How a service mesh helps manage distributed microservices

A service mesh brings security, resiliency, and visibility to service communications, so developers don’t have to

RHEL 8: 'the foundation for digital transformation'

7 infrastructure performance and scaling tools you should be using

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.

Future of CRDs: Structural Schemas

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.

Redis 5 now available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 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.

Mentoring new system administrators

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.”

SUSE now member of iRODS, Sponsor of User Group Meeting

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.

The openSUSE Leap 15.1 update experience

My desktop is a HP Pavilion Power 580-146nd. This is a midsize PC with an AMD Ryzen 5 1400 CPU, an AMD Radeon RX 580 GPU, 16 GB of RAM, a 128 GB M.2 SSD and a 1 TB 7200rpm HDD.

I used the same USB thumbstick. After selecting ‘Update’ from the boot menu, the whole screen went black. And then nothing happened. Since I have installed openSUSE many times before, I quickly realized that this must be a graphics issue. I used ‘nomodeset’ in the past to get around that issue. This causes the installer to go back to the most basic graphics settings but it also means I could finish the update.

It used to be a lot easier to edit the boot options. However, this is now hidden. This post on Stack Exchange (2) gives a great explanation how to enable nomodeset, both as a one-time option and as a permanent option.

For the permanent enablement of nomodeset I know an easier way: in YaST look for the module ‘Boot Loader’ and in the Kernel Parameters tab, you can edit the boot command. This was the route that I took to make nomodeset a permanent boot setting.

Getting further with Btrfs in YaST

Since the YaST team rewrote the software stack for managing the storage devices, we have been adding and presenting new capabilities in that area regularly. That includes, among other features, the unpaired ability to format and partition all kind of devices and the possibility of creating and managing Bcache