The industry has high hopes for network automation. Industry research, as well as our own work, indicates that IT and networking professionals believe that many network management tasks can be automated using promising software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) technology.
What is realistic? Network automation and network virtualization enable automation by programmatically configuring and provisioning network connections, a process known as orchestration. These time and cost-saving capabilities, combined with automated management of the network based on business policy, and end-to-end automated Quality of Service are available in today’s market.
But network automation goes beyond orchestration – for example using analytics and monitoring tools to detect and diagnose network problems and respond to network demand ahead of time, delivering auto-healing and auto-scaling functionality.
To some, cloud computing and IT security do not intersect. The results are often disastrous. Considering the huge amount of press that cloud computing receives when breaches occur, it’s easy to understand why they believe that. But if you look at IT security from a wider lens, you’ll see that cloud computing technologies are actually helping to propel IT security at rates never seen before.
Indeed, some of the advancement of security mechanisms and architectures such as end-to-end encryption can be traced back to public and private cloud security breaches where sensitive data was stolen for profit or fun. This brought the topic of encryption to the forefront of conversation in CIO circles around the globe. It also likely contributed to the recent skyrocketing adoption rates for encryption. According to a recent Ponemon Institute study that polled more than 5,000 IT and business managers from various parts of the world, 41% said that encryption has been adopted extensively in their organizations, an increase from 16% in 2005.
Makers and hackers getting started with connected devices and the Internet of Things(IoT) have many choices of development boards. In the last 18 months, the DIY market exploded with the availability of a variety of boards. Developers will have to choose from microcontroller-based boards, System on Chip (SOC) boards, Single-board Computers (SBC) and purpose-built boards with support for Smart Bluetooth and WiFi.
For beginners, it’s always confusing to choose the right board. Here is a list of 10 development boards that are ideal for your first IoT project.
The Free Software Foundation’s Linux distribution gNewSense is finally out in its fourth revision after a two-plus-year development cycle.
The FSF is best known for its unrelenting advocacy for software unencumbered by patents and protected for future use by the GPL, as embodied in software like the Linux kernel and the GNU toolchain. As such, its Linux distribution is assembled with the goal of having no dependencies at all on proprietary binaries or other components that aren’t compatible with the GPL.
One thing I’ve thought a lot about is how the role of the system administrator is changing. This reflection was prompted by a couple of things: one, I’m a co-chair for talks at one of the longest running system administration conferences, so I should probably think about this kind of thing seriously when planning what talks we’ll accept, etc. The other thing, though, is that I’ve read what some peers have had to say about the tone of the Google Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) book. My own interpretation is that the book thinks of traditional system administrators as “button pushers” who solely operate something that someone else gave them; similar to what you see in many large organization IT departments. There’s a heavy emphasis on Engineering™, which isn’t present in large organization IT departments. I haven’t really dug in to the book — so I’m going to leave those thoughts here and circle back in a few.
May 8, 2016, Linus Torvalds made his regular Sunday evening announcement to inform us about the availability of another RC (Release Candidate) build of the forthcoming Linux 4.6 kernel branch. But this time, things are a little different because he announced Linux kernel 4.6 RC7, which, as expected, it is the last Release Candidate in the upcoming series, or at least that’s how he sees things because it was a very quiet development cycle. So, if everything remains as quite as it was until today, next week we should see the final release of Linux kernel 4.6.
“So here’s rc7, because while things were really quiet there for a while, it never got *so* quiet that I would decide that there’s no point to making the traditional last rc. But this is it, unless something surprising happens,” said Linus Torvalds.
One important step to protect a system is using a firewall. Essentially, this is a network security system, acting like a security guard between internal and external networks. The firewall controls incoming and outgoing network traffic using security rules. The rules specify which connections you want to allow and the ports and zones through which the connection can be established.
All of the software featured in this article is released under an open source license. Each of the solutions offer a comparable set of features to many expensive commercial firewall solutions.
When a group of employees collaborate on a project, there is need for handling all aspects and complexities of the project from start to finish, such as task assignment, scheduling, budget management, communication, documentation, and so on. Thus a good project management tool is a necessity for any kinds of businesses or organizations which are involved in a lot of collaborative projects.
Starting an open source program office is a growing trend among companies that leverage open source software in their business strategies.
