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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
This week was a busy one for open source enterprise wins! Read the latest installment of our weekly digest to stay on the cutting edge of OSS business beats.
1) The Linux Foundation’s Dronecode project receives accolades for the creator of its PX4 project; Lorenz Meier has been recognized by MIT Technology Review in its annual list of Innovators Under 35.
4) Microsoft announced purchase of a startup called Cycle Computing for an “undisclosed sum”. While it doesn’t have the name recognition of some of its peers, the startup has played a pivotal role in cloud computing today.
5) Open source content management system was initially released without frills or fanfare. After 2,600 commits, the 1.0 version is ready to tackle the blogging giants.
There are so many Linux distributions available—so many, in fact, that it can become a bit of a challenge to find the one right for you. After you’ve looked at them enough, it seems the variations tend to blur together, such that one flavor of Linux is only a slight shift away from another.
Perhaps your distribution of choice may have a sweet-looking desktop, but it might be the standard Ubuntu underneath. Or, maybe you’ve found that a distro is using the same GNOME as everyone else, with the slightest variation under the hood. That’s how it goes in the selection of Linux. The good news is that, even with that familiarity, there are some truly brilliant distributions available. Some of them advance the desktop interface well beyond the standard, while others go out of their way to be familiar.
Chakra Linux is a combination of the above descriptions. What initially started out as a variation on Arch Linux, with the name KDEmod, the distribution used a “lightified and modular” version of the KDE desktop, built exclusively for Arch Linux. This take on KDE offered a significant performance increase and improved customizations over the standard KDE installation, and it quickly gained a following.
After a while, however, it was determined that the LiveCD Project would be a much better fit and Chakra was born. Since then, the environment has slowly morphed into its own beast, a unique merging of ideologies and designs that deliver a solid and beautiful experience.
Chakra’s main vision is to provide a pure KDE/Qt desktop, with a nod to simplicity and transparency. Of course, simplicity is in the eye of the beholder. Even though KDE makes for an incredibly user-friendly environment, a new-to-Linux user will find themselves a bit confused when it comes to certain tasks. Let’s dive in and see what Chakra’s all about.
At first blush
Chakra is a beautiful desktop—if you’re okay with flat themes (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The Chakra desktop, showing off the flat theme.
Check out the Chakra menu, and you’ll find just about every piece of software you need. The one caveat to this is the choice of office suit. Instead of the more popular LibreOffice, Chakra installs the KDE-specific Calligra. As long as you don’t need to interact with MS Office, that’s not completely a bad thing. If, however, you have to open any MS Office document (later than Office 2007), you’re out of luck. As much as I respect what Calligra is doing, without the ability to interact with the likes of .docx, it simply will not do (especially in a business environment).
Of course, that’s not really too much of an issue, as you can open up the Octopi software installer and install LibreOffice. Unfortunately, the version available is a bit out of date. Currently, the latest release of LibreOffice is 5.4.0.3 and the version available to Chakra (after an initial update) is 5.3.5-1. Unfortunately, there is no latest version of the office suite to be downloaded for the platform, so users would have to wait until the developers make it available for update.
Speaking of which…
Another issue new users will find with Chakra is the update process. With most Linux distributions, you can head to the desktop menu and find an entry for updating software. Not so with Chakra. Any updating to be done, must be handled through the command line. So to upgrade your system, you must open up the terminal window and issue the command:
sudo pacman -Syu
After running the command, you must okay every single one of the updates, before the process will continue (do note, the first run will take considerable time).
Speaking of which…
A unique aspect of Chakra is that it is a half-rolling release distribution. This means that Chakra works with a stable core and rolling applications on top. With this idea, you will always have the latest desktop software, running on top of a not-so-latest release of the core. This forms a solid foundation for which to run software. For instance, after an initial update, Chakra was using KDE 5.10.4-1 (the latest release) and kernel is 4.8.6-1. The mainline kernel is currently at 4.13-rc4, so this is certainly a stable kernel.
Fortunately, you do not have to install applications from the command line (you certainly can, if you choose). If you prefer a GUI for installing software, Chakra includes the Octopi front end for that particular task (Figure 2).
Figure 2: The Octopi GUI front end.
It is very important that you run the sudo pacman -Syucommand before first using Octopi—otherwise, you’ll have out of date packages available for installation.
Some nice choices
Looking beyond the Calligra over LibreOffice issue, some nice choices have been made for default software. Take, for instance, the selection of Clementine as the default music player. This happens to be my favorite of all the available players on the market. It offers an amazing array of features, with a great user interface. Good choice. Another solid choice is Qupzilla, a lightweight web browser that uses the Qt webengine. This browser is faster to open that Firefox, offers more features than Midori, and renders as well as Chrome.
Another nice touch is the addition of the Yakuake drop-down terminal. I like a good terminal that is quick to open and quick to get out of the way; Yakuake does this with ease.
Who should be using Chakra
Chakra is a unique distribution that offers an interface and stability that begs for new users to come play, but with just enough added complexity that might challenge them to learn a bit more (or make them slightly hesitant). On the other hand, Chakra does deliver serious performance and plenty of tools (such as Package Changelogs, Chakra Bug Tracking System, Qt Designer, Vim text editor, and more) that will make more hard-core users quite happy.
If you’re a new user, who doesn’t mind working at the command line now and then, Chakra will serve you well. If you’re already well versed in Linux, Chakra will give you just enough to keep you curious and happy, while remaining stable underneath.
Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.
