Open Source RTOS for IoT Gains Support from Linaro

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August 18, 2016

With more than 25 billion Internet connected things predicted to hit the market by 2020, the “Internet of Things” is evolving from a promise to an everyday reality. Whether it’s how we control our energy usage or secure our homes, smart devices are changing the world we live in and how we live.

IoT, like any disruptive technology shift, brings opportunities as well as challenges. Open source presents an opportunity for IoT to overcome interoperability barriers and innovate at an unprecedented rate. It provides a neutral forum for collaboration at scale and allows developers to contribute and advance software so that IoT products can get to market faster.

One key challenge is choice, and developers have a lot of it. For IoT to deliver on the promise of seamless connectivity, devices need a highly modular platform that can easily integrate with embedded devices. While Linux has proven itself time and again as the de facto operating system choice for embedded development, some IoT devices require a real-time operating system (RTOS) that addresses the very smallest of memory footprints.

To provide an open source solution that complements real-time Linux but keeps critical concerns like security and modularity top-of-mind, we created the Zephyr Project. Zephyr Project is a small, scalable, RTOS designed specifically for small-footprint IoT devices. It is also embedded with development tools and has a modular design so that developers can customize its capabilities and create IoT solutions that meet the needs of any device, regardless of architecture. This enables easier connectivity to the cloud as well as other IoT devices.

Recently the Zephyr Project announced Linaro as its newest member, joining the likes of Intel, NXP Semiconductors and Synopsys. As a global leader in open source development for the ARM ecosystem, Linaro will help drive Zephyr specifications and initiatives, and help the project realize its vision of becoming the premier multi-architecture open source RTOS for IoT.

The Zephyr Project comes at a critical time for the IoT small device development community. As an open source project, Zephyr unites the community to help make small, embedded devices “smarter,” while ensuring ubiquitous connectivity and security in small device infrastructure. It’s an exciting time for IoT, and we encourage anyone interested to join the effort.

From ownCloud to Nextcloud: A Proven Cloud Innovator Launches a Promising New Platform

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Sam Dean

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August 18, 2016

The ever popular ownCloud open source file-sharing and storage platform for building private clouds went through a shakeup not long ago. CTO and founder of ownCloud Frank Karlitschek resigned from the company and penned an open letter, which pointed to possible friction created as ownCloud moved forward as a commercial entity as opposed to a solely community focused, open source project. A few months after that decision, though, Karlitschek revealed a very promising new cloud platform: Nextcloud.

Nextcloud is a fork of ownCloud, and there are strong signs that we can expect good things from this open platform. Although ownCloud is open core, all of Nextcloud’s features are open source. The first release is based on ownCloud 9, which arrived in March 2016. The bottom line is that the testing and hardening that made ownCloud a solid platform carries over to Nextcloud. It’s already a proven private infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud platform. Nextcloud introduces many new features, too, including file drop capabilities and enterprise-class logging. The logging features enables administrators to generate compliance reports or auditing information and they can feed the logs into enterprise tools and solutions like Splunk.

Nextcloud is making moves that strongly differentiate it from ownCloud, and they are moves that could attract the DevOps community and enterprise IT departments. In fact, the Nextcloud site notes the following, regarding the instant carryover community that Nextcloud will benefit from:

“Started by the well known open source file sync and share developer Frank Karlitschek and joined by the most active contributors to his previous project, building on its mature code base, we offer a more reliable and sustainable solution for users and customers. We have developed a drop-in replacement for that legacy code base, providing the bug fixes and security hardening all users need and the Enterprise Subscription capabilities enterprise customers require, all fully open source.”

With Nextcloud, the company is providing enterprise support subscriptions, and good bridges to the cloud via mobile devices. Nextcloud recently announced an iOS app that lets iOS users gain instant access to Nextcloud-stored content. And, the company has also announced Nextcloud Android Client version 1.1.0 on the Google Play Store.

