The following five open source tools allow us to satisfy these goals while remaining a high-functioning team.Remotely-distributed system administration teams provide around-the-clock coverage without anyone losing sleep, and have the benefit of drawing from a global talent pool. The OpenStack global infrastructure team relies on these five open source tools to communicate, and to coordinate our work.
We also add in a few more provisos:
we must do our work in public
we work for different companies
we must use open source software for everything we do
The following five open source tools allow us to satisfy these goals while remaining a high-functioning team.
Read more at OpenSource.com
The CORD Project recently became an independent project hosted by The Linux Foundation. CORD (TM)(Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter), which began as a use case of ONOS®, brings NFV, SDN, and commodity clouds to the telco central office and aims to give telco service providers the same level of agility that cloud providers have to rapidly create new services. Major service providers like AT&T, SK Telecom, Verizon, China Unicom, and NTT Communications, as well as companies like Google and Samsung, are already supporting CORD.
As an open source project, CORD can have its own board, governance, steering teams, and its own community, to help achieve its goals and deliver value to service providers, vendors, and industry.
In advance of the first CORD Summit, which will be held July 29 at Google, we talked with Guru Parulkar, executive director of ON.Lab, about the launch of the new open source initiative and the overall goals of the project.
Linux.com: You recently announced the CORD Project as its own independent initiative. Why did On.Lab decide to do this? What are the mission and goals for CORD as its own project?
Guru Parulkar: CORD started as a use case of ONOS, which is creating an open source software defined networking (SDN) OS for service providers with scalability, performance, and high availability. ON.Lab and our partners and collaborators designed a few proof of concepts (PoCs) and demonstrations of CORD during 2015 and early 2016. They were very well-received by the community, and we believe CORD captured the industry’s imagination. It quickly became apparent that CORD represents a compelling “solution platform for service delivery” and can bring a lot of value to service providers. So, we decided to make CORD a separate open source project with the mission to bring “datacenter economy” and “cloud agility” to service providers by building an open reference implementation and nurturing a vibrant open source community.
Guru Parulkar, Executive Director of ON.Lab
Linux.com:What is the market problem CORD is trying to solve? Why is CORD needed?
Guru:CORD essentially aims to reinvent the service provider central office and thus has the potential to reinvent the future access networks and services for tens of millions of residential, mobile and enterprise customers.
A central office represents very important infrastructure for a service provider. It is essentially a gateway to three important segments of customers: residential, mobile, and enterprise users. These central offices have been evolving over the past 40-50 years and have hundreds of different types of devices, which are closed, proprietary, and not programmable. As a result, service providers are looking to transform their infrastructures with platforms and solutions that offer the same type of economies that data center operators have been enjoying with merchant silicon, white boxes, and open source software platforms. They are eager to achieve the same level of agility that allows a cloud provider to rapidly create new services — maybe every week. The CORD project delivers an integrated solutions platform for service delivery that service providers need to be competitive in the market and meet their customers’ rapidly changing demands.
Linux.com: You recently announced some major new collaborators — Google, Radisys, and Samsung. Why are so many companies investing in CORD right now?
Guru: We are delighted to welcome Google, Radisys, and Samsung to the ONOS and CORD partnerships. They all bring unique value of their own to our projects. Given Google’s track record as a provider of cloud and access services, we anticipate it will play an important role in strengthening the CORD architecture, implementation, and deployments. Radisys plans to provide turn-key CORD pods that will accelerate development and adoption of CORD, while Samsung is a leader in mobile wireless and will help us accelerate adoption of CORD in this important market segment.
During this past year, ON.Lab and our partners and collaborators have demonstrated a few CORD PoCs for residential, mobile and enterprise customers. We demonstrated how CORD can be an integrated solutions platform that leverages merchant silicon, white boxes, and open source software and delivers a range of services including traditional connectivity and cloud services. I believe the players in the industry see the potential of CORD and realize that this is the right time to participate, contribute, and create real solutions and services using CORD to reinvent the access networks and services.
