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Demand for Open Source Skills on the Rise

By
Esther Shein
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Interest in hiring open source workers is on the rise, with 60 percent of companies surveyed looking for full-time hires, compared with 53 percent last year, according to the 2017 Open Source Jobs Report.

Hiring managers from 280 global businesses, along with 1,800 open source professionals participated in the July study by The Linux Foundation and tech career firm Dice.

That’s good news if you have open source skills; indeed, 86 percent of professionals say open source has advanced their careers. The not-so-good news is 89 percent of hiring managers are finding it difficult to find this type of talent, which is in line with last year’s finding of 87 percent. The specific areas hiring managers say open source talent is in short supply are developers (73 percent), DevOps (60 percent) and SysAdmins (53 percent).

It’s no wonder then that 67 percent of managers are eyeing these hires more than other areas of business in the next six months. Fifty-eight percent say they will hire more open source professionals in that timeframe with expertise in cloud (70 percent), web technologies (67 percent) and Linux (65 percent).

Because of the challenges hiring open source professionals, 47 percent of employers say they are willing to pay for employees’ certifications, which is up from 33 percent in 2016. Meanwhile, 55 percent of hiring managers are making formal training a priority and seeking certification in new open source hires.

Training Opportunities

Additional training and certification are being offered by 33 percent of manager respondents who say these are incentives to retain employees, which is up from 26 percent last year. Among the ways training is being provided: 63 percent of respondents say they offer online/virtual courses, while 49 percent pay for individual training, and 39 percent provide live training instruction onsite.

Most hiring managers surveyed (73 percent) say developers are the main position they are looking to fill. They also need DevOps Engineers (60 percent) and Systems Administrators (53 percent).

Cloud technology such as OpenStack and Cloud Foundry ranked as the most sought-after area of expertise among 70 percent of employers, up from 66 percent last year. Web technologies was next, with 67 percent of hiring managers citing a need for that

knowledge, compared with 62 percent last year. Demand for Linux talent remains strong, with 65 percent of hiring managers looking for those skills, down slightly from 71 percent in 2016.

The technologies with the greatest influence over hiring decisions are cloud (62 percent), application platforms (56 percent) and Big Data (53 percent).

This year, cloud/virtualization was cited as the most desirable open source skill among 60 percent of hiring managers, followed by application development (59 percent) and DevOps (57 percent).

Open source professionals weigh in

Open source professional respondents rank five skills closely in demand:

  • Cloud (47 percent)

  • Application development (44 percent)

  • Big Data (43 percent)

  • DevOps (42 percent)

  • Security (42 percent)

Additionally, 77 percent of professional respondents say the ability to architect solutions based on open source is the top most valuable skill in their job, followed by 66 percent who say experience with open source development tools and 65 percent who cite knowledge of new tools.

Cloud technologies skills will be the most important skill to have in 2018, according to 69 percent of open source professional respondents, followed by big data/analytics (57 percent); containers (56 percent) and security (55 percent).

In the coming weeks, we’ll be looking at individual skills in more detail, examining specific hiring needs and training opportunities.

You can download the complete 2017 Open Source Jobs Report now.

This Week in Numbers: New Monitoring Methods for Kubernetes

By
The New Stack
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Our new report, The State of the Kubernetes Ecosystem reports on a survey of 470 container users, 62 percent of which were at least in the initial production phase for the Kubernetes open source container orchestration engine. After further screening, we were able to get detailed information from 208 people about the storage and monitoring technologies they use with Kubernetes.

Prometheus is by far the most cited tool among our survey respondents for monitoring Kubernetes clusters. Heapster, however, has also gained significant adoption among our group. Traditional monitoring vendors are not faring as well, although usage levels for their tools appear to increase when they are being integrated into a larger, custom monitoring platform.

Read more at The New Stack

Linux Commands for Managing, Partitioning, Troubleshooting

By
Network World
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Managing Linux disks and the file systems that reside on them is something of an art – from initial setup to monitoring performance.

How much do you need to know about disks to successfully manage a Linux system? What commands do what? How do you make good decisions about partitioning? What kind of troubleshooting tools are available? What kind of problems might you run into? This article covers a lot of territory – from looking into the basics of a Linux file systems to sampling some very useful commands.

Disk technology

In the beginning days of Unix and later Linux, disks were physically large, but very small in terms of storage capacity. A 300 megabyte disk in the mid-90’s was the size of a shoebox. Today, you can get multi-terrabyte disks that are the size of a slice of toast.

Read more at NetworkWorld

Open Container Initiative Reaches ‘Great Milestone,’ Says Red Hat Chief Technologist

By
Silicon Angle
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After two years of work, the Open Container Initiative launched Version 1.0 for container runtime and image specifications in July. OCI’s foundation, formed by a number of container industry leaders, was tasked with the mission to create specifications that would support container portability across different operating systems and platforms. Red Hat Inc.’s chief technologist likes the specifications that he’s seen so far.

