Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a famous computer scientist and academic who invented the World Wide Web in 1989—so when he talks about new technologies it’s worth paying attention.
Today, one of the topics on his mind is blockchain, a revolutionary way of creating permanent, tamper-proof records across a disparate network of computers.
Blockchain is most famously associated with the digital currency bitcoin but the technology is increasingly being used for record keeping by banks and retailers. It will also come to be used by more ordinary citizens in the near future, says Berners-Lee.
Salesforce learned early on that open source projects stay healthy when they have a diverse community of stakeholders that have an interest in making the software succeed.
Apache Phoenix started at Salesforce as its own open source Phoenix project. But it didn’t find success until people from outside Salesforce also got invested and the project no longer depended on the needs and desires of one company. In a true community effort, people from other companies joined in and said, ‘this is useful for us and we want to contribute,’” says Ian Varley, a Software Architect at Salesforce who recently led the open source program there. In the end, this diverse community is what allowed it to become an Apache project and incorporate new features that the company’s own engineers could never have dreamed up.
Kubernetes and containers can speed up the development process while minimizing programmer and system administration costs, say representatives of the Open Container Initiative and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. To take advantage of Kubernetes and its related tools to run a cloud-native architecture, start with unappreciated Kubernetes features like namespaces.
Kubernetes is far more than a cloud-container manager. As Steve Pousty, Red Hat’s lead developer advocate for OpenShift, explained in a presentation at the Linux Foundation’sOpen Source Summit, Kubernetes serves as a “common operating plane for cloud-native computing using containers.”
What does Pousty mean by that? Let’s review the basics.
I’ve covered several scientific packages in this space that generate nice graphical representations of your data and work, but I’ve not gone in the other direction much. So in this article, I cover a popular image processing package called ImageJ. Specifically, I am looking at Fiji, an instance of ImageJ bundled with a set of plugins that are useful for scientific image processing.
The name Fiji is a recursive acronym, much like GNU. It stands for “Fiji Is Just ImageJ”. ImageJ is a useful tool for analyzing images in scientific research—for example, you may use it for classifying tree types in a landscape from aerial photography. ImageJ can do that type categorization. It’s built with a plugin architecture, and a very extensive collection of plugins is available to increase the available functionality.
The first step is to install ImageJ (or Fiji). Most distributions will have a package available for ImageJ. If you wish, you can install it that way and then install the individual plugins you need for your research.
Inline, side-arm, reverse, and forward. These used to be the terms we used to describe the architectural placement of proxies in the network.
Today, containers use some of the same terminology, but they are introducing new ones. That’s an opportunity for me to extemporaneously expound* on my favorite of all topics: the proxy.
One of the primary drivers of cloud (once we all got past the pipedream of cost containment) has been scalability. Scale has challenged agility (and sometimes won) in various surveys over the past five years as the number one benefit organizations seek by deploying apps in cloud computing environments.
Join 2000 technologists and community members next week as they convene at Open Source Summit Europe and Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Prague. If you can’t be there in person, you can still take part, as The Linux Foundation is pleased to offer free live video streaming of all keynote sessions on Monday, Oct. 23 through Wednesday, Oct. 25, 2017. So, you can watch the event keynotes presented by Google, Intel, and VMware, among others.
The livestream will begin on Monday, Oct. 23 at 9 a.m. CEST (Central European Summer Time). Sign up now! You can also follow our live event updates on Twitter with #OSSummit.
According to some, blockchain is one of the hottest and most intriguing technologies currently in the market. Similar to the rising of the internet, blockchain could potentially disrupt multiple industries, including financial services. This Thursday, October 19 at Sibos in Toronto, Hyperledger’s Security Maven Dave Huseby will be moderating a panel “Does Blockchain technology alleviate security concerns or create new challenges?” During this session, experts will explore whether the shared nature of blockchain helps or hinders security.
We developed a Q&A with Dave to go over some security questions related to blockchain in advance of the panel. Let’s get to it!
What are the cybersecurity concerns that you are noticing today?
Integrating with existing systems, cryptographic key material management, and providing the required network quality of service connecting blockchain members are the greatest cyber-security concerns I am noticing today. Any organization applying blockchain technology to an existing process almost certainly has existing systems that chaincode/smart contracts will have to interact with.
This article was sponsored by Intel and written by Linux.com.
The Open Source Summit Europe conference opens its doors on Oct. 23 in Prague this year. Ahead of the gathering of attendees and presenters representing all walks of Linux communities, Linux.com interviewed industry leaders on some of the top emerging trends and issues of the day. Among those is edge computing, which Imad Sousou, vice president of the Software and Services Group and general manager of the Open Source Technology Center at Intel Corporation, shed considerable light on in this interview. He is also a keynote speaker, addressing this very topic at the event on Tuesday, Oct. 24.
