Trending Developer Skills, Based on My Analysis of “Ask HN: Who’s Hiring?”

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August 22, 2017

A few years ago, I became curious about identifying emerging technologies and predicting them. So I created Hacker News Hiring Trends, or HN Hiring Trends for short. Hacker News is one of the most popular discussion boards for programmers. It is also one of the best places to discover new technologies. Every month Hacker News hosts a thread called “Ask HN: Who is Hiring?” Users also post jobs opportunities from their companies on this thread.

The fact that these job opportunities are posted monthly and that most are from start-ups (new technologies are usually created or used in start-ups) makes this the ideal environment to capture data. Data which can be used to discover trends.

Let’s dig into the latest trends.

Spyware Backdoor Prompts Google to Pull 500 Apps with >100m Downloads

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ArsTechnica

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August 22, 2017

At least 500 apps collectively downloaded more than 100 million times from Google’s official Play Market contained a secret backdoor that allowed developers to install a range of spyware at any time, researchers said Monday.

The apps contained a software development kit called Igexin, which makes it easier for apps to connect to ad networks and deliver ads that are targeted to the specific interests of end users. Once an app using a malicious version of Igexin was installed on a phone, the developer kit could update the app to include spyware at any time, with no warning.

OpenShift on OpenStack: Delivering Applications Better Together

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OpenShift Blog

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August 22, 2017

Have you ever asked yourself, where should I run OpenShift? The answer is anywhere—it runs great on bare metal, on virtual machines, in a private cloud or in the public cloud. But, there are some reasons why people are moving to private and public clouds related to automation around full stack exposition and consumption of resources. A traditional operating system has always been about exposition and consumption of hardware resources—hardware provides resources, applications consume them, and the operating system has always been the traffic cop. But a traditional operating system has always been confined to a single machine[1].

Well, in the cloud-native world, this now means expanding this concept to include multiple operating system instances. That’s where OpenStack and OpenShift come in. In a cloud-native world, virtual machines, storage volumes and network segments all become dynamically provisioned building blocks.

Future Proof Your SysAdmin Career: Configuration and Automation

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Sam Dean

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August 21, 2017

System administrators looking to differentiate themselves from the pack are increasingly getting cloud computing certification or picking up skills with configuration management tools. From Puppet, to Chef to Ansible, powerful configuration management tools can arm sysadmins with new skills such as cloud provisioning, application monitoring and management, and countless types of automation.

Configuration management platforms and tools have converged directly with the world of open source. In fact, several of the best tools are fully free and open source. From server orchestration to securely delivering high-availability applications, open source tools such as Chef and Puppet can bring organizations enormous efficiency boosts.

The prevalence of cloud computing, and the open platforms that facilitate it, have contributed to the benefits organizations can reap from configuration management tools. Cloud platforms allow teams to deploy and maintain applications serving thousands of users, and the leading open source configuration management tools have integrated ways to automate all relevant processes.

When many people envision a sysadmin in action, they imagine an interaction with an end user. However, as organizations move to the cloud and heterogeneous technology infrastructure environments, many sysadmins need to expand their skills. Today, automation of tasks and application delivery are big themes. Among other benefits, automated provisioning and configuration can result in time savings and reduce human error.

Tools for the task

Puppet and Chef are both open configuration management tools that can automate many common tasks. As noted in an UpGuard blog post, “It is frequently stated that Puppet is a tool that was built with sysadmins in mind. The learning curve is less imposing due to Puppet being primarily model driven. Getting your head around json data structures in Puppet manifests is far less daunting to a sysadmin who has spent their life at the command line than ruby syntax is.”

Puppet can automate many sysadmin tasks, including deploying new machines, pushing changes out to existing systems, and performing verification checks. Chef, however, is noted for providing a great deal of power and flexibility. It automates the management of systems in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment.

So, how can sysadmins gain familiarity with these tools? Puppet and Chef have commercial enterprises behind them, and flexible training options are available. For example, if you just want to take Puppet for a test drive within a virtual machine, you can do so here; instructor-led and online training options are detailed there as well. You can chart a learning roadmap for Puppet here.

Red Hat and other vendors also offer training options for Puppet as used in a standard operational environment or in a cloud environment. Red Hat also offers training for Ansible, and the curriculum is specifically geared toward sysadmins who need to automate, configure, and manage systems and processes. In-person or online training options for Chef can be found here, and you can sample some of the online tutorials here.