Led by an open source program officer, open source offices can range in size from one or two advocates on an engineering team to an entirely separate R&D division. But the goal is the same: to strategically address common challenges companies face when adopting open source software.
“An open source office whether centralized or by division can bring multiple best practices on how a company can manage consumption, compliance and contribution to open source” says Nithya Ruff, the head of SanDisk’s Open Source Strategy office, in the Q&A below. “It can create a proactive plan for driving more strategic involvement in projects important to the company’s roadmap and drive clear and common messages.”
The TODO group, which became a Linux Foundation project in March, is a cross-industry effort that brings together open source program managers to help establish open source best practices, tools and programs and support corporate open source engagement.
Open source program managers from Twitter, Box, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and SanDisk will be on hand at OSCON May 18-19, 2016, in Austin, Texas, to discuss why they started open source offices at their companies and the lessons they learned along the way.
We caught up with Nithya Ruff for a preview of their panel discussion, “Open source lessons from the TODO Group.”
And visit The Linux Foundation booth #109-2 to collect a wooden Linus Torvalds token for the OSCON open source history game for attendees.
Nithya Ruff is head of SanDisk’s Open Source Strategy office.Linux.com: What are some of the common challenges companies face when they start adopting open source?
Nithya Ruff: Companies that have not grown up with open source in their DNA face a number of challenges when they first adopt open source or look at adopting an open source strategy.
a. They don’t completely understand the licenses and legal obligations and often see it as a single license which would force them to open their intellectual property or trade secrets. Once they start understanding it more deeply they realize that one can consume without creating obligations and that there are a number of different licenses each with their own obligations. So legal education is the first challenge.
b. The second is to create awareness of the need to engage with open source and the need to have a strategy around how the company needs to work with open source communities. This is a strategy and a business discussion with executives and business leaders so that they support the need to have a plan and investment in this effort. These are the top 2 areas of challenge.
Linux.com: How does creating an in-house open source office help companies maximize their open source involvement?
Ruff: One can continue to engage with open source in an ad hoc and distributed manner but this often creates issues and challenges with messaging, unintended consequences, multiple processes and confusion in the market on company intent. It could also inadvertently expose a company to compliance risks. An open source office whether centralized or by division can bring multiple best practices on how a company can manage consumption, compliance and contribution to open source. It can create a proactive plan for driving more strategic involvement in projects important to the company’s roadmap and drive clear and common messages.
Linux.com: What is one of the key lessons SanDisk has learned about corporate open source participation since starting its open source office two years ago?
Ruff: The biggest lesson has been learning about how much open source activity there already was in the company and how we would not have any knowledge of this and support it without starting this initiative. Knowing consumption and dependencies has allowed us to shape our compliance and community engagement plan.
Linux.com: How have you benefited from your involvement in the TODO Group?
Ruff: Just this week, I needed to know a simple and best practice way to manage contribution license agreements or CLAs. I contacted my fellow open source officers in other companies via the TOoDOo group and within hours I had two very usable solutions. This is huge, to be able to consult each other on the best way to do things. I am a big believer in reuse and to not recreate. And this was a great example of how we can share practices.. TOoDOo members have been generous in sharing their time and coming to SanDisk to share their practices like Guy Martin (Autodesk) and Cedric Williams (PayPal) did recently. It is impactful to hear from other companies and to learn from their initiatives in open source. This is one area, where we don’t compete and are happy to share.
Linux.com: What will TODO Group members discuss in your panel at OSCON?
Ruff: Open Source officers in companies are still rare. There are less than 30 of us and we know there is a lot of pent-up need for information on how to set it up. We will discuss what TOoDOo does, what each of us do at our companies and shed light on helping companies manage their open source efforts successfully.
Linux.com: What else are you looking forward to at OSCON this year? What do you hope to accomplish by attending?
Ruff: I always enjoy attending OSCON as it covers culture and community very well side by side with technical topics. I look forward to connecting with friends in the community. I am also doing a talk on why it is important to market in open source. We all need people on the project who can write clearly, tell stories and create awareness. The business side of open source is a passion and I look forward to sharing this at OSCON this year.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) will hold its second annual Apache: Big Data North America conference in Vancouver, BC, starting Monday next week. Alongside keynotes from companies like Netflix and IBM, and panels on a huge range of topics — from security and storage to managing distributed systems and machine learning — the foundation will also host a forum that looks to cut to the heart of its community model and how private companies should be involved in its work.
