China adopted a controversial cyber security law on Monday to counter what Beijing says are growing threats such as hacking and terrorism, but the law triggered concerns among foreign business and rights groups.
The legislation, passed by China’s largely rubber-stamp parliament and set to take effect in June 2017, is an “objective need” of China as a major internet power, a parliament official said.
Overseas critics of the law say it threatens to shut foreign technology companies out of various sectors deemed “critical”, and includes contentious requirements for security reviews and for data to be stored on servers in China.
As a recruiter working in the open source world, I love that I interact every day with some of the smartest people around. I get to hear about the cool projects they’re working on and what they think about the industry, and when they are ready for a new challenge. I get to connect them to companies that are quietly changing the world.
But one thing I enjoy most about working with them is their curiosity: they ask questions, and in my conversations, I hear a lot of inquiries about the job search and application process.
Did this ever happen to you? You realized that you had mistakenly deleted a file – either through the Del key, or using rm in the command line.
In the first case, you can always go to the Trash, search for the file, and restore it to its original location. But what about the second case? As I am sure you probably know, the Linux command line does not send removed files anywhere – it REMOVES them. Bum. They’re gone.
Companies in diverse industries are increasingly building applications designed to run in the cloud at a massive, distributed scale. That means they are also seeking talent with experience deploying and managing such cloud native applications using containers in microservices architectures.
Kubernetes has quickly become the most popular container orchestration tool according to The New Stack, and thus is a hot new area for career development as the demand for IT practitioners skilled in Kubernetes has also surged. Apprenda, which runs its PaaS on top of Kubernetes, reported a spike in Kubernetes job postings this summer, and the need is only growing.
To meet this demand, The Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation today announced they have partnered to provide training and certification for Kubernetes.
The Linux Foundation will offer training through a free, massive open online course (MOOC) on edX as well as a self-paced, online course. The MOOC will cover the introductory concepts and skills involved, while the online course will teach the more advanced skills needed to create and configure a real-world working Kubernetes cluster.
The training course will be available soon, and the MOOC and certification program are expected to be available in 2017. The course is open now at the discounted price of $99 (regularly $199) for a limited time. Sign uphereto pre-register for the course.
The course curriculum will also be open source and available on GitHub, Dan Kohn, CNCF Executive Director, said in his keynote today at CloudNativeCon in Seattle.
Certification will be offered by Kubernetes Managed Service Providers (KMSP) trained and certified by the CNCF. Nine companies with experience helping enterprises successfully adopt Kubernetes are committing engineers to participate in a CNCF working group that will develop the certification requirements. These early supporters include Apprenda, Canonical, Cisco, Container Solutions, CoreOS, Deis, Huawei, LiveWyer, and Samsung SDS. The companies are also interested in becoming certified KMSPs once the program is available next year.
Kubernetes is a software platform that makes it easier for developers to run containerized applications across diverse cloud infrastructures — from public cloud providers, to on-premise clouds and bare metal. Core functions include scheduling, service discovery, remote storage, autoscaling, and load balancing.
Google originally engineered the software to manage containers on its Borg infrastructure, but open sourced the project in 2014 and donated it earlier this year to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation at The Linux Foundation. It is now one of the most active open source projects on GitHub and has been one of the fastest growing projects of all time with a diverse community of contributors.
“Kubernetes has the opportunity to become the new cloud platform,” said Sam Ghods, a co-founder and Services Architect at Box, in his keynote at CloudNativeCon. “We have the opportunity to do what AWS did for infrastructure but this time in an open, universal, community-driven way.”
With more than 170 user groups worldwide, it’s already easy to hire people who are experts in Kubernetes, said Chen Goldberg, director of engineering for the Container Engine and Kubernetes team at Google, in her keynote at CloudNativeCon.
The training and certification from CNCF and The Linux Foundation will go even further to help develop the pool of Kubernetes talent worldwide.
