions are asked and answered, and then a newer (and even more revolutionary) framework pops up to usurp the throne.

Using the Stack Overflow Trends tool and some of our internal traffic data, we decided to take a look at some of the more prominent UI frameworks: Angular, React, Vue.js, Backbone, Knockout, and Ember.

Framework lifecycle

Stack Overflow Trends lets us examine how each of these technologies has been asked about over time. We can start by looking at some of the larger frameworks.