11 Top Tools to Assess, Implement, and Maintain GDPR Compliance

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November 14, 2017

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect in May 2018, which means that any organization doing business in or with the EU has six months from this writing to comply with the strict new privacy law. The GDPR applies to any organization holding or processing personal data of E.U. citizens, and the penalties for noncompliance can be stiff: up to €20 million (about $24 million) or 4 percent of annual global turnover, whichever is greater. Organizations must be able to identify, protect, and manage all personally identifiable information (PII) of EU residents even if those organizations are not based in the EU.

Some vendors are offering tools to help you prepare for and comply with the GDPR. What follows is a representative sample of tools to assess what you need to do for compliance, implement measures to meet requirements, and maintain compliance once you reach it.

How AMD Wants to Provide ‘Supercomputing for All’

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eWeek

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November 14, 2017

At the SC17 supercomputing conference in Denver Nov. 13, AMD and some of its ecosystem partners announced the availability of a suite of new, high-performance systems powered by AMD EPYC CPUs (central processing units) and AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs (graphics processing units) to accelerate the use of supercomputing in smaller data centers.

AMD combines this portfolio with new software, including the new ROCm 1.7 open platform with updated development tools and libraries, enabling complete AMD EPYC-based PetaFLOPS systems.

Supports Various Environments

By supporting both heterogeneous supercomputing systems and memory-bound, CPU-driven, high-performance platforms with EPYC, AMD claims it can address the needs of multiple workloads with up to a 3X advantage in performance per dollar for the EPYC 7601 versus Intel’s Xeon Platinum 8180M.

How OpenChain Can Transform the Supply Chain

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OpenSource.com

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November 14, 2017

OpenChain is all about increasing open source compliance in the supply chain. This issue, which many people initially dismiss as a legal concern or a low priority, is actually tied to making sure that open source is as useful and frictionless as possible. In a nutshell, because open source is about the use of third-party code, compliance is the nexus where equality of access, safety of use, and reduction of risk can be found. OpenChain accomplishes this by building trust between organizations.

Many companies today understand open source and act as major supporters of open source development; however, addressing open source license compliance in a systematic, industry-wide manner has proven to be a somewhat elusive challenge. The global IT market has not seen a significant reduction in the number of open source compliance issues in areas such as consumer electronics over the past decade.

LTS Linux Kernel 4.14: No Regressions

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Paul Brown

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November 13, 2017

Linus Torvalds released version 4.14 of the Linux kernel on Sunday, Nov. 12 — which was a week later than expected. The delay was due to some reverts that would have made the projected Nov. 5 release too early.

One of the unsettling reverts was regarding an AppArmor patch that was causing a regression, a big no-no according to Torvalds, who stated the first rule of Linux kernel development: “we don’t cause regressions.” After some back and forth, Linus reverted the offending commit himself and the problem was temporarily solved.

And now the new kernel is here: Linux 4.14 is the 2017 Long-Term Stable (LTS) release of the kernel and will be supported for about two years. Greg Kroah-Hartman made the announcement in his blog and added that he would be supporting 4.14 with stable kernel patch backports “unless it is a horrid release,” which, despite the delaying issues, doesn’t seem to be the case.

Something else that was pending and has finally been addressed in this kernel is the closing of in-tree kernel firmware. This will help better enforce placing firmware blobs in the linux-firmware.git repository. Before David Woodhouse created the Git repository, proprietary firmware blobs were submitted to an in-tree kernel firmware/ branch, but this branch has been dormant for years. Deleting it gets rid of any ambiguity and lightens the kernel load by some 100,000 lines.

Zstd/Zstandard is also something new that has been integrated into kernel 4.14. Zstd is a compression technology for filesystems that achieves similar compression ratios to zlib, but is much faster. Zstd was originally developed at Facebook and has already been tested extensively in production environments.

Other stuff that’s new in kernel 4.14

A virtual machine shake-up has led to improvements in speed and performance of KVM, Xen, and Microsoft’s Hyper-V. Interestingly enough, in the case of latter, most changes have not come from Redmond, but from Red Hat engineers.
The Raspberry Pi now has HDMI CEC support built into the mainline kernel. CEC, or “Consumer Electronics Control” allows users to control devices over HDMI using a single controller — think using a remote to control your Pi, but that can also be used to control a TV connected to your Pi.
Several fixes to EFI support ensures that reboots are handled correctly and, by enabling the wiping of RAM after a warm reboot, that they are now more secure.

To find out more, check out the writeups at Kernel Newbies and Phoronix.

You can learn more about the Linux kernel development process and read featured developer profiles in the new 2017 Linux Kernel Development Report. Download the free report now.