Focus on Security

Nextcloud is also focusing on security, which can be a sticky issue for open cloud platforms. It is adding two-factor authentication and methods for blocking brute force hacking attacks. Nextcloud will also support the use of Google Authenticator and self-supported authentication via SMS. “We made a number of improvements to the security of the code base, hardening it against potential attacks, and fixed a number of bugs, making sure an upgrade doesn’t leave the installation in a broken state,” developers report.

What about applications that tie in with the Nextcloud platform? Nextcloud has partnered with Collabora Productivity to bring Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) to Nextcloud users. This is a version of the LibreOffice productivity suite that caters to enterprise users. When it comes to offering productivity applications that can incorporate cloud storage and services, it puts Nextcloud on a level playing field with Microsoft’s Office 365 suite, and Google Docs.

Version 10 of Nextcloud’s platform is in beta testing now, and you can download the beta and access forum-based support here. You can also learn how to install Nextcloud on Ubuntu in this tutorial. Open source cloud platforms have been all the rage for the past several years, and even though Nextcloud is only a couple of months old, it comes from a proven cloud player in Frank Karlitschek, and it’s a story to watch.

Meanwhile, ownCloud is far from forgotten. “There is tremendous potential in ownCloud and it is an open source product protected by the AGPL license,” Karlitschek wrote in his open resignation letter. In fact, ownCloud 9.0 Enterprise Edition has just arrived. It incorporates full federation, letting users on different servers share directories and files. If you’re interested in exploring ownCloud, you can take a guided video tour of the platform here.

Learn more about cloud technologies through The Linux Foundation’s free self-paced Introduction to Cloud Infrastructure Technologies course.

Patterns for Managing Multi-Tenant Cloud Environments

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18F Blog

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August 18, 2016

When 18F started, deploying government services into a public cloud was still fairly uncommon. However, over the last two years nearly everything 18F has built for our agency partners has been deployed into Amazon Web Services (AWS), including our platform-as-a-service cloud.gov. Meanwhile, other federal agencies have also started using commercial public clouds, some at a large scale.

Over that time, as a result of the success of implementing the federal cloud-first strategy, 18F’s AWS account has grown in size and complexity. We need a new approach to ensure it remains manageable. In this post, we’ll describe our plan for evolving our existing cloud deployment based on modern DevOps principles and practices. Future blog posts will discuss how we are executing each part of our strategy.

Docker and High Security Microservices: A Summary of Aaron Grattafiori’s DockerCon 2016 Talk

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Info Q

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August 18, 2016

At DockerCon 2016, held in Seattle, USA, Aaron Grattafiori presented “The Golden Ticket: Docker and High Security Microservices”. Core recommendations for running secure container-based microservices included enabling User Namespaces, configuring application-specific AppArmor or SELinux, using an application-specific seccomp whitelist, hardening the host system (including running a minimal OS), restricting host access and considering network security.

Grattafiori, Technical Director at NCC Group and author of “Understanding and Hardening Linux Containers” (PDF), began the talk by introducing the principles of defense in depth, which consists of a presenting a layered defense, and shrinking attack surfaces and hardening those that remain. Although microservices may add overall complexity to a system architecture (particularly when operated at scale), the fact that they can be implemented to not present a single point of security failure provides an advantage over a typical monolithic application.

The principle of least privilege, e.g. not running an application process as root, is vitally important to securing a system.

Federal Open-Source Policy Isn’t Open Enough, Says Tech Group

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FCW News

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August 18, 2016

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has praised new federal guidelines aimed at improving the sharing of federally developed software code but complained that the government’s 20 percent release goal does not go far enough.

The policy, announced by U.S. CIO Tony Scott on Aug. 8, seeks to makes federal source code more accessible while increasing sharing across government and reducing duplicative software purchases.

The policy calls for agencies to open 20 percent of their custom code for the duration of a three-year pilot project, including making that code available to the public.

DDoS Protection in the Cloud

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ADMIN Magazine

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August 18, 2016

OpenFlow and other software-defined networking controllers can discover and combat DDoS attacks, even from within your own network.

