LC3 2017 Features Open Source Experts in SDN, Cloud, DevOps, and More

By

-

April 24, 2017

Developers, architects, sysadmins, DevOps experts, business leaders, and other professionals will gather in China June 19-20 to discuss the latest open source technology and trends at LinuxCon + ContainerCon + CloudOpen China 2017 (LC3).

This event — held for the first time in Beijing, China — features three conferences in one, with more than 100 conference sessions focusing on topics such as:

Kubernetes
Cloud Native & Containers
Linux
Blockchain
Networking & Orchestration
IoT & Embedded Linux
Professional Open Source

In a special keynote presentation, Linus Torvalds, Creator of Linux and Git, will chat with Dirk Hohndel, VP, Chief Open Source Officer, VMware.

Other keynote speakers include:

Madam Yang Zhiqiang, Deputy General Manager, China Mobile Research Institute
Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director, OpenStack Foundation
Dave Ward, ‎CTO of Engineering and Chief Architect, Cisco Systems
Dr. Sanqi Li, CTO of Product & Solutions, Huawei

With more than half of the speakers coming from outside of China, there is no better place to learn from leading open source experts from China and around the world.

Session highlights include:

Adoption and Localization of Kubernetes in China – Jiayao (Julia) Han, Caicloud
There is NO Open Source Business Model – Stephen Walli, Docker Inc.
Releasing a Linux Distribution In the Age of DevOps – Brian Stinson, The CentOS Project
The Business Reality of Building Open Source: What We Learned from OVS and OVN – Justin Pettit, VMware & Ben Pfaff, Open vSwitch Project
Challenge and Practice of SDN in Large Scale Data Centers – Jiang, Alibaba Cloud
Hardening Your IoT Endpoints: A Preventive Toolkit – Rabimba Karanjai, Almaden Research Center

At LC3, attendees can expect to learn about the newest and most interesting open source technologies as well as how to collaborate and lead in the open source community.

You can view the full schedule here.

Take advantage of early bird pricing now and save $60USD / 415RMB through April 27. Register now!

The Linux Foundation’s Clyde Seepersad to Host Training Q&A on Twitter

By

The Linux Foundation

-

April 24, 2017

On Friday, April 28, The Linux Foundation will continue its new series of Twitter chats with leaders at the organization. This monthly activity, entitled #AskLF, gives the open source community a chance to ask upper management at questions about The Linux Foundation’s strategies and offerings.

#AskLF aims to increase access to the bright minds and community organizers within The Linux Foundation. While there are many opportunities to interact with staff at Linux Foundation global events, which bring together over 25,000 open source influencers, a live Twitter Q&A will give participants a direct line of communication to the designated hosts.

The second host (following Arpit Joshipura’s chat last month) will be Clyde Seepersad, the General Manager of Training and Certification since 2013. His #AskLF session will take place in the midst of many new training initiatives at the organization, including a new Inclusive Speaker Orientation and a Kubernetes Fundamentals course. @linuxfoundation followers are encouraged to ask Seepersad questions related to Linux Foundation courses, certifications, job prospects in the open source industry, and recent training developments.

Sample questions might include:

I’m new to open source but I want to work in the industry. How can a Linux Foundation Certification help me?
What are The Linux Foundation Training team’s support offerings like?
How will a Linux Foundation certification give me an advantage over other candidates with competitors’ certifications?

Here’s how you can participate in the first #AskLF:

Follow @linuxfoundation on Twitter: Hosts will take over The Linux Foundation’s account during the session.
Save the date: April 28, 2017 at 10 a.m. PT.
Use the hashtag #AskLF: To ask Clyde your questions while he hosts. Click here to spread the news of #AskLF with your Twitter community.
Be a n00b!: If you’ve been considering beginning a open source training journey, don’t be afraid to ask Clyde basic questions about The Linux Foundation’s methods, recommendations, or subjects covered. No inquiry is too basic!

More dates and details for future #AskLF sessions to come! We’ll see you on Twitter, April 28th at 10 a.m. PT.