“We had some initial code associated with those specifications as part of the OCI project and expectations that we’d get further adoptions from other parts of the ecosystem, and we’re seeing the evidence of that happening today,” said Chris Wright (pictured), vice president and chief technologist, Office of Technology, at Red Hat. “It’s a great milestone.”

Read more at SiliconAngle

Seven Things about Linux You May Not Have Known

By
OpenSourceForU
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One of the coolest parts about using Linux is the knowledge you gain over time. Each day, you’re likely to come across a new utility or maybe just an unfamiliar flag that does something helpful. These bits and pieces aren’t always life-changing, but they are the building blocks for expertise.

Even experts don’t know that all, though. No matter how much experience you might have, there is always more to learn, so we’ve put together this list of seven things about Linux you may not have known.

There is an interactive mode for command history

You’re probably familiar with history, which reads your bash history to stdoutin a handy numbered list. However, if you find yourself searching for a specific URL in a sea of `curl` commands, this list isn’t always easy to read.

As an alternative, Linux comes with an interactive reverse search that helps you to avoid the headache. You can activate it with ctrl+r. This enables an interactive prompt that will search backwards through your bash history for a string you provide. You can cycle back through older commands by pressing ctrl+r again or cycle forward using ctrl+s.

Read more at OpenSourceForU

This Week in Open Source News: Open Source Summit 2017 Roundup

By
The Linux Foundation
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Open Source Summit North America was this past week and some of our favorite writers and journalists were onsite reporting live about this event. Below you’ll find a special edition of the Linux.com news digest from Sean Michael Kerner, SiliconANGLE, and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols!

Sean Michael Kerner:

SiliconANGLE:

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols/ZDNet:

Lyft and Uber on Stage Together at Open Source Summit in L.A.

By
The Linux Foundation
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The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has seen tremendous growth since it was founded in mid-2015. As a Linux Foundation project, it has grown from 22 member companies at its start to 118 today — a 5X growth rate. And its members now include Alibaba, AWS, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and — as of this week — Oracle.

“This is the first time in the history of open source where we have the top (six) cloud providers in the world sitting at the same foundation table, driving cloud-native forward,” said Chris Aniszczyk, Chief Operating Officer of CNCF.

CNCF was seeded with the Kubernetes project, donated by Google, and quickly added nine more projects including Prometheus, OpenTracing, Fluentd, Linkerd, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt, and CNI.

Read more at The Linux Foundation

​CNCF Adds Oracle, Onboards the Envoy and Jaeger Projects

By
The New Stack
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The Cloud Native Computing Foundation continues to gain momentum, signing on as a sponsor one of the most venerable enterprise software companies, Oracle, and adding two more cloud-native projects to its portfolio, the Envoy service mesh and the Jaeger microservice debugging software.

The CNCF announced the new inclusions at the Open Source Summit North America, being held this week in Los Angeles.

“The last decade was about virtualization, and this decade is about containerization and cloud-native. You containerize, and that allows you to split the app into lots of pieces — microservices — and then you orchestrate all those pieces,” said CNCF Executive Director Dan Kohn. “We think that’s really the biggest trend in computing.”

CNCF has already signed on as sponsors the five largest cloud purveyors, AWS, Microsoft, Google, IBM and Alibaba.

Read more at The New Stack

Solus 3 Brings Maturity and Performance to Budgie

By
Jack Wallen
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Back in 2016, the Solus developers announced they were switching their operating system over to a rolling release. Solus 3 marks the third iteration since that announcement and, in such a short time, the Solus platform has come a long way. But for many, Solus 3 would be a first look into this particular take on the Linux operating system. With that in mind, I want to examine what Solus 3 offers that might entice the regular user away from their current operating system. You might be surprised when I say, “There’s plenty.”

This third release of Solus is an actual “release” and not a snapshot. What does that mean? The previous two releases of Solus were snapshots. Solus has actually moved away from the regular snapshot model found in rolling releases. With the standard rolling release, a new snapshot is posted at least every few days; from that snapshot an image can be created such that the difference between an installation and latest updates is never large. However, the developers have opted to use a hybrid approach to the rolling release. According to the Solus 3 release announcement, this offers “feature rich releases with explicit goals and technology enabling, along with the benefits of a curated rolling release operating system.”

Of course, no average user really cares if an operating system is a rolling release or a hybrid. From that particular perspective, what is more important is how well the platform works, how easy it is to use, and what it offers out of the box.

Let’s take a look at those three points to see just how well Solus 3 could serve even a new-to-Linux user.

