Latest Fedora Project OS Tips its Hat to Container Upgrades

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July 13, 2017

The Red Hat-backed Fedora Project released the latest version of its open source operating system that powers container management, data center operations, and developer workstations. The Linux-based Fedora OS was initially released in 2003 and is the basis for a number of distribution platforms, including Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux platform and the One Laptop Per Child XO project.

The latest Fedora 26 release includes updated compilers and languages; a new version of its package management system; an updated storage configuration screen for installation programs; and the ability to create bootable SD cards with ARM-based devices.

Specific to the Atomic Host container management platform, Fedora 26 brings containerized Kubernetes as an alternative to built-in Kubernetes binaries. The move allows for running of different versions of the container orchestration engine.

DevOps Metrics: Are You Measuring What Matters?

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The Enterprisers Project

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July 13, 2017

How do you measure DevOps success? Talk “metrics” for DevOps work or cloud-native infrastructures, and the conversation tends to revolve around familiar operational and productivity measures. Uptime. Transactions per second. Bugs fixed. Commits. Familiar categories of data that are straightforward to track and would seem to at least passingly correlate with some combination of efficiency, health of the environment, and development speed.

It’s common for IT teams to instrument for and log such data – especially now that machine learning and other modern tools make it much easier to gain insights from large datasets, whether for pro-active, predictive analytics, or root cause analysis after a failure.

That’s not a DevOps metric!

However, that doesn’t make everything a metric! A metric is properly thought of as a key performance indicator for data – a measurement that’s important to you in some fundamental way.

9 Cutting-Edge Programming Languages Worth Learning Now

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InfoWorld

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July 13, 2017

The big languages are popular for a reason: They offer a huge foundation of open source code, libraries, and frameworks that make finishing the job easier. This is the result of years of momentum in which they are chosen time and again for new projects, and expertise in their nuances grow worthwhile and plentiful.

Sometimes the vast resources of the popular, mainstream programming languages aren’t enough to solve your particular problem. Sometimes you have to look beyond the obvious to find the right language, where the right structure makes the difference while offering that extra feature to help your code run significantly faster without endless tweaking and optimizing. This language produces vastly more stable and accurate code because it prevents you from programming sloppy or wrong code.

Keynotes for Node.js Interactive Focus on the Future of the Platform

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Medium Blog

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July 13, 2017

From October 4–6 developers, software architects, engineers, and community organizers will gather in Vancouver, British Columbia for Node.js Interactive — an event hosted by the Node.js Foundation. The conference features keynotes, presentations and workshops that are aimed to help Node.js users better understand how to work with Node.js and JavaScript as well as best practices in contributing to the project.

The conference attracts new Node.js users and experienced users alike, and focuses on a wide range of topics like security, serverless, emerging uses cases (artificial intelligence and IoT), community building, diagnostics and much more. You can view the presentation and workshop schedule here.

How to Install OpenStack in Less Than an Hour

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Sander van Vugt

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July 12, 2017

OpenStack is a framework for building IT infrastructure. This framework consists of a collection of many smaller projects including OpenStack Nova (compute), Keystone (identity service), Glance (image service), Neutron (networking), and many others.

These components are combined into working software, either through a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach or by using one of the many available distributions. Brave admins will go the DIY route which allows you to select exactly which components you need and stay on the cutting edge with constant access to the latest and greatest OpenStack releases, which happen every six months.

A distribution is less work to build and maintain. You can get the whole setup installed in less than an hour — although you will also need to wait for the hot new features from the latest OpenStack releases.

There are many available OpenStack distributions including RDO/RHOS, Mirantis, SUSE, Ubuntu, DevStack, HPE, Oracle, VMware and others in the OpenStack marketplace. However, they are not all lightweight. The distribution you choose will depend on its features. These include the following:

Supported projects
Support offering (to help you out if things go wrong)
Integration with your existing infrastructure
Support for different hypervisors. Some distributions don’t go beyond supporting KVM, while others include support for nearly all of the available hypervisors.

Pick your distribution

The first step is to pick your distribution. My personal favorite is Red Hat based OpenStack, running on CentOS (RDO). It offers different deployment solutions which will lead to a fairly standardized configuration. It’s lightweight, running on a minimum of 6 GiB RAM, and supports KVM and ESXi hypervisors. And best of all it’s free, with a fast and easy deployment using Packstack. This makes it ideal to configure a demo OpenStack that will run as a virtual machine on your laptop, for instance.

For a POC setup, install CentOS using the ”Server with GUI” installation pattern. Make sure you have at least 6 GiB RAM, more is better! Note that the Packstack installer will allocate processes according to the number of CPUs you’re using, which highly increases RAM requirements. If you’re installing in a VM, it’s a good idea to configure it with just 1 CPU while installing, and if so required, increase the number of CPUs one the installation has finished.

After installation, use yum search openstack. It will show a list of packages available for different distributions. I recommend that you don’t use the latest release, but the one before as it’s likely to have fewer bugs.

Installation Summary

You can install OpenStack with a few simple commands:

yum install centos-release-openstack-ocata
yum install openstack-packstack
packstack –gen-answer-file=/root/answers.txt
packstack –answer-file=/root/answers.txt (takes 10-15 minutes, depending on Internet speed)

An important part of the installation is the answer file. This long file contains a long list of parameters that need to be configured to determine what is going to be installed and how it will be installed. Below is a list of some of the parameters I’d recommend that you change to get to a simple POC setup.