More information on Linux Foundation Training can be found in the training blog via Linux.com:

https://www.linux.com/learn/training

Hear Clyde’s thoughts on why Linux Foundation certifications give you a competitive advantage in this on-demand webinar:

No More Excuses: Why You Need to Get Certified Now

*note: unlike Reddit-style AMAs, #AskLF is not focused around general topics that might pertain to the host’s personal life. To participate, please focus your questions around open source networking and Clyde Seepersad’s career.

Keeping State and Networking in Kubernetes

By

Carla Schroder

-

April 24, 2017

In our previous installments of this series (see below), we learned a lot of neat things about Kubernetes. We learned that it is descended from the secret Google Borg project, its architecture, and why it is a good choice for your datacenter. Now we’ll learn how Kubernetes keeps state with etcd, and how normal Linux networking ties everything together.

Key-Value Stores

Kubernetes needs a persistency layer to track the state of the cluster over time. Traditionally, this could be implemented with a relational database. However, in a highly scalable system, a relational database (e.g., MySQL PostgreSQL) becomes a single point of failure. Distributed key-value stores are, by design, made to run on multiple nodes. Data is replicated among the nodes and has strong consistency, so that when any individual nodes fail the data store does not fail. Zookeeper, Consul, and etcd are all examples of distributed key-value stores.

Kubernetes uses etcd. etcd can be run on a single node, though this provides no fault-tolerance. etcd uses a leader election algorithm to provide strong consistency of the stored state among the nodes.

In a test setup on the master node, we also run a single node etcd key-value store. We can check its content with the etcdctl command and see what Kubernetes is storing in it:

$ systemctl -a | grep etcd etcd2.service loaded active running
etcd2

$ etcdctl ls /registry
/registry/ranges
/registry/namespaces
/registry/serviceaccounts
/registry/controllers
/registry/secrets
/registry/pods
/registry/deployments
/registry/services
/registry/events
/registry/minions
/registry/replicasets

This gives you a sneak peek at some of the Kubernetes resources.

Networking Setup

Getting all the previous components running is a common task for system administrators who are used to configuration management. But to get a fully functional Kubernetes cluster, the network must be setup properly as well.

If you have deployed virtual machines (VMs) based on IaaS solutions, this will sound familiar. Containers running on all the nodes will attach to a Linux bridge. This bridge is configured to give IP addresses in a specific subnet, and that subnet is routed to all the other nodes. In essence, you need to treat a container just like a VM. All the containers started on any nodes need to be able to reach each other.

You can see the detailed explanation about this model at Cluster Networking. The only caveat is that in Kubernetes the lowest compute unit is not a container, but what we call a pod. A pod is a group of co-located containers that share the same IP address.

Kubernetes expects this network configuration to be available. It is not created automatically, so you have to set it up. You can configure your physical network, or use a software-defined overlay such as Weave, Flannel, or Calico.

Tim Hockin, one of the lead Kubernetes developers, has created a useful slide deck, Illustrated Guide To Kubernetes Networking, to help understand Kubernetes networking.

Download the sample chapter now.

You may enjoy the previous entries in this series:

The Cloud Foundry Approach to Container Storage and Security

By

The New Stack

-

April 24, 2017

Recently, The New Stack published an article titled “Containers and Storage: Why We Aren’t There Yet” covering a talk from IBM’s James Bottomley at the Linux Foundation’s Vault conference in March. Both the talk and article focused on one of the central problems we’ve been working to address in the Cloud Foundry Foundation’s Diego Persistence project team, so we thought it would be a good idea to highlight the features we’ve added to mitigate it. Cloud Foundry does significantly better than what the article suggests is the current state of the art on the container security front, so we’ll cover that here as well.

As the article puts it:

Right now, a major roadblock to stateful storage of containers is the inability, under current Linux-y architectures, to reconcile the file system user ID (fsuid), used by external storage systems, with the user IDs (uids) created within containers. They can not be reconciled in any way that can be both safe and maintainable without loss of coherence of either the system or the system administrator.

Google’s New Chip Is a Stepping Stone to Quantum Computing Supremacy

By

MIT Technology Review

-

April 24, 2017

John Martinis has given himself just a few months to reach a milestone in the history of computing.