Linux.com:CORD started as a use case for ONOS, so there is already a community, PoC, and field trials that exist. Can you summarize CORD’s traction to date?
Guru:Besides our existing service provider partners, we also have 20 companies that are active collaborators and many other service providers around the globe that are also interested and want to use CORD. Our developer community is also growing quickly. We are very pleased with the traction. At the same time, we have lot of work ahead of us before CORD can become the mainstream solution for service providers.
Linux.com:The first CORD Summit is coming up July 29. What can attendees expect to learn? Any exciting keynotes and presentations? Why did Google agree to host the event? What role will they play in the event?
Guru:We are expecting a very productive inaugural CORD summit. We have a packed agenda and a sold-out event with 300 participants. Craig Barratt from Google will present one of the keynotes — this is the first time we will hear from Google about CORD in a public setting and so that should be interesting for the community. AT&T and China Unicom will also give keynotes, sharing their perspective and assessment of CORD progress. Finally, Jim Zemlin, executive director of Linux Foundation, will do a keynote on CORD as an open source project.
Beyond the keynotes, we will have several presentations that will provide an overview of CORD platform and how it can be used for residential, mobile, and enterprise domains of use. We will also have presentations on the first open source CORD distribution — how to get it, use it, and contribute to it. Finally, we will have breakout sessions where we will present and discuss the roadmap — what is next for CORD and various domains of use. We will also have a breakout session on community building. These breakout sessions will also provide an opportunity for the community to provide input and shape the roadmaps and indicate how they plan to participate and contribute.
We hope the summit will help the engage and unite the community to accelerate development and deployment of CORD.
Linux.com: On.Lab has been working with The Linux Foundation via ONOS for a while. Describe the nature of that relationship and the services and guidance you receive from the organization. How does the partnership benefit ONOS?
Guru:The Linux Foundation is a very important partner for us. ON.Lab has lot of expertise in distributed software and networking especially SDN. We need a partner that can guide us and provide help in creating open source platforms and communities — this is where The Linux Foundation excels and has a tremendous track record. Thus ON.Lab and The Linux Foundation have complementary strengths. Together we have an opportunity to shape the future of service provider networking. Specifically, we have been working with The Linux Foundation on how to set up open source governance, IT infrastructure, community building, and evangelism of our projects with media and analysts.
Linux.com: What technical features differentiate CORD from competing solutions in the market?
Guru: I cannot think of any open source projects or platforms that can be thought of as a direct competition to CORD. The key differentiators of CORD include the following:
Unique and strong partnership.
Integrated solutions platform for “service” delivery.
A common platform for three critical and big domains of use.
Leverages merchant silicon and white boxes.
Built with best in class open source platforms.
Each differentiator by itself represents significant value, and together they do make CORD a very compelling platform and open source project. These differentiators are not meant to suggest that CORD is done. Actually, we have lot of work on many fronts ahead of us. CORD needs to mature to be deployable in a production infrastructure at scale. Once this happens, it will be ready to go mainstream.
Linux.com: How can business and technical leaders, developers, network administrators, and engineers get started with CORD?
Guru: CORD is an open source project, and we want to follow the best practices of open source projects to make it easier for developers and users from service providers and vendors to use and build on CORD.
We have created a distribution in standard repositories that a developer or user can download and auto-build CORD on a single node very quickly — hopefully, in an hour or so. We also provide excellent documentation in terms of white papers, design notes, videos, and demos to make it really easy for developers and users to get started. Moreover, we are using Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) to help make the developers productive. Our goal is to create a positive experience for new and existing developers and users.
The Bash shell is a fundamental Linux tool and, in this era of containers and clusters and microservices, good old-fashioned Linux system administration skills are as relevant as ever. Today, we’ll learn about running other command shells, Bash built-ins, configuration files, and shell expansion.
Which Shells?
Run cat /etc/shells to see which command shells are installed on your Linux system. Your default shell is set in /etc/passwd:
You can run any other shell you want by invoking it from your Bash shell:
carla@studio:~$ tcshstudio:~>
Then type exit to return to Bash.