Pre-register now for the online, self-paced Kubernetes Fundamentals course from The Linux Foundation and pay only $99 ($100 off registration)!
Software defined storage (SDS) brings cloud benefits to storage, but the challenge is that it must be highly reliable – you can’t lose a single byte of data. Storage can be difficult to manage in the cloud where there are many frameworks and technologies working together in virtualized / containerized environments.
At LinuxCon Europe, Cameron Bahar, SVP and Global CTO of Huawei Storage, launched the project proposal for a new open source initiative called OpenSDS:
“What we’re proposing effectively is this virtualization layer that effectively does discovery, provisioning, management, and orchestration of advanced storage services. It allows the open source vendors to plug in their OpenSDS adapters to manage storage. Ceph, Gluster, and ZFS and what have you can plug in through that stack. It allows the vendors from EMC, Huawei, Intel, HP to plug in their adapters. … We define the interfaces once, you make them general enough, and then we’re able to update, both in an open source way and in a proprietary way, these vendor APIs.”
In this keynote, Bahar invites vendors, customers and other open source collaborators to work with them to make this mission a reality: “We want to develop an open source SDS controller platform that allows us to manage both virtualized and containerized and bare metal environments, and facilitate collaborations. Adherence to standards, leverage existing open source, and have a customer and vendor community that comes together to solve the problem together.”
Steven Tan, Chief Architect at Huawei, talked about some of the technical details for how OpenSDS could benefit people using Kubernetes and OpenStack. He outlined three key benefits: “The first one is to be able to plug in to be able to provide a seamless plugin for any framework. Second, to be able to provide an end-to-end storage management with a single solution. Third, to support a broad set of storage including closed storage.”
Tan went on to talk more about how the project will be managed as a Linux Foundation project with light governance and a technical steering committee for the technical oversight of the project. The source code will be on GitHub with Gerrit code reviews and regular IRC meetings as well as meetups.
They were joined on stage by a special guest, Reddy Chagam, Chief Architect of SDS at Intel, who talked about Intel’s involvement in the project.
While the project hasn’t launched quite yet, stay tuned for more information about how to participate in OpenSDS. For now, you can watch the entire keynote below to learn more about the project!
The Apache Hadoop framework for distributed processing of large data sets is supported and used by a wide-ranging community — including businesses, governments, academia, and technology vendors. According to John Mertic, Director of ODPi and the Open Mainframe Project at The Linux Foundation, Apache Hadoop provides these diverse users with a solid base and allows them to add on different pieces depending on what they want to accomplish.
John Mertic, Director, ODPi and Open Mainframe Project
As a preview to Mertic’s talk at Apache: Big Data Europe in Seville, Spain, we spoke with him about some of the challenges facing the project and its goals for growth and development.
Apache Hadoop has a large and diverse community and user base. What are some of the various ways the project is being used for business and how can the community meet those needs?
If you think of a use case where a business needs to answer a question with data, the chances that they are using Apache Hadoop are fairly high. The platform is evolving to become the go-to strategy for working with data in a business. Hadoop’s ability to turn data into business insights speaks to the flexibility and depth of both Hadoop and the Big Data ecosystem as a whole.
The Big Data community can help to increase the adoption of Apache Hadoop through consistent encouragement of interoperability and standardization across Hadoop offerings. These efforts will not only help to mitigate the risks associated with implementing such differing platforms, but also streamline new development, promote open source architectures, and eliminate functionality confusion.
What is the most common misconception about Apache Hadoop?
The most common misconception about Apache Hadoop is that it is just a project of The Apache Software Foundation, and one containing only YARN, MapReduce, HDFS. In reality, as it’s brought to market by platform providers like Hortonworks, IBM, Cloudera, or MapR, Hadoop can be equipped with 15-20 additional projects that vary across platform vendors, like Hive, Ambari, HCFS, etc. To use an analogy, Apache Hadoop is like Mr. Potato Head. You start with a solid base and can add different pieces depending on what you are trying to accomplish. What an end user may think of as Apache Hadoop is actually more than what it really is, and thus it may seem quite amorphous.
