Announcing Linkerd 1.0

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April 27, 2017

Today, we’re thrilled to announce Linkerd version 1.0. A little more than one year from our initial launch, Linkerd is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and has a thriving community of contributors and users. Adopters range from startups like Monzo, which is disrupting the UK banking industry, to high scale Internet companies like Paypal, Ticketmaster, and Credit Karma, to companies that have been in business for hundreds of years like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

A 1.0 release is a meaningful milestone for any open source project. In our case, it’s a recognition that we’ve hit a stable set of features that our users depend on to handle their most critical production traffic. It also signals a commitment to limiting breaking configuration changes moving forward.

How to Run NGINX as a Docker Container

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Tech Republic

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April 27, 2017

Using Docker containers makes for an incredibly easy way to roll out apps and services onto your network. With this, you can extend the offerings of your business or quickly test a new server or service. With these apps as containers, it becomes possible to cut down on sysadmin overhead, thanks to no longer having to manage applications through package managers or installing from source. By installing the likes of NGINX as a Docker container, you can simply replace the image when new updates arrive.

But how do you deploy NGINX as a Docker container? Let me walk you through the process. I will demonstrate on Ubuntu 16.04 and will assume you already have docker installed and ready to go.

Tales of a Chef Workflow: Cookbook Organization and Maintenance

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dnsimple

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April 27, 2017

In this post I want to cover a few small tips and lessons learned from working with Chef for about 5 years now. The last 3 years at DNSimple have helped further shape my personal opinions on organization of Chef cookbooks workflows. What follows is how we do things at DNSimple and not the one and only way to do things with Chef. One of Chef’s greatest strengths is its flexibility, however it can also be a challenge for Chef developers of any skill level.

Naming things

They say the 2 hardest problems in computer science are naming things, cache invalidation, and off by one errors.

Free Webinar on Starting a Collaborative Open Source Project

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The Linux Foundation

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April 26, 2017

Starting a collaborative open source software project involves more than a great idea and the code to get it going. Much of the work involves deciding how you want your community of developers to build and evolve the code. But there’s no need to be intimidated by the process. This upcoming free webinar — from Capital One and The Linux Foundation — will provide the necessary information to get your open source project underway with proven best practices.

In this webinar, The Linux Foundation’s Mike Dolan, VP of Strategic Programs, and Scott Nicholas, Sr. Director of Strategic Programs, will outline important steps to get your project going and keep it on track for success.

You’ll learn how to:

Set up your decision making model
Understand and clearly document your licensing policy
Create a trademark and usage policy that fits your code
Successfully contribute to existing open source projects

The “Best Practices for Starting an Open Source Project” webinar will be held Wednesday, May 3, at 2:00 PM Eastern time. Register now!

Mike Dolan is VP of Strategic Programs responsible for Collaborative Projects and Legal Programs at The Linux Foundation. Mr. Dolan has set up and launched dozens of open source and open standards projects covering technology segments including networking, virtualization, cloud, blockchain, Internet of Things, Big Data and analytics, security, containers, storage and embedded devices.

Scott Nicholas is Sr. Director of Strategic Programs for The Linux Foundation. Scott assists in the launch and support of open source projects and contributes to the foundation’s legal programs. Scott has set up numerous collaborative projects across the technology stack. Scott assists in the execution of The Linux Foundation’s annual Legal Summit and other legal programs.

Get a Preview of Apache IoT Projects at Upcoming ApacheCon

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Pam Baker

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April 26, 2017

The countdown until ApacheCon North America has begun. The blockbuster event will be in Miami this year and runs May 16-18. The Apache community is made up of many niche communities and ApacheCon offers something for all of them.

Here, Roman Shaposhnik, Director of Open Source, Pivotal Inc., who is heading the Apache IoT track at the ApacheCon conference, gave us a sneak peek of what the Apache Internet of Things community can look forward to at the event.

Linux.com: Please give us an overview of the projects the Apache IoT community are working on.

Roman Shaposhnik: There are many projects underway. Including projects such as Apache Mynewt and several that are directly relevant to the embedded space, which is a precursor to the IoT. Those are on the edge, and then there are projects on the data centered side too. So, we’ve got projects on Hadoop, and some on NiFi, an enterprise integration and dataflow automation tool, that is happening on the edge in the data center. Apache gives you end-to-end approach to an IoT architecture. We don’t just stop at the edge, we don’t just stop at the data center. It’s kind of end to end — that’s what’s exciting to me about it.

Linux.com: When many of us think about the IoT, we think about smart devices like the Amazon Echo, but we don’t think about what is behind that. What’s happening on that end?

Shaposhnik: Today the bulk of the projects are on the back end, but with things like Mynewt joining the Apache family, we’re moving towards what is commonly referred to as “Fog” computing, where your edge becomes increasingly more intelligent, and more independent from the data center.

Linux.com: Which talks are you most excited about in your track at ApacheCon?

Shaposhnik: We had to turn talks down because we didn’t have enough space in our track but the ones that made the cut are simply outstanding. That makes it difficult to choose a few to highlight, so I’ll just mention some that I either took a direct role in organizing or that I, myself, would really love to attend.

I’ll start with two of the keynotes, both from an investment or VC community perspective. Basically, they are VCs explaining to developers what areas they feel will attract investments. That information is super important to an emerging technology like IoT. IoT is a hot market today, but figuring out what part of the market to address is a huge challenge.