The CNCF Just Got 36 Companies to Agree to a Kubernetes Certification Standard

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TechCrunch

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November 13, 2017

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced today that 36 members have agreed to a set of certification standards for Kubernetes, the immensely popular open source container orchestration tool. This should make it easy for users to move from one version to another without worry, while ensuring that containers under Kubernetes management will behave in a predictable way.

The group of 36 is agreeing to a base set of APIs that have to underly any version of Kubernetes a member creates to guarantee portability. Dan Kohn, executive director at CNCF, says that they took a subset of existing Kubernetes project APIs, which are treated as a conformance test that the members who have signed on, are guaranteeing to support. In practice this means that when you spin up a new container, regardless of who creates the version of Kubernetes, it will behave in a consistent way, he said.

Autodesk’s Shift to Open Source and Inner Source

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The Linux Foundation

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November 13, 2017

Autodesk is undergoing a company-wide shift to open source and inner source. And that’s on top of the culture change that both development methods require.

Inner source means applying open source development practices and methodologies to internal projects, even if the projects are proprietary. And the culture change required to be successful can be a hard shift from a traditional corporate hierarchy to an open approach. Even though they’re connected, all three changes are distinct heavy lifts.

They began by hiring Guy Martin as Director of Open Source Strategy in the Engineering Practice at Autodesk, which was designed to transform engineering across the company. Naturally, open source would play a huge role in that effort, including spurring the use of inner source. But neither would flourish if the company culture didn’t change. And so the job title swiftly evolved to Director of Open @ADSK at the company.

China Pulls Ahead of U.S. in Latest TOP500 List

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Top500

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November 13, 2017

The fiftieth TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world has China overtaking the US in the total number of ranked systems by a margin of 202 to 143. It is the largest number of supercomputers China has ever claimed on the TOP500 ranking, with the US presence shrinking to its lowest level since the list’s inception 25 years ago.

Just six months ago, the US led with 169 systems, with China coming in at 160. Despite the reversal of fortunes, the 144 systems claimed by the US gives them a solid second place finish, with Japan in third place with 35, followed by Germany with 20, France with 18, and the UK with 15.

Monitoring Container Clusters with Prometheus

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ADMIN Magazine

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November 13, 2017

In native cloud environments, classic monitoring tools reach their limits when monitoring transient objects such as containers. Prometheus closes this gap, which Kubernetes complements, thanks to its conceptual similarity, simple structure, and far-reaching automation.

Kubernetes [1] makes it much easier for admins to distribute container-based infrastructures. In principle, you no longer have to worry about where applications run or if sufficient resources are available. However, if you want to ensure the best performance, you usually cannot avoid monitoring the applications, the containers in which they run, and Kubernetes itself.

You can read how Prometheus works in a previous ADMIN article [2]; here, I shed light on the collaboration between Prometheus and Kubernetes. Because of its service discovery, Prometheus independently retrieves information about the container platform, the current container, services, and applications via the Kubernetes API. You do not have to change the configuration of Prometheus when pods launch or die or when new nodes appear in the cluster: Prometheus detects all of this.

OCI Update: v1.0.1 Release and New Maintainer

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Open Container Initiative

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November 13, 2017

Concurrently, we are gearing up for the next phase in ensuring broad adoption of common container image format and runtime specs as we prepare to launch an OCI certification/conformance program. This program will allow folks to be confident that their OCI solutions meet a high set of criteria that deliver interoperable solutions. We’ll be presenting a session on Container Runtime & Image Format Standards: What it Means to be ‘OCI-certified during CloudNatvieCon + KubeCon in Austin, Texas on Wednesday, December 6 at 11:10 am. If you’ll be on site, please stop by our booth and check the schedule for additional OCI-related sessions

This Week in Open Source News: More Open Source Guides Released by The Linux Foundation, New Hyperledger MOOC & More

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The Linux Foundation

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November 10, 2017

This week in Linux and open source news, The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Guides surface useful strategic knowledge via TODO Group, Hyperleder’s new free course more relevant than ever, and more!

1) More Open Source Guides have been released by The Linux Foundation & TODO Group. Read them to glean free tips on building an open source program.

Linux Foundation Publishes Enterprise Open Source Guides– ADT Magazine

2) As Hyperledger & blockchain technology expands in influence, the project’s new MOOC will become increasingly useful.

Hyperledger Goes to School– Nasdaq.com

3) In a podcast from The New Stack, Cloud Foundry’s Executive Director Abby Kearns shares how the platform is evolving to benefit organizations working outside Silicon Valley.

Cloud Foundry: Focusing on Flexibility and Choice for a Cloud-Native World– The New Stack

4) “Resonance Audio provides immersive sound on both phones and PCs.”

Google Built a Spatial Studio Kit for Games and VR– Engadget

5) The city of Munich scales back Linux use in a major way.

Linux Pioneer Munich Supports Windows 10 Rollout From 2020 in Key Vote– TechRepublic