What are its strengths, and what value does it bring to users?
The Hadoop ecosystem enables a multitude of strategies for dealing with and capitalizing on data in any enterprise environment. The breadth and depth of the evolving platform now enables businesses to consider this growing ecosystem as part of their strategy for data management.
Can you describe some of the current challenges facing the project?
There certainly are compatibility gaps with Apache Hadoop and, while technologists are tackling some of these by creating new innovative projects, I think having a tighter feedback loop of real-life usage from businesses — to help technologies closest to the project understand the challenges and opportunities — will be crucial to increase adoption. Obtaining those use cases directly from user to project can help solidify and mature these projects quickly.
The effects of the broad ecosystem – most commonly occurring through end user confusion and enterprise software expectations – happen when end users turn to Hadoop from the matured world of enterprise data warehouses with the same expectations but don’t see the same stability in this new ecosystem.
What are the project’s goals and strategies for growth?
ODPi’s goals for the Big Data community at-large are to solve end-user challenges more directly, remove the investment risks for legacy companies considering a move to Hadoop through universal standardization, and connect the technology more directly to business outcomes for potential enterprise users.
Attending Apache: Big Data Europe? Join Apache project members and speakers at the ODPi Community Lounge!
Kubernetes is an open source container management platform designed to run enterprise-class, cloud-enabled and web-scalable IT workloads. It is built upon the foundation laid by Google based on 15 years of experience in running containerized applications.
Though their popularity is a mostly recent trend, the concept of containers has existed for over a decade. Mainstream Unix-based operating systems (OS), such as Solaris, FreeBSD and Linux, had built-in support for containers, but it was Docker that truly democratized containers by making them manageable and accessible to both the development and IT operations teams. Docker has demonstrated that containerization can drive the scalability and portability of applications. Developers and IT operations are turning to containers for packaging code and dependencies written in a variety of languages. Containers are also playing a crucial role in DevOps processes. They have become an integral part of build automation and continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
While core implementations center around the life cycle of individual containers, production applications typically deal with workloads that have dozens of containers running across multiple hosts. The complex architecture dealing with multiple hosts and containers running in production environments demands a new set of management tools. Some of the popular solutions include Docker Datacenter, Kubernetes, and Mesosphere DC/OS.
The open source Kubernetes container management project is probably the most popular of the various competing container management services available today. The Cloud Native Compute Foundation, which plays host to the open source side of Kubernetes, is hosting its first Kubernetes conference this week and unsurprisingly, we’ll see quite a bit of container-related news in the next few days.
First up is Microsoft, which is not only making the source code of the engine at the core of its Azure Container Service (ACS) available, but also launching a preview of its native integration of Kubernetes for ACS. In addition, Microsoft is also continuing to bet on Mesosphere’s DC/OS and updating that service to the latest release of DC/OS.
It’s easy to think we’ve reached peak Bitcoin, but the blockchain at the heart of cryptocurrencies contains the seeds of something revolutionary.
The blockchain is a decentralised electronic ledger with duplicate copies on thousands of computers around the world. It cannot be altered retrospectively, allowing asset ownership and transfer to be recorded without external verification.
Investors have now realised the blockchain is bigger than Bitcoin. In the first quarter of 2016, venture-capital investment in blockchain startups overtook that in pure-play Bitcoin companies for the first time, according to industry researcher CoinDesk, which has tallied $1.1 billion (£840m) in deals to date.
Some companies cannot allow having their services down. In case of a server outage a cellular operator might experience billing system downtime causing lost connection for all its clients. Admittance of the potential impact of such situations leads to the idea to always have a plan B.
In this article, we’re throwing light on different ways of protection against server failures, as well as architectures used for deployment of VMmanager Cloud, a control panel for building a High Availability cluster.