The Linux Foundation’s “Guide to the Open Cloud: Current Trends and Open Source Projects” includes a comprehensive section on configuration management tools, and you can find out more and visit some relevant open source project repositories here.

Sysadmins who add cloud and configuration management skills to their toolkits are keeping pace with rapidly changing technology environments. These aren’t the only ways to expand your skills, though. In the next article, we will look more closely at the importance of DevOps.

Learn more about essential sysadmin skills: Download the Future Proof Your SysAdmin Career ebook now.

Future Proof Your SysAdmin Career: New Networking Essentials

Future Proof Your SysAdmin Career: Locking Down Security

Future Proof Your SysAdmin Career: Looking to the Cloud

Future Proof Your SysAdmin Career: Configuration and Automation

Future Proof Your SysAdmin Career: Embracing DevOps

Future Proof Your SysAdmin Career: Getting Certified

Future Proof Your SysAdmin Career: Communication and Collaboration

Future Proof Your SysAdmin Career: Advancing with Open Source

Docker Enterprise Now Runs Windows and Linux in One Cluster

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InfoWorld

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August 21, 2017

With the newest Docker Enterprise Edition, you can now have Docker clusters composed of nodes running different operating systems.

Three of the key OSes supported by Docker—Windows, Linux, and IBM System Z—can run applications side by side in the same cluster, all orchestrated by a common mechanism.

Clustering apps across multiple OSes in Docker requires that you build per-OS images for each app. But those apps, when running on both Windows and Linux, can be linked to run in concert via Docker’s overlay networking.

This Week in Numbers: Serverless Adoption on Par with Containers

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The New Stack

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August 21, 2017

Serverless technologies like functions as a service (FaaS) are in use by 43 percent of enterprises that both have a significant number of strategic workloads running in the public cloud workloads and the ability to dynamically manage them.

Without those qualifications, it is easy to misinterpret the findings from New Relic’s survey-based ebook “Achieving Serverless Success with Dynamic Cloud and DevOps.” After digging in, we found that the survey says 70 percent of enterprises have migrated a significant number of workloads to the public cloud. Among this group, 39 percent of using serverless, 40 percent are using containers and 34 percent are using container orchestration.

At least superficially, adoption of serverless technologies now matches that of containers.

Here Are All the Git Commands I used Last Week, and What They Do

By

freeCodeCamp

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August 21, 2017

Like most newbies, I started out searching StackOverflow for Git commands, then copy-pasting answers, without really understanding what they did.

Image credit: XKCD

Well, here I am years later to compile such a list, and lay out some best practices that even intermediate-advanced developers should find useful.

To keep things practical, I’m basing this list off of the actual Git commands I used over the past week.

Almost every developer uses Git, and most likely GitHub. But the average developer probably only uses these three commands 99% of the time:

Node.js Foundation 2017 Survey Results

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Node.js

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August 21, 2017

The primary objective of the research was to profile Node.js users, understand usage patterns and trends and identify potential areas of improvement. With over 8 million Node.js instances online, three in four users are planning to increase their use of Node.js in the next 12 months. Many are learning Node.js in a foreign language with China being the second largest population outside of the U.S. using Node. Want to get a better understanding on how people are using and learning Node.js?

Read the full report.

PayScale’s Highest Paying Cloud Computing Jobs In 2017

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Forbes

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August 21, 2017

Enterprise IT Architects with cloud computing expertise are earning a median salary of $137,957.
Senior Solution Architects with cloud computing expertise are earning a median salary of $132,327.
AT&T pays a median salary of $248,323 for experienced cloud computing professionals according to PayScale.

These and many other insights are from PayScale’s analysis of the highest paying cloud computing jobs in 2017.

Designing a Microservices Architecture for Failure

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Rising Stack

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August 21, 2017

A Microservices architecture makes it possible to isolate failures through well-defined service boundaries. But like in every distributed system, there is a higher chance for network, hardware or application level issues. As a consequence of service dependencies, any component can be temporarily unavailable for their consumers. To minimize the impact of partial outages we need to build fault tolerant services that can gracefully respond to certain types of outages.

This article introduces the most common techniques and architecture patterns to build and operate a highly available microservices system based on RisingStack’s Node.js Consulting & Development experience.

The Risk of the Microservices Architecture

The microservices architecture moves application logic to services and uses a network layer to communicate between them. Communicating over a network instead of in-memory calls brings extra latency and complexity to the system which requires cooperation between multiple physical and logical components. The increased complexity of the distributed system leads to a higher chance of particular network failures.