Attacks based on the distributed denial of service (DDoS) model are, unfortunately, common practice, often used to extort protection money or sweep unwanted services off the web. Currently, such attacks can reach bandwidths of 300GBps or more. Admins usually defend themselves by securing the external borders of their own networks and listening for unusual traffic signatures on the gateways, but sometimes they fight attacks even farther outside the network – on the Internet provider’s site – by diverting or blocking the attack before it overloads the line and paralyzes the victim’s services.

In the case of cloud solutions and traditional hosting providers, the attackers and their victims often reside on the same network. Thanks to virtualization, they could even share the same computer core. In this article, I show you how to identify such scenarios and fight them off with software-defined networking (SDN) technologies.

It’s Time to Say Goodbye to Linux 4.6

By

PCWorld

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August 18, 2016

‘Please move to 4.7.1 now,’ the kernel’s lead maintainer says. If you’re using a version of Linux based on the 4.6 series of the kernel, the software’s lead maintainer has a message for you: It’s time to upgrade.

Greg Kroah-Hartman on Tuesday announced the arrival of Linux 4.6.7 and made it clear that it will be the last in the kernel’s 4.6 series. Version 4.7.1 made its debut on Tuesday as well, and that’s where the future lies, Kroah-Hartman said.

How Analytics Are Transforming NV

By

SDx Central

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August 18, 2016

Big data and analytics are transforming Network Virtualization (NV) by taking advantage of new sources of data and providing analytics tools that can link to automation in software-defined networks (SDNs).

One of the things that IT organizations often fail to appreciate about network virtualization (NV) is the amount of visibility that can be gained into the overall IT environment. Network overlays typically provide analytics applications with a set of northbound application programming interfaces (APIs) to provide more data than was previously available operating only at the hardware level.

This means analytics are transforming NV. Gaining access to that data is more critical than ever because of the convergence of application performance management (APM) and network performance management (NPM). IT organizations need to be able to correlate data all the way down to specific transactions to provide a comprehensive picture of what any end user is experiencing at any given time.

The Top 10 IoT Application Areas – Based on Real IoT Projects

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IoT Analytics

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August 18, 2016

As part of a larger effort to track the IoT ecosystem, we set out, mining hundreds of homepages, and managed to assemble and verify 640 actual enterprise IoT projects (Note: We did not include any consumer IoT projects such as wearable devices or hobby projects). In a second step we took the time to collect all published information about these IoT projects and put them into a structured list. There is a vast number of insights hidden in the data, some of which we would like to share with you today.

Most of the IoT projects we identified are in industrial settings (141 projects), followed by Smart City (128) and Smart Energy IoT projects. The Americas make up most of those projects (44%), followed by Europe (34%). There are large differences when looking at individual IoT segments and regions. The Americas and particularly Northern America is strong in Connected Health (61%) and Smart Retail (52%), while the majority of Smart City projects are located in Europe (47%). The Asia / Pacific region is particularly strong in the area of Smart Energy projects (25%).

TripleO QuickStart HA Setup && Keeping undercloud persistent between cold reboots ( newly polished )

By

Boris Derzhavets

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August 18, 2016

This post follows up http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/230814/index.html
and might work as timer saver unless status undecloud.qcow2 per
http://artifacts.ci.centos.org/artifacts/rdo/images/mitaka/delorean/stable/
requires fresh installation to be done from scratch.
Current update allows to automate procedure via /etc/rc.d/rc.local and exports
is stack’s shell variables which allow to start virt-manager right away , presuming that xhost+ was issued in root’s shell.

Thus, we intend to survive VIRTHOST cold reboot (downtime) and keep previous version of undercloud VM been able to bring it up avoiding build via quickstart.sh and restart procedure from logging into undercloud and immediately run overcloud deployment. Proceed as follows . .

Complete text may be seen at http://bderzhavets.blogspot.com/2016/08/tripleo-quickstart-ha-setup-keeping.html