He’s leader of the Google research group working on building astonishingly powerful computer chips that manipulate data using the quirks of quantum physics. By the end of this year, Martinis says, his team will build a device that achieves “quantum supremacy,” meaning it can perform a particular calculation that’s beyond the reach of any conventional computer. Proof will come from a kind of drag race between Google’s chip and one of the world’s largest supercomputers.

“We think we’re ready to do this experiment. It’s something we can do now,” says Martinis.

The Story of Getting SSH Port 22

By

SSH Communications Security

-

April 24, 2017

The SSH (Secure Shell) port is 22. It is not a co-incidence. This is a story I (Tatu Ylonen) haven’t told before. I wrote the initial version of SSH in Spring 1995. It was a time when telnet and FTP were widely used.

Anyway, I designed SSH to replace both telnet (port 23) and ftp (port 21). Port 22 was free. It was conveniently between the ports for telnet and ftp. I figured having that port number might be one of those small things that would give some aura of credibility. But how could I get that port number? I had never allocated one, but I knew somebody who had allocated a port.

The basic process for port allocation was fairly simple at that time. Internet was smaller and we were in the very early stages of the Internet boom. Port numbers were allocated by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). At the time, that meant an esteemed Internet pioneer called Jon Postel and Joyce K. Reynolds. Among other things, Jon had been the editor of such minor protocol standards as IP (RFC 791), ICMP (RFC 792), and TCP (RFC 793). Some of you may have heard of them.

To me Jon felt outright scary, having authored all the main Internet RFCs!

Anyway, just before announcing ssh-1.0 in July 1995, I sent this e-mail to IANA:

Protect Your Management Interfaces

By

NCSC

-

April 24, 2017

When it comes to architecture design, one area that is often not given due consideration is the protection of the management interfaces used by administrators or operators to configure their infrastructure. These are the interfaces used to perform privileged actions on systems, and as such they’re a valuable prize for an attacker who wants to gain total control of your system.

There are a wide variety of management interfaces for different technologies. These include more traditional management interfaces (such as consoles and remote desktops), browser-based admin interfaces to configure infrastructure, and web-based interfaces to configure many cloud services.

This blog focuses on the more traditional management interfaces for managing servers and network infrastructure. Some of the points will be equally applicable to protecting cloud-based services too, and we’ll follow up with a blog that covers protecting the management interfaces of cloud services at a later date.

An Aerospace Engineer Drags a Stodgy Industry Toward Open Source

By

Wired

-

April 24, 2017

MORE THAN A decade ago, software engineer Ryan Melton spent his evenings, after workdays at Ball Aerospace, trying to learn to use a 3-D modeling program. After a few weeks, for all his effort, he could make … rectangles that moved. Still, it was a good start. Melton showed his spinning digital shapes to Ball, a company that makes spacecraft and spacecraft parts, and got the go-ahead he’d been looking for: He could try to use the software to model a gimbal—the piece on a satellite that lets the satellite point.

Melton wanted to build the program to save himself time, learn something new. “It was something I needed for me,” he says. But his work morphed into a software project called Cosmos—a “command and control” system that sends instructions to satellites and displays data from their parts and pieces. Ball used it for some 50 flight projects and on-the-ground test systems. And in 2014, Melton decided Cosmos should share its light with the world.

Assimilate Go Programming with Open Source Books

By

-

April 24, 2017

Go is a compiled, statically typed programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. It’s a general purpose programming language with modern features, clean syntax and a robust well-documented common library, making it a good candidate to learn as your first programming language. While it borrows ideas from other languages such as Algol and C, it has a very different character. It’s sometimes described as a simple language.

ShellCheck – A Tool That Shows Warnings and Suggestions for Shell Scripts

By

Tecmint

-

April 24, 2017

ShellCheck is a static analysis tool that shows warnings and suggestions concerning bad code in bash/sh shell scripts. It can be used in several ways: from the web by pasting your shell script in an online editor (Ace – a standalone code editor written in JavaScript) in https://www.shellcheck.net (it is always synchronized to the latest git commit, and is the simplest way to give ShellCheck a go) for instant feedback.

Alternatively, you can install it on your machine and run it from the terminal, integrate it with your text editor as well as in your build or test suites.

There are three things ShellCheck does primarily: