The Open Networking Foundation’s security working group is preparing to release guidelines for designing and deploying secure software-defined networking (SDN) controllers. The guidelines are currently in review and will be published in June, according to Sandra Scott-Hayward, vice chair of ONF’s security project.
The ONF report also will analyze open source SDN controllers and look at how they compare to other controllers, says Scott-Hayward.
The ONF’s security working group is also working on a guideline on security hardening. This guideline will help members figure out how to select and secure SDN components to configure SDN security. “We aren’t providing specific protocols but giving general guidelines,” Scott-Hayward says.
EMC hopes to make unikernels a bigger part of the cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) landscape through its open source UniK orchestration tool, which it unveiled this week.
Unikernels are application images that contain only the bare minimum amount of code necessary to make an application run. They’re similar to containers in that they pack applications into portable, standalone environments, but unikernels take things a step further by cutting out as much overhead as possible. They also generally contain a complete operating system, rather than relying on a host OS, as containers generally do.
EMC is pitching the product as an easy way for developers to leverage microservices in order to package software for the cloud or IoT environments.
As implicit in the name, DevOps was meant to bring development and operations teams together into a more cohesive IT staff. QA management, likewise, was absorbed into what essentially became a collaborative team that worked together toward a common goal. The idea here was to eliminate the kinks in the product development and deployment chain by dissolving the barriers between departments. Different organizations have managed to achieve this with varying degrees of success in devops agile operations and continuous delivery.
A case could be made that those companies that didn’t succeed in their transition to DevOps did not adequately define it – and herein lies a significant area of contention for organizations and industry experts.
Researchers and scientists appear up in arms this week over the state of Indirect GLX (IGLX) in the X.Org Server and the potential they’d lose the remote OpenGL rendering support they’ve been accustomed to using for seeing visualizations from clusters / super-computers on their workstations. IGLX isn’t being killed off at this time, but rather it was disabled by default and that news is now reaching users… Adam Jackson has since sought to clear up the confusion over the IGLX support still being found in the xorg-server just that it needs to be manually enabled (via +iglx).
Read more at Phoronix
Just one year after Telstra completed its acquisition of Pacnet, the Australian-based service provider is taking big steps to expand its global footprint using its PEN platform built on SDN.
Prodip Sen explains that The Linux Foundation helped educate his colleagues while forming the OPNV project.
“Even after the formation of OPNFV, as we worked through the running of the organization […] The Linux Foundation has been very helpful in providing us with information, discussions, and contacts to help us explore options and opportunities” says Sen. “They have helped with the working of OPNFV itself.”
Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging alternative to using dedicated hardware appliances, particularly for service providers, where quick, flexible responses to traffic pattern shifts and user demand changes are essential. It implements network tasks like access security, load balancing, and packet filtering as software modules suitable for virtualized cloud environments.
Despite these advantages, NFV adoption was slow when the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)’s NFV group finished its initial standardization work. So some of the ETSI founding members considered how they might accelerate adoption of the technology.
“We realized that the standardization process in telecommunications takes too long,” said Prodip Sen, who was at the time working at Verizon, and is now CTO, NFV at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. “The typical process takes many years. Service providers couldn’t afford to wait that long for this technology to be adopted. The agility and rapid pace of change in the market doesn’t allow that. So we were looking for ways to accelerate that standardization.”
Organizing Open Source with The Linux Foundation
They latched onto the idea that open source was the best way to accomplish faster market adoption. But they all came from telecommunications companies with no experience in open source. So they approached several organizations to learn more about open source and find out how they could get NFV going.
“We wanted to get some education in it, and also wanted help in forming our NFV effort,” Sen said. “That’s where The Linux Foundation helped us: they educated us on what was involved, provided us with workshops and discussions to help educate our colleagues, and worked with us to step us through the process of formation of the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) project itself.”
OPNFV was launched in September 2014 as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.
Since then, reports Sen, “The Linux Foundation has been very helpful in providing us with information, resources and the learnings from other open source projects, allowing us to run and improve the working of OPNFV itself.”
