Tenets of SRE

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October 31, 2017

While the nuances of workflows, priorities, and day-to-day operations vary from SRE team to SRE team, all share a set of basic responsibilities for the service(s) they support, and adhere to the same core tenets. In general, an SRE team is responsible for the availability, latency, performance, efficiency, change management, monitoring, emergency response, and capacity planning of their service(s). We have codified rules of engagement and principles for how SRE teams interact with their environment—not only the production environment, but also the product development teams, the testing teams, the users, and so on. Those rules and work practices help us to maintain our focus on engineering work, as opposed to operations work.

Ensuring a Durable Focus on Engineering

As already discussed, Google caps operational work for SREs at 50% of their time. Their remaining time should be spent using their coding skills on project work. In practice, this is accomplished by monitoring the amount of operational work being done by SREs, and redirecting excess operational work to the product development teams: reassigning bugs and tickets to development managers, [re]integrating developers into on-call pager rotations, and so on.

The following section discusses each of the core tenets of Google SRE.

Beat the Biggest Threat to the Open Organization: Bias

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OpenSource.com

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October 31, 2017

Bias is the single greatest threat to the open organization. This is no exaggeration. In traditional organizations, responsibilities for evaluating ideas, strategies, contributions—even people—typically fall on (presumably) trained managers. In open organizations, that responsibility rests with contributors of all sorts.

“In organizations that are fit for the future,” writes Jim Whitehurst in The Open Organization, “Leaders will be chosen by the led. Contribution will matter more than credentials […] Compensation will be set by peers, not bosses.” According to Whitehurst, an open organization is a meritocracy: “Those people who have earned their peers’ respect over time drive decisions.” But the way humans allocate their respect is itself prone to bias. And imagine what can happen when biased decision-making results in the wrong leaders being chosen, certain contributions being over- or undervalued, or compensation being allocated on something other than merit.

The following checklist covers several documented phenomena that, sometimes unconsciously, skew the decision-making practices.

Scary Linux Commands for Halloween

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Network World

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October 31, 2017

With Halloween so fast approaching, it’s time for a little focus on the spookier side of Linux. What commands might bring up images of ghosts, witches and zombies? Which might encourage the spirit of trick or treat?

crypt

Well, we’ve always got crypt. Despite its name, crypt is not an underground vault or a burial pit for trashed files, but a command that encrypts file content. These days “crypt” is generally implemented as a script that emulates the older crypt command by calling a binary called mcrypt to do its work. Using the mycrypt command directly is an even better option.

Apache Software Foundation Is Bringing Open Source ML to the Masses with PredictionIO

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Jaxenter

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October 31, 2017

The Apache Software Foundation is opening up the field of machine learning with its new open source project, PredictionIO. But how are they making it easier for newcomers to learn this devilishly complicated bit of coding? The clever use of templates, of course.

The Apache Software Foundation has announced a brand-new machine learning project, PredictionIO. Built on top of a state-of-the-art open source stack, this machine learning serve is designed for developers and data scientists to create predictive engines for any machine learning task.

PredictionIO is designed to democratize machine learning. How? By providing a full stack for developers, they can create deployable applications “without having to cobble together underlying technologies”. Making it easier to use should widen the appeal and keep the machine learning bottleneck from getting any worse.

Operating a Kubernetes Network

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Julia Evans

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October 31, 2017

I’ve been working on Kubernetes networking a lot recently. One thing I’ve noticed is, while there’s a reasonable amount written about how to set up your Kubernetes network, I haven’t seen much about how to operate your network and be confident that it won’t create a lot of production incidents for you down the line.

In this post I’m going to try to convince you of three things: (all I think pretty reasonable :))

Avoiding networking outages in production is important
Operating networking software is hard
It’s worth thinking critically about major changes to your networking infrastructure and the impact that will have on your reliability, even if very fancy Googlers say “this is what we do at Google”. (google engineers are doing great work on Kubernetes!! But I think it’s important to still look at the architecture and make sure it makes sense for your organization.)

