Red Hat: Containers and Kubernetes, Systemd Everywhere, AMQ Streams on OpenShift and System Administrators

• Containers and Kubernetes can be essential to a hybrid cloud computing strategy

  Hybrid cloud is gaining ground among enterprises that want to expand computing resources with public cloud infrastructure while still using their on-premise, data center environments. Adding public cloud can mean more elasticity, scalability, and even faster time to market. But if you want to improve the chances that your hybrid cloud can deliver on its promise, you need to think about adding containers to the mix. Linux containers provide a way to encapsulate application code in a way that makes the code more portable and faster to deploy. More and more organizations are using containers as part of the infrastructure for microservices-based, cloud-native applications. Containers can be portable across environments such as Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and consistent, so they can speed application delivery times and make it easier for teams to collaborate, even if those teams are working in different deployment environments. And they can serve as a bridge between your data center and public cloud environments.

• Systemd-homed Looks Like It Will Merged Soon For systemd 245

  Announced back in September at the All Systems Go event in Berlin was systemd-homed as a new effort to improve home directory handling. Systemd-homed wants to make it easier to migrate home directories, ensure all user data is self-contained, unify user-password and encryption handling, and provide other modern takes on home/user directory functionality. That code is expected to soon land in systemd. Systemd-homed was talked about by Lennart as being ready for versions 244 or 245. Now that systemd 244 shipped at the end of November, systemd-homed is looking like it will soon land in Git.

• Understanding Red Hat AMQ Streams components for OpenShift and Kubernetes: Part 3

  In the previous articles in this series, we first covered the basics of Red Hat AMQ Streams on OpenShift and then showed how to set up Kafka Connect, a Kafka Bridge, and Kafka Mirror Maker.

• What personality trait most defines a sysadmin?

  When you think of a system administrator, who do you think of? Chances are, most of us have taken a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test at some point in our careers. For me, my results typically come up as INTJ, and I've always thought the traits associated with that type (introversion, intuition, thinking, judging) have aligned with my interest in technology and the kind of work I enjoy. But that doesn't mean that those are the only characteristics that make a good sysadmin. Far from it. A successful team is made up of a diversity of skills, viewpoints, and personal characteristics.

• How to identify a strong sysadmin job applicant

  When a company looks for new resources with skills in a specific focus area—especially in IT—the challenge is on. Why? Because only a few in the company, if any, have even a vague notion of how to verify the skills they are looking for. The work of a system administrator is a key function, and if it goes wrong, the very existence of the company is at stake (something I’ve been unfortunate to witness when called in on an emergency rescue effort).

Fedora 31 Elections Results

The Fedora 31 election cycle has concluded. Here are the results for each election. Congratulations to the winning candidates, and thank you all candidates for running in this election! Council One Council seat was open this election. A total of 243 ballots were cast, meaning a candidate could accumulate up to 729 votes (243 * 3). # votes Candidate 520 Dennis Gilmore 259 Alberto Rodríguez Sánchez 237 John M. Harris, Jr. FESCo Five FESCo seats were open this election. A total of 273 ballots were cast, meaning a candidate could accumulate up to 2184 votes (273 * 8). # votes Candidate 1490 Miro Hrončok 1350 Kevin Fenzi 1115 Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek 879 Fabio Valentini 877 David Cantrell 868 Justin Forbes 813 Randy Barlow 534 Pete Walter Also: Fedora program update: 2019-49

GNU: Guile 2.9.6 (Beta) and GCC 10's C++20 "Spaceship Operator"

• GNU Guile 2.9.6 (beta) released

  We are delighted to announce GNU Guile 2.9.6, the sixth beta release in preparation for the upcoming 3.0 stable series. See the release announcement for full details and a download link. This release fixes bugs caught by users of the previous 2.9.5 prerelease, and adds some optimizations as well as a guile-3 feature for cond-expand.

• GCC 10's C++20 "Spaceship Operator" Support Appears To Be In Good Shape

  The C++20 spaceship operator support was merged in early November for GCC 10. The commits this week meanwhile allow the operator to be used with std::pair and std::array, among other related commits in recent weeks. See the GCC C++ status page for the state of C++20/C++2A with GCC 10. Most C++20 functionality is already in place even on GCC 8/9 but some pieces remain around atomic compare-and-exchange with padding bits, modules support, coroutines, using enum, and more implicit moves. 14 Comments

Curl Milestone and New Feature

• A 25K commit gift

  The other day we celebrated curl reaching 25,000 commits, and just days later I received the following gift in the mail.

• curl speaks etag

  That’s a quote from the mozilla ETag documentation. The header is defined in RFC 7232. In short, a server can include this header when it responds with a resource, and in subsequent requests when a client wants to get an updated version of that document it sends back the same ETag and says “please give me a new version if it doesn’t match this ETag anymore”. The server will then respond with a 304 if there’s nothing new to return. It is a better way than modification time stamp to identify a specific resource version on the server.