The connected world holds a lot of promise—and an equal measure of complexity. That promise may seem like a long way from reality given the current mix of immature products and technologies. So how do we get there?
The industry is increasingly talking about edge computing as one way to fulfill this promise. We talked with Sousou about this new approach and on how Intel is helping bring it to market.
Linux.com: Intel is talking more and more about the “edge to cloud” computing landscape. What does this mean and why is it important?
Imad Sousou: Until now, Intel has talked about devices, and we’ve talked about cloud. I think it’s important that we start to talk about them together. In the next few years, the industry can expect billions of devices will be connected to each other and to the cloud, generating massive amounts of data and putting a strain on bandwidth, no matter how much optimization work we do. These bandwidth constraints create a need for devices at the edge of the network to do processing and computation—we’re talking potentially about everything from lightbulbs and appliances to manufacturing lines, medical equipment and cars. These devices will soon need to create, transmit, store, process and act upon data in real time, locally. This “edge computing” pushes intelligence to the edge of the network, making the promise of smart cities, intelligent factories, and connected hospitals possible.
Linux.com: As edge computing emerges, what challenges does Intel anticipate?
Sousou: With compute-intensive work moving closer to the edge, devices will need to process and act intelligently on massive amounts of data in real time. Computing performance is essential to ensuring the data and system integrity, reliability, and responsiveness, needed to make this smart, connected world become a reality. We are also seeing that as more devices connect to each other and to the network, security becomes a bigger concern.
Linux.com: Given these challenges, how is Intel helping to address them?
Sousou: Today, we are looking at approaches, technologies and best practices developed for—and proven in—the cloud, and figuring out ways to use them at the edge. Containers and orchestration are great examples of this. With edge devices specifically, responsiveness and security are key. Container technologies, such as Intel® Clear Containers, matched with hardware-based security offered by Intel® architecture, can help meet the speed and security requirements of both data centers and edge devices.
In a world of self-driving cars, drones, and industrial robotics, intelligence, real-time processing and quick decision-making remain critical. Secure, lightweight, open orchestration solutions like Intel® Cloud Integrated Advanced Orchestrator (Ciao) can coordinate deployment of containers, virtual machines and Kubernetes-based clusters, across multiple nodes, with speed, scalability and flexibility.
Linux.com: We’ve talked about computing across this landscape. Where does open source fit in?
Sousou: Open source really makes the promise of a smart, connected world possible. Not only has open source proven to be a viable development model, it is driving much of today’s innovation. Just as the Internet would not have been possible without the access, scale and affordability that open source provides, the world of connected devices is difficult to imagine without open source.
For example, consider communication between connected edge devices. These devices need to recognize each other, and they need a common way of exchanging data quickly and securely. Intel, along with industry-leading companies including Cisco, LG, Microsoft and Samsung, is driving the Open Connectivity Foundation efforts to help standardize how these devices will interact. This open source implementation and certification program can allow devices to communicate regardless of form factor, operating system, service provider or ecosystem.
Linux.com: Is there anything else that you would like to share with readers?
Sousou: I’ve spent most of my career in open source. I still get really excited by the innovations coming out of our community. The great thing about open source is how everyone can learn from each other, evolve and grow. I am confident that together we’ll meet the challenges in connecting the 50 billion devices we expect to be online by 2020, and creating powerful edge solutions.
For those at the Open Source Summit Europe in Prague on Tuesday, Oct. 24, I hope you’ll attend my keynoteto learn more about the future of edge computing, and where Intel is investing. You can also stop by the Intel booth to see in person what we’re doing to help enable smarter, connected edge devices today.
There’s been a lot of adoption of Kubernetes in the last few years, and as of Oct. 17 the open-source container orchestration technology has one more supporter. Docker Inc. announced at its DockerCon EU conference here that it is expanding its Docker platform to support Kubernetes.
Docker had been directly competing against Kubernetes with its Swarm container orchestration system since 2015. The plan now is to provide a seamless platform that supports a heterogenous deployment that can include both Swarm and Kubernetes clusters.
“Docker adapts to you because it’s open,” Docker founder Solomon Hykes said during his keynote address at DockerCon.
Last year, the Kubernetes project introduced its Container Runtime Interface (CRI) — a plugin interface that gives kubelet (a cluster node agent used to create pods and start containers) the ability to use different OCI-compliant container runtimes, without needing to recompile Kubernetes. Building on that work, the CRI-O project (originally known as OCID) is ready to provide a lightweight runtime for Kubernetes.
So what does this really mean?
CRI-O allows you to run containers directly from Kubernetes – without any unnecessary code or tooling. As long as the container is OCI-compliant, CRI-O can run it, cutting out extraneous tooling and allowing containers to do what they do best: fuel your next-generation cloud-native applications.