I’m definitely not a Kubernetes networking expert by any means, but I have run into a few issues while setting things up and definitely know a LOT more about Kubernetes networking than I used to.

A Free Guide to Participating in Open Source Communities

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The Linux Foundation

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October 30, 2017

The Linux Foundation’s free online guide Participating in Open Source Communities can help organizations successfully navigate these open source waters. The detailed guide covers what it means to contribute to open source as an organization and what it means to be a good corporate citizen. It explains how open source projects are structured, how to contribute, why it’s important to devote internal developer resources to participation, as well as why it’s important to create a strategy for open source participation and management.

One of the most important first steps is to rally leadership behind your community participation strategy. “Support from leadership and acknowledgement that open source is a business critical part of your strategy is so important,” said Nithya Ruff, Senior Director, Open Source Practice at Comcast. “You should really understand the company’s objectives and how to enable them in your open source strategy.”

Running Non-Root Containers On Openshift

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Bitnami Perspectives

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October 30, 2017

In this blog post we see how a Bitnami non-root Dockerfile looks like by checking the Bitnami Nginx Docker image. As an example of how the non-root containers can be used, we go through how to deploy Ghost on Openshift. Finally, we will cover some of the issues we faced while moving all of these containers to non-root containers

What Are Non-Root Containers?

By default, Docker containers are run as root users. This means that you can do whatever you want in your container, such as install system packages, edit configuration files, bind privilege ports, adjust permissions, create system users and groups, access networking information.

With a non-root container you can’t do any of this . A non-root container should be configured for its main purpose, for example, run the Nginx server.

Ledger Systems Today Are Siloed and Disconnected. Hyperledger Quilt Wants to Solve That

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Jaxenter

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October 30, 2017

Hyperledger Quilt started over a year ago and is a Java implementation of the Interledger protocol. We talked with Adrian Hope-Bailie, Standards Officer at Ripple and Maintainer of Hyperledger Quilt about the problem this project wants to solve, its benefits, limitations and more.

JAXenter: What is Hyperledger Quilt and what problem does it want to solve?

Adrian Hope-Bailie: Hyperledger Quilt offers interoperability between ledger systems by implementing the Interledger Protocol (ILP), which is primarily a payments protocol and is designed to transfer value across systems – both distributed ledgers and non-distributed ledgers. It is a simple protocol that establishes a global namespace for accounts, as well as, a protocol for synchronized atomic swaps between different systems.

2 Ways to Better Secure your Linux Home Directory

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Tech Republic

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October 30, 2017

One often-forgotten area of Linux security is the home directory—otherwise known as ~/. Something to keep in mind, is that particular directory houses user data. In other words, this is the default directory where documents are stored. If this machine is used in a business environment, there could be sensitive information stored within.

Let’s see what we can do to that home directory to make it more secure. We’ll start with the easy tip first. I’ll be demonstrating on a freshly installed Ubuntu 17.10 desktop.

This Week in Open Source News: Open Source Summit Europe Is Platform for Several Important Announcements

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The Linux Foundation

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October 27, 2017

In this special Open Source Summit Europe edition of the Linux.com weekly digest, we revisit stories that broke at the annual gathering of open source experts and enthusiasts. Here’s what you might have missed in Prague.

1) The annual Linux Kernel Development Report has been released, detailing the voices behind the kernel and its strength in today’s technological landscape.

Report: Interest in the Linux Kernel Remains Strong– SDTimes

Who’s Building Linux in 2017?– ZDNet

2) “The Linux Foundation has announced the Community Data License Agreement (CDLA) family of open data agreements.”

CDLA Announced by Linux Foundation– AppDeveloper Magazine

3) CNCF adds Docker-incubated Notary and The Update Framework (TUF), which was “originally developed by professor Justin Cappos and his team at NYU’s Tandon School of engineering.”

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation Adds Two Security Projects to its Open Source Stable– TechCrunch

4) Heather Kirksey, director of OPNFV talk about the newly-announced Euphrates and the open source project’s latest movements

OPNFV Supports Containerized OpenStack and Kubernetes– SDxCentral