Making More Contacts in the Open Source Community
Thanks to OPNFV’s partnership with The Linux Foundation, group members have met and acquired new participants, and has been networking with other players in the open source community, says Sen.
“One thing that has been very useful for us has been the ability of The Linux Foundation to make connections with other open source organizations who are perhaps going through similar issues, and help us learn from each other about best practices,” says Sen, who is now chair of the board for OPNFV.
The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit , an invitation-only event held in March, was a good example of this, says Sen.
“The event gave us an opportunity to connect to others who are on the same journey as we are on – to develop open source software for a particular purpose — and helped us realize the commonality of many of the challenges we face,” Sen said. “We heard from others who are struggling with many of the same issues, and had already dealt with some of these. This has been very helpful to us.” Sen said.
For telecommunications companies either looking to adopt, or that are currently using NFV technology, collaboration is vital. The open source environments that The Linux Foundation provides are good learning platforms that set businesses up for success.
Watch the complete video below:
Read more stories about Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects:
Toby Ford, assistant vice president, Cloud Technology, Strategy & Planning at AT&T Inc., said in a BCE keynote that Open Platform for NFV Project will be the natural place for evaluating the work of efforts such as OPEN-Orchestrator Project (OPEN-O), Open Source MANO (OSM) and possibly AT&T’s internally developed platform, ECOMP, which it may be releasing to open source.
“There is enormous interest in orchestration and covering the MANO part of ETSI’s NFV,” he said. That has spawned efforts such as those named above. “Somehow that has to be resolved and the fair playing field of OPNFV will be the place to do that.”
More and more professionals are preparing for certification to fill in gaps in their Linux knowledge, build confidence, and prove to to their management team or hiring managers that their skills are sharp. According to the latest 2016 Open Source Jobs Report from The Linux Foundation and Dice, 76% of open source professionals believe that certifications are useful for their careers, while 44% percent of hiring managers report that candidates holding certifications were more likely to be hired.
But despite all the compelling evidence that certifications are valuable for career advancement or making it past the “HR Firewall” some professionals are still reluctant to attempt to pass their certification exam. Whether the roadblock is fear of failure or uncertainty about how to properly prepare, The Linux Foundation is committed to addressing those challenges and helping you succeed.
Join us for a webinar session on Thursday, June 9, 2016, at 10 a.m. Pacific, focused on tips, tactics, and practical advice that will give you the confidence to take the leap to commit to, schedule, and pass your next certification exam.
By attending this session, you will learn:
how certifications can help you reach your career goals
which certification is right for you: Linux Foundation Certified SysAdmin or Engineer?
strategies to thoroughly prepare for the exam
how to avoid common exam mistakes
the ins and outs of the performance certification process to boost your exam confidence
Once you register, you’ll receive an email with important information about the webinar, in this email you’ll also find a link to submit your certification questions early, for a better chance of having the topic addressed on-air.
Ready to get started with certification now? Linux Foundation Training is offering a new course, LFS211 Linux Networking and Administration to help prepare senior Linux sysadmins to pass the Linux Foundation Certified Engineer (LFCE) exam, which comes bundled with the new course.
If you’re deploying containers at very large scale, there’s a very good chance that you use a variety of automation tools simultaneously. Docker has its own, naturally, and its scripts are almost delightfully straightforward and easy for the mind to digest. But it doesn’t really matter how simple the composition may be; if you’re using two or more conductors, you may get into more trouble orchestrating the conductors than the workloads.
Last March, we asked developers for information about the way containers are being managed and orchestrated within their organizations. We gave them a list of five methods of orchestration and asked them to choose any and all that apply. Some 21 percent of respondents who use containerization in the development stage, but not in production, said they use shell scripts and customizations for the purposes of integrating multiple tools. Maybe coincidentally but maybe not, another 21 percent of respondents said they use configuration management (CM) tools, such as Chef, Ansible, and Puppet.