What’s Inside Bash?
Runenable -a to see a list of your Bash built-in commands. Some of these duplicate GNU commands, such as printf, kill, and echo. The Bash versions are stripped-down, with fewer command options. Use the built-in command type to see which they are:
$ type -a killkill is a shell builtinkill is /bin/kill$ type -a typetype is a shell builtin
Bash executes built-ins first, so if you want the GNU commands, you have to use the full path, like this:
$ /bin/kill 7502
The help syntax for Bash built-ins is backwards:
$ help kill
Bash Configuration Files
There are several Bash configuration files, and they differ according to your Linux distribution, so you may not have all of these. The best way to learn what they do on your system is to read them. User-specific files are read first:
/etc/profile, system-wide user environment defaults, applied at login.
~/.bash_login, user settings applied only at login.
~/.bash_profile, user-specific configuration, applied at login.
~/.profile is used when ~/.bash_profile and ~/.bash_login are not present.
~/.bashrc is applied to non-login shells, so you don’t have to log in every time you open a terminal. Most distros place user settings here, and then call ~/.bashrcfrom login files such as ~/.bash_profile.
~/.bash_logoutcontains settings applied at logout, such as clearing the console.
~/.bash_historycontains your Bash command history up to your configured limit. Commands that you have run are stored in memory until you close the terminal you are working in, and then written to the file. This is why, when you work in multiple terminals, your command history gets mixed up.
What is the size limit of your history file?
$ echo $HISTFILESIZE2000
Where is this limit set?
$ grep -d skip 2000 .*.bashrc:HISTFILESIZE=2000
Shell Expansion
Shell expansion is one the biggest sources of confusion for Bash users, so I hope this explanation will help you understand how it works and thereby be less vexed.
You see tilde expansion in filenames, for example ~/.bashrc. The tilde is a shortcut for /home/user.
Brace expansion generates arbitrary text strings. This is a slick way to create a batch of new directories quickly:
$ mkdir -p testdirs/{test4,test5,test6}
There must not be any spaces between your filenames.
Pattern matching uses *, ?, and [] as wildcards. The * matches any string. You probably use this already, for example *.jpg to find all JPG files, or all files that start with a string like catpic*.
Using ? matches any single character:
$ ls tes?ttesst
Patterns enclosed in square braces have mighty matching powers. This matches any one of the three enclosed characters:
$ locate test[256]test2test5Test6
Square brace expansion supports POSIX character classes: alnum, alpha, ascii, blank, cntrl, digit, graph, lower, print, punct, space, upper, word, and xdigit. Use digit to match any numbers:
$ ls test[[:digit:]]
test4:
test5:
test6:
$ ls test[[:digit:]]*
test666 test9file
test4:
test5:
test6:
alpha matches only letters:
$ ls test[[:alpha:]]*
tesst
The character classes are great shortcuts, and the above POSIX link describes how all of them work.
Command substitution replaces command names with command output. The backslashes at the ends of the lines format the command examples so that they fit the column width. If you copy and paste these examples, you can include the backslashes. If you want to remove them, make sure your command is all on one line:
$ echo "The current directory is $(pwd), the date and time are $(date), and my hostname is $(hostname)"The current directory is /home/carla/testdirs, the date and time are Mon Jul 25 13:40:00 PDT 2016, and my hostname is studio
You can use any command or script, and you can combine commands:
$ echo "The usernames in my /etc/passwd file are $(awk -F":" '{ print $1 }' /etc/passwd)"
You can use command substitution to assign variables. You can run these commands individually or put them in a script:
$ CWD=$(pwd)$ DATE=$(date)$ HOSTNAME=$(hostname)$ echo "The current directory is $CWD, the date and time are $DATE, and my hostname is $HOSTNAME" The current directory is /home/carla/testdirs, the date and time are Sun Jul 24 13:53:34 PDT 2016, and my hostname is studio
Here we are at the end again already. In this article, I’ve shown the basics of how to use some important Bash commands. Please see these other articles for more beginning Bash tutorials.
