My experiment with openSUSE's Tumbleweed was a mixed experience. On the positive side, Tumbleweed stays constantly up to date, providing the latest packages of software all the time. For people who regularly want to stay on the cutting edge, but who do not want to re-install or perform a major version-to-version upgrade every six months, Tumbleweed provides an attractive option. I also really like that file system snapshots are automated and we can revert most problems simply by restarting the computer and choosing an older snapshot from the boot menu.

On the negative side, a number of things didn't work during my time with the distribution. Media support was broken, the Discover software manager had a number of issues and some configuration modules caused me headaches. These rough edges sometimes get fixed, but may be traded out for other problems since the operating system is ever in flux.

In the long term, a bigger issue may be the amount of network bandwidth and disk space Tumbleweed consumes. Just to keep up with updates we need set aside around 1GB of downloads per month and (when Btrfs snapshots are used) even more disk space. In a few weeks Tumbleweed consumed more disk space with far fewer programs installed as my installation of MX Linux. Unless we keep on top of house cleaning and constantly remove old snapshots we need to be prepared to use significantly more storage space than most other distributions require.

Tumbleweed changes frequently and uses more resources to keep up with the latest software developments. I would not recommend it for newer Linux users or for people who want predictability in the lives. But for people who want to live on the cutting edge and don't mind a little trouble-shooting, Tumbleweed provides a way to keep up with new versions of applications while providing a safety net through Btrfs snapshots.

• Protect Your Time and Money from the Data Explosion

  As today’s data explosion continues, there’s really no question that for the IT manager or anyone in a similar role, software-defined storage (SDS) is going to be a worthwhile investment. With it, your organization can scale your storage to match your rapidly ballooning data, while still keeping tight control of your costs and your maintenance burden.

  Without SDS, you’re going to need a budget that grows for every extra gigabyte your organization wants to store. Unless you work at an organization with a rapidly expanding IT budget—yeah, we thought not—SDS is the only realistic way to tackle the situation. In the long run (and maybe even quite quickly), SDS will save you two things: time and money.

• Istio: A New Routing Tier for Cloud Foundry

  When an app is pushed in Cloud Foundry, cloud controller creates identifiers for the app plus some routing metadata (DesiredLRP + routing metadata) and then forwards those to Diego. At this point, Diego is scheduling the application by trying to find a home for it in any of the available running containers. Once the application is up and running, Diego’s BBS API notifies route-emitters about this app. Route-emitters then forwards the routes along with the IP and Port for that application container to two places. The first is NATS which is used by gorouter to receive it’s route updates and the second is Routing-API which provides routes to TCP router. Gorouter and TCP router then update their routing tables using all the updates that they received from NATS and Routing-API respectively.

• SUSE Manager’s missing locking feature, and how it’s not missing at all

  Earlier this month, a colleague from France asked why SUSE Manager doesn’t offer a system locking feature when you choose Salt as the client stack.
  This feature is still available if you’re using the traditional SUSE Manager client stack. It allows you to lock the system and prevent any changes like installing or removing packages until the system is unlocked again.

• Deploying SLURM PAM modules on SLE compute nodes

  The high CPU-GPU and memory density of modern HPC compute nodes provide sufficient resources for concurrent distributed workloads. Workloads on a compute node will usually belong to different users, and those workloads are understandably important to their respective owners. Moreover, research workloads may have normal runtimes measured in seconds, weeks or even months. If a user were to access that node and initiate work or processes, not managed by the cluster scheduler or resource management facilities, and cause the node to crash that would certainly not be fair.

• Purple Reign: Five ways to look at IBM buying Red Hat

  Having spent decades writing about the fallout of enterprise technology mergers and acquisitions I think I can say, with expert confidence, that nobody ever calls these things correctly. A long-held tradition calls for rapid analysis, a glance at stock price movements, a weak pun on the potential new name for the company, a quick call around of the usual suspects, maybe an off-the-record chat with folks with an axe to grind and a hasty conclusion that the result will be either disastrous or epoch making. With that in mind, I've held back commenting on IBM agreeing to buy Red Hat… until now.