What Solus 3 offers out of the box

On many levels, this is the most important point for first-time users. Why? Because there are many Linux distributions available that don’t meet the minimum needs, without having to tinker and add extra packages out of the box. This, however, is an area where Solus 3 really shines. Once installed, the average user will have everything they need to get their work done — and then some.

First off, Solus 3 features the Budgie desktop (Figure 1). Anyone that has ever used a PC desktop, since Windows XP, will be instantly at home. The standard features abound:

  • Task bar

  • Application menu (with search)

  • System tray

  • Notification center

  • Desktop icons

Figure 1: The Budgie desktop with application menu open.

Once users get beyond the desktop interface, they’ll find all the applications necessary to go about their days:

  • Firefox web browser (version 55.0.3)

  • LibreOffice office suite (version 5.4.0.3)

  • Thunderbird email client with Lightning calendar pre-installed (version 52.3.0)

  • Rhythmbox audio player (version 3.4.1)

  • GNOME MPV movie player (version 0.12)

  • GNOME Calendar (version 3.24.3)

  • GNOME Files file manager (version 3.24.2)

Do note, the above version numbers reflect a system update upon initial installation.

Solus 3 also includes a fairly straightforward Software Center tool — one that has a nifty trick up its sleeve. Unlike many Linux distributions, the Solus Software Center includes a Third Party section that doesn’t require the user to have to install added repositories to add the likes of Android Studio, Google Chrome, Insync, Skype, Spotify, Viber, WPS Office Suite, and more. All you have to to do is open up the Software Center, click Third Party, and find the third-party software you want to install (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Third-party software installation is made simple on Solus.

Beyond the desktop and the included software, Solus 3 offers the user a remarkably pain-free experience, right out of the box.

There are also a few small additions that go a long way to making Solus a special platform. Take, for instance, the Night Light feature, a tool that reduces eye strain by taking care of the  display’s blue light. From within the Night Light tool, you can even set a schedule to enable/disable the feature (Figure 3).

Figure 3: The Solus Night Light configuration tool.

The only issue I can find with included packages is the missing Samba-GNOME Files integration. Normally, it is possible to right-click a folder within the file manager and enable the sharing of said folder, via Samba. Although Samba is pre-installed, there is no easy way to enable Samba sharing within the default file manager. For those that really need to share out directories with Samba, you’ll have to do it the old-school way … via the terminal.

Solus 3 does make it fairly easy to connect to other shares on your network (by clicking Other Locations in Files and then browsing your local network).

How easy is it to use?

By now, you’ve probably drawn the conclusion that Solus 3 is a new-user dream come true. That conclusion would be spot on. The developers have done an amazing job of ensuring nothing could possibly trip up a new user. And by “nothing,” I do mean nothing. Solus 3 does exactly what a Linux distribution should do — it gets out of the way, so the user can focus on work or social/entertainment distraction. From installation of the operating system, to installation of software, to daily use … the Solus developers have done everything right. I cannot imagine a single user type stumbling over this take on Linux. Period. This is one Linux distribution with barely a single bump in the learning curve.

How well does Solus 3 work?

Considering how “young” Solus is, it is remarkably stable. During my testing phase, I only encountered one issue with the platform—installing the third-party Spotify client (NOTE: Other third-party software installed fine, so this is, most likely, a Spotify issue). Even with that hiccup, a second attempt at installing the Spotify client succeeded. That should tell you how issue-free Solus is. Outside of that (and the Samba issue), I am happy to report that Solus 3 “just works” and does so with grace and ease. To be honest, Solus 3 feels like a much more mature platform than a “3” release should.

Give Solus 3 a try

If you’re looking for a new Linux distribution that will make the transition from any other platform a no-brainer of a task, you cannot go wrong with Solus 3. This hybrid release distribution will make anyone feel right at home on the desktop, look great doing so, and ease away any headache you might have ever experienced with Linux.

Kudos to the Solus developers for releasing a gem of a distribution.

Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.

Kubernetes Meets HPC

By
insideHPC
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In this post, I discuss some of the challenges of running HPC workloads with Kubernetes, explain how organizations approach these challenges today, and suggest an approach for supporting mixed workloads on a shared Kubernetes cluster. 

In Kubernetes, the base unit of scheduling is a Pod: one or more Docker containers scheduled to a cluster host. Kubernetes assumes that workloads are containers. While Kubernetes has the notion of Cron Jobsand Jobs that run to completion, applications deployed on Kubernetes are typically long-running services, like web servers, load balancers or data stores and while they are highly dynamic with pods coming and going, they differ greatly from HPC application patterns.
Traditional HPC applications often exhibit different characteristics:

  • In financial or engineering simulations, a job may be comprised of tens of thousands of short-running tasks, demanding low-latency and high-throughput scheduling to complete a simulation in an acceptable amount of time.

Read more at insideHPC

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