CONFIG_DEFAULT_PASSWORD=password
CONFIG_SWIFT_INSTALL=n
CONFIG_HEAT_INSTALL=y
CONFIG_NTP_SERVERS=pool.ntp.org
CONFIG_KEYSTONE_ADMIN_PW=password
CONFIG_CINDER_VOLUMES_CREATE=y
CONFIG_HORIZON_SSL=y
CONFIG_HEAT_CFN_INSTALL=y
CONFIG_PROVISION_DEMO=n
CONFIG_NEUTRON_OVS_TUNNEL_IF=eth1

Verifying the Installation

Once the Packstack based installation has finished, you’ll want to figure out if it was successful. A few simple commands can help you verify your installation. To start with, use source ˜/keystonerc_admin. This command sources the OpenStack credentials file that has automatically been created. This file authenticates you with Keystone, the OpenStack authentication service, after which you’ll have full access to all of the OpenStack components and you’ll be able to run the different OpenStack commands.

Another useful command is openstack-status (you’ll need to install the openstack-utils RPM). After sourcing the credentials file, it gives an overview of the complete configuration that’s currently operational. You can also use the OpenStack command-line interface. The openstack command from the CLI has hundreds of options to allow you to manipulate all parts of OpenStack. Type, for example:

openstack user list

which will show a list of users currently configured in your OpenStack cloud.

After verifying that OpenStack has been configured successfully, you can also start a browser and connect to the Horizon configuration interface. This is a nice graphical interface that gives easy access to most of the tasks that OpenStack admins need to do on a frequent basis.

Screen Shot 2017-05-11 at 15.41.45.png

Now that it’s installed and verified, services are defined in the database and exist at a Keystone level, many configuration files have been created with a common structure, and SDN has been set up, all through the magic of Packstack.

Now you can get started creating a project and user and running an instance. In part 2 of this series on OpenStack, I’ll show you how to get instances up and running in 40 minutes!

Now updated for OpenStack Newton! Our Essentials of OpenStack Administration course teaches you everything you need to know to create and manage private and public clouds with OpenStack. Download a sample chapter today!

How to Write Documentation That’s Actually Useful

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HPE Blog

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July 12, 2017

Now more than ever we need well-documented code. Here are four ways to make sure your applications make sense to humans as well as to computers.

Programmers love to write code, but they hate to write documentation. Developers always want to read documentation when they inherit a project, but writing it themselves? Feh!

How common is this? A recent GitHub survey found that “incomplete or outdated documentation is a pervasive problem,” according to 93 percent of respondents. Yet 60 percent of contributors to the open source code repository say they rarely or never contribute to documentation. Their reasoning, for both the open source projects and their own applications? A common attitude that “documentation is for ‘lusers‘ who don’t write good code!”

That’s not a stance your business can afford to adopt.

Tech Giants Rally Today in Support of Net Neutrality

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The Verge

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July 12, 2017

Technology giants like Amazon, Spotify, Reddit, Facebook, Google, Twitter and many othersare rallying today in a so-called “day of action” in support of net neutrality, five days ahead of the first deadline for comments on the US Federal Communications Commission’s planned rollback of the rules.

In a move that’s equal parts infuriating and exasperating, Ajit Pai, the FCC’s new chairman appointed by President Trump, wants to scrap the open internet protections installed in 2015 under the Obama administration. Those consumer protections mean providers such as AT&T, Charter, Comcast, and Verizon are prevented from blocking or slowing down access to the web.

FD.io: Breaking the Terabit Barrier!

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FD.io

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July 12, 2017

At launch, FD.io’s VPP technology could route/switch at half a Terabit per second at multimillion fib entry scales. Close examination of the bottlenecks revealed that it was being limited by the ability of the PCI bus to deliver packets from the NIC to the CPU. VPP had headroom to do more, but the PCI bus bandwidth imposed limitations.

Today we are delighted to announce that limitation has moved further out. The increased PCI bandwidth in the Intel® Xeon® Processor Scalable family have doubled the amount of traffic the PCI bus can deliver to the CPU, and VPP has risen to the occasion without the need of new software optimizations. This proves what we have long suspected: VPP can route/switch in software at multi-million fib entry scale as much traffic as the PCI bus can throw at it.

The Changing Face of the Hybrid Cloud

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OpenSource.com

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July 12, 2017

Depending upon the event you use to start the clock, cloud computing is only a little more than 10 years old. Some terms and concepts around cloud computing that we take for granted today are newer still. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) document that defined now-familiar cloud terminology—such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)—was only published in 2011, although it widely circulated in draft form for a while before that.

Among other definitions in that document was one for hybrid cloud. Looking at how that term has shifted during the intervening years is instructive. Cloud-based infrastructures have moved beyond a relatively simplistic taxonomy. Also, it highlights how priorities familiar to adopters of open source software—such as flexibility, portability, and choice—have made their way to the hybrid cloud.

Dangerous Logic – De Morgan & Programming

By

I Programmer

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July 12, 2017

Programmers are master logicians – well they sometimes are. Most of the time they are as useless at it as the average joe. The difference is that the average joe can avoid logic and hence the mistakes. How good are you at logical expressions and why exactly is Augustus De Morgan your best friend, logically speaking?

It is commonly held that programming is a logical subject.

Programmers are great at working out the logic of it all and expressing it clearly and succinctly, but logic is tough to get right.

IFs and Intervals

A logical expression is just something that works out to be true or false.

Generally you first meet logical expressions as part of learning about if statements. Most languages have a construct something like…