Open source, in the form of both software and hardware is big business—really big business. This past week, Wal-Mart Stores, one of the largest retailers in the world proved it once again when they announced that they would make their application lifecycle management tool OneOps available as an open source project. Why give away something that you created yourself that gives your company an advantage? Because companies like Wal-Mart and General Electric (with their Open Innovation initiative) are finding that proprietary is being beat by collaboration and openness.
Turning a company’s proprietary work into something shared in the market can reap benefits as others also help innovate and return new features and functionality to your work.
The cybersecurity shortfall in the workforce remains a critical vulnerability for companies and nations, according to anIntel Security report being issued today.
Eighty-two percent of surveyed respondents reported a shortage of security skills, and respondents in every country said that cybersecurity education is deficient. 25% of organizations have lost proprietary data to cyberattacks. Also, 71 percent of respondents report that the lack of security skills does measurable damage to their organizations.
You’ve heard the benefits of DevOps, and you’ve decided to move your teams to this way of working. But how do you know if you are doing it right? Metrics are key indicators for businesses to figure out whether or not they are making the right decisions, but often they aren’t choosing the right metrics to look at, according to Anders Wallgren, CTO of Electric Cloud.
He spoke at the Agile 2016 conference in Atlanta about the key DevOps metrics businesses should look into to determine failures or successes.
In a move with serious implications for the lowest software layers of data center infrastructure, commercial OpenStack producer Mirantis this morning announced it is partnering with the two most important players in the infrastructure space — Google and Intel — to produce a new version of the OpenStack platform designed to run inside Linux containers (such as Docker), for deployment through Google’s Kubernetes orchestrator platform.
“We are containerizing all of the OpenStack services,” explained Boris Renski, Mirantis’ co-founder and CMO, in an interview with Datacenter Knowledge, “and making it possible to natively run OpenStack on top of Kubernetes — to make it be orchestrated by Kubernetes.” … What Renski is telling us is that Mirantis’ commercial OpenStack is itself will be deployed within containers, whose coordination with one another will be maintained using Kubernetes.
One of the original major proponents of container technology on Linux, OpenVZ — or Virtuozzo in its commercial edition — is releasing a new version of its container solution, packaged as a full-fledged Linux distribution.
The commercial edition of OpenVZ, called Virtuozzo (also the name of the company marketing the product), incorporates OpenVZ but adds enterprise-grade features not found in the open source release. Virtuozzo has a new release of its own alongside OpenVZ 7, named — appropriately enough — Virtuozzo 7.
Most of the big changes announced in OpenVZ 7.0 involve the packaging and deployment of the product. It’s now an entire standalone Linux distribution, with both the commercial Virtuozzo product and the free OpenVZ distribution based on the same kernel.
System administrators today are tasked with creating a much smarter networking layer. One that is capable of keeping up with some of the most advanced business and IT demands. In a recent Worldwide Enterprise Networking Report, IDC pointed out that virtualization continues to have a sizable impact on the enterprise network. IDC expects that these factors will place unprecedented demands on the scalability, programmability, agility, analytics capabilities, and management capabilities of enterprise networks. They predict that in 2016, overall enterprise network revenue will grow 3.5 percent to reach $41.1 billion.
In one of my recent articles here on DCK, we defined the overall SDN landscape. We examined technologies like NSX, ACI, and even open SDN systems. Today, we take a step back and will look at four data center networking components impacting the modern business:
Black Duck’s latest open source survey shows that a majority of companies are now using open source. So what’s stopping the rest? Here’s a look at the reasons why businesses might choose not to use open source, or avoid partnering with companies that do.
The fact that open source doesn’t work for everyone — or that some people think it won’t work for them, so they don’t even give it a try — does not mean open source is inherently flawed. It’s certainly a highly effective way to build and acquire software in many situations. Still, to understand open source fully, it’s worth taking a look at its drawbacks, both perceived and actual. They include…
