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How a service mesh helps manage distributed microservices [3]
A service mesh brings security, resiliency, and visibility to service communications, so developers don’t have to
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RHEL 8: 'the foundation for digital transformation' [4]
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7 infrastructure performance and scaling tools you should be using [5]
Sysadmins, site reliability engineers (SREs), and cloud operators all too often struggle to feel confident in their infrastructure as it scales up. Also too often, they think the only way to solve their challenges is to write a tool for in-house use. Fortunately, there are options. There are many open source tools available to test an infrastructure's performance. Here are my favorites.
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Future of CRDs: Structural Schemas [6]
Authors: Stefan Schimanski (Red Hat)
CustomResourceDefinitions were introduced roughly two years ago as the primary way to extend the Kubernetes API with custom resources. From the beginning they stored arbitrary JSON data, with the exception that kind, apiVersion and metadata had to follow the Kubernetes API conventions. In Kubernetes 1.8 CRDs gained the ability to define an optional OpenAPI v3 based validation schema.
By the nature of OpenAPI specifications though—only describing what must be there, not what shouldn’t, and by being potentially incomplete specifications—the Kubernetes API server never knew the complete structure of CustomResource instances. As a consequence, kube-apiserver—until today—stores all JSON data received in an API request (if it validates against the OpenAPI spec). This especially includes anything that is not specified in the OpenAPI schema.
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Redis 5 now available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 [7]
Red Hat Software Collections supply the latest, stable versions of development tools for Red Hat Enterprise Linux via two release trains per year. As part of the latest Software Collections 3.3 release, we are pleased to announce that Redis 5 is now generally available and supported on RHEL 7.
The new Red Hat Software Collection includes Redis 5.0.3. Redis 5 is an open source in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache and/or message broker. This version provides multiple enhancements and bug fixes over version 3.2 distributed with an earlier Red Hat Software Collections release. Most notably, the redis-trib cluster management tool has been implemented in the Redis command-line interface.
The primary addition in Redis 5 is Streams—a new log-like data structure for storing multiple fields and string value with automatic sequencing. For detailed changes in Redis, see the upstream release notes for version 4.0 and version 5.0.
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Mentoring new system administrators [8]
While this article is geared toward senior system administrators taking a more active role in the development of newer team members, those readers who are new might find interest in a different view of the world of working with newer systems administrators.
As a system administrator who has been in the role for a long time, it’s easy to shake a proverbial cane at those newer team members who bother you with inane questions lacking the technical detail needed to provide a complete answer. It would be so easy to gruffly utter a few words to get them to go away, or point out the lack of specificity of the question in such a way as to make them feel so small that they won't talk to you again. I’ve been there, and—being frank—done exactly that.
I was recently reading a discussion forum where there was an administrator who appeared inexperienced and, apparently, all on his or her own to figure things out. That caused me to think back to my first system administration job, and realize how thankful I am that when I started, I had someone senior who was willing to invest time in helping me become better. This better didn’t come in the form of drilling me with commands or syntax, but with a more Socratic method to help me develop skills that I use almost every day.
When I first started with the group, whenever I hit an issue, I would go down to Chris’ office with my notepad and pencil and ask him about the problem (sometimes multiple times a day). After about a week of this, I came into his office, as usual, to ask about a system call or something. He didn’t look at me and put his hand up, signaling me to stop.
After he finished whatever it was he was working on, he turned to me and said, “What research have you done about this question? Man pages? Google searches? -h output?”
I said, “No, I just came down here to ask you.”
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SUSE now member of iRODS, Sponsor of User Group Meeting [9]
This month, SUSE became a member of the iRODS (integrated Rule-Oriented Data System) consortium which is an open source data management software used by research organizations and government agencies worldwide.
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iRODS UGM will host 25+ presentations from the user community and the core development team, including use case presentations, live demonstrations, and open discussions about requested iRODS features. They anticipate an audience of 150 participants representing dozens of academic, government, and commercial institutions.