One of those talks is a keynote by a friend of mine from Lightspeed Venture Partners. Sudip Chakrabarti is his name, and he will be explaining his experiences. The other one is a keynote organized as a panel of VC partners and investors in the Valley. These two are really super exciting to me.

Besides those talks, there are several Mynewt talks that I’m super excited about. Mynewt is exciting to me because I come from a background with some operating system design. I really love this approach in how they make it all pluggable and modularized. I highly recommend any talk on Mynewt, but everything else is just amazing as well.

There is also Justin McLean, who is driving the Apache IoT community in Australia. He is doing his own presentations and introducing people to different ways of doing IoT on small devices.

Linux.com: The Apache software foundation has a long tradition of being the place where innovation happens in a variety of communities. For example, we started out in the web and web services and then we had a boom of Java standards development kinds of projects. Right now, we’re in the midst of a big data surge. Do you see IoT as the next place that Apache is going to go and go big?

Shaposhnik: That was one reason why I was so happy to bring my VC friends to the conference because right now I see exactly that happening. I think big data has graduated to, I wouldn’t say a full enterprise adoption because there’s still challenges companies are working to iron out the kinks, but I think the investment interest has shifted more towards IoT. Now, that is not to say that big data is somehow unimportant. It is still a very important piece of the overall puzzle, but from an investment, hyper-growth perspective, I think IoT is the big next thing.

Learn first-hand from the largest collection of global Apache communities at ApacheCon 2017 May 16-18 in Miami, Florida. ApacheCon features 120+ sessions including five sub-conferences: Apache: IoT, Apache Traffic Server Control Summit, CloudStack Collaboration Conference, FlexJS Summit and TomcatCon. Secure your spot now! Linux.com readers get $30 off their pass to ApacheCon. Select “attendee” and enter code LINUXRD5. Register now >>

Open Source Groups Provide New Licensing Resources

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ADT Mag

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April 26, 2017

Newcomers to free and open source software (FOSS) might be bewildered by the variety of licenses that dictate how users can use community offerings.

For example, the Open Source Initiative lists nine “popular licenses” and Wikipedia lists dozens more coming in a variety of flavors for different purposes. Those purposes include linking, distribution, modification, patent grant, private use, sublicensing and trademark grant.

To help newbies get a handle on FOSS licenses, The Linux Foundation and Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) today announced new resources to help with identification and compliance.

New Strain of Linux Malware Could Get Serious

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LinuxInsider

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April 26, 2017

A new strain of malware targeting Linux systems, dubbed “Linux/Shishiga,” could morph into a dangerous security threat.

Eset on Tuesday disclosed the threat, which represents a new Lua family unrelated to previously seen LuaBot malware.

Linux/Shishiga uses four different protocols — SSH, Telnet, HTTP and BitTorrent — and Lua scripts for modularity, wrote Detection Engineer Michal Malik and the Eset research team in an online post.

Linux/Shishiga targets GNU/Linux systems using a common infection vector based on brute-forcing weak credentials on a built-in password list. The malware uses the list to try a variety of different passwords in an effort to gain access. This is a similar approach used by Linux/Moose, with the added capability of brute-forcing SSH credentials.

Compose your Infrastructure, Don’t Micromanage It

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Medium Blog

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April 26, 2017

TLDR: Leverage Kubernetes annotations across your cluster to declaratively configure management of monitoring and logging.

Two of the largest surfaces of applications that make contact with infrastructure are monitoring and logging, and this post talks how to approach both these needs in a scalable, composable, and simplified way. If you are familiar with the Kubernetes, Prometheus, Fluentd, and the ELK stack, feel free to skip the background. …

The real power of Kubernetes comes from the API types that describe what pods should look like and manage the scheduling (and querying) of pods. Kubernetes does this with the use of key-value pairs on API objects called Labels. As an example, when a Deployment API-object is created, the Kubernetes Scheduler ensures that a specified number of pods are running across the available servers.

What’s a Service Mesh? And Why Do I Need One?

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Buoyant Blog

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April 26, 2017

tl;dr: A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for making service-to-service communication safe, fast, and reliable. If you’re building a cloud native application, you need a service mesh!

Over the past year, the service mesh has emerged as a critical component of the cloud native stack. High-traffic companies like Paypal, Lyft, Ticketmaster, and Credit Karma have all added a service mesh to their production applications, and this January, Linkerd, the open source service mesh for cloud native applications, became an official project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. But what is a service mesh, exactly? And why is it suddenly relevant?

In this article, I’ll define the service mesh and trace its lineage through shifts in application architecture over the past decade. I’ll distinguish the service mesh from the related, but distinct, concepts of API gateways, edge proxies, and the enterprise service bus.

How to Get Started Learning to Program

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OpenSource.com

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April 26, 2017

There’s a lot of buzz lately about learning to program. Not only is there a shortage of people compared with the open and pending positions in software development, programming is also a career with one of the highest salaries and highest job satisfaction rates. No wonder so many people are looking to break into the industry!

But how, exactly, do you do that? “How can I learn to program?” is a common question. Although I don’t have all the answers, hopefully this article will provide guidance to help you find the approach that best suits your needs and situation.