  Bitter experience has taught me the fraught dangers involved in bold analysis or confident prognostication, for your reporter is the man who once considered Apple "finished" and tipped you off that Amazon's Kindle was a "crummy e-book format". So I have waited and bided my time and only now sagely bring you the artfully back-covering five possible ways to look at IBM buying Red Hat.

• OpenStack: Digital Transformation for Service Providers

  Digital transformation is the ‘catch-all’ phrase used to describe the acceleration of IT development to meet the fundamental changes in how businesses operate and deliver value to their customers. While this is different in many industry verticals, companies share some common characteristics on this internal-culture changing journey.

• IBM's Red Hat acquisition could be "disastrous", says Puppet exec

  Nigel Kersten says claims that the deal is a cloud play are "ridiculous"
  IBM shocked the tech industry earlier this year when it snapped up open source stalwart Red Hat in a $34 billion mega-deal.

  The acquisition marks the biggest software merger in history, and the general assumption is that IBM is intending to leverage Red Hat's experience in the cloud computing market to bolster its own efforts in this area as it seeks to pivot from old-school on-premise infrastructure to newer revenue streams.

  Not everyone agrees with this, however. Nigel Kersten is vice-president of ecosystem engineering at open source firm Puppet, and previously served as CIO, CTO and chief technical strategist. According to him, the idea that IBM is buying Red Hat for its cloud credentials is laughable.

• IBM to increase focus on Cloud Migration Services

  IBM is focusing to keep it easier for customers to move to multi-cloud environments by adding automation tools to its cloud services. And, the tech-giant is enlarging its relationship with cloud migration specialists ServiceNow. Both the moves are taken to help customer simplify some hard tasks includes moving new and legacy applications to multi-cloud environments on IBM’s own cloud service or others such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Red Hat.

  To magnify its new services, IBM last month said it would buy open-source software pioneer Red Hat for nearly $34 billion stock acquisition. On the other hand, the deal would be bought enormous opportunities for IBM making it a large open source and enterprise software player worldwide. This will help the company make its mark into the lucrative hybrid-cloud party targeting prominent market players including Google, Amazon and Microsoft among others.

• Damien Wong from Red Hat Asia Pacific Pte Ltd clinches Executive of the Year - Computer Software at the SBR Management Excellence Awards 2018

  To support the company’s goal of becoming the leading IT infrastructure software provider in ASEAN, Damien Wong, Vice President and General Manager of Red Hat Asia Pacific Pte Ltd, developed the Red Hat ASEAN 2.0 Strategy to guide the company's business for fiscal years FY16-FY18 using a collaborative and inclusive approach.

  Wong is known for his dynamic leadership style where he recommended the adoption of a Balanced Scorecard approach, covering Financial, Market, Customer, and Employee goals. This strategy, which favoured an approach that did not just emphasise financial results alone, was developed to guide the Red Hat ASEAN team across the fiscal years FY16-FY18. For developing the Red Hat ASEAN 2.0 Strategy, Wong clinched the Executive of the Year for Computer Software at the SBR Management Excellence Awards 2018.

• Excited About Application Modernization? Contain Yourself…

  For those of us who work with technologies every day, it’s important to remember one key thing: every topic is new to someone somewhere every day.

  With that in mind, we are starting a series of posts here that will start from basics to help you build your knowledge of modern application delivery. Think of it as Containers 101.
  To understand what containers are and how they benefit application developers, devops, and operations teams, let’s look at an essential change in the architecture of applications: the use of microservices.

• The Brains Behind the Books – Part VI : Markus Feilner

  Despite its more than 25 years, SUSE felt like a mature start-up, and as a boss and “personal firewall” (as the team would call me), I was allowed to nearly triple the team size, 40% of which are female writers (and technology experts!!) today. I learnt what it means to “lead a world-wide remote team”, including budget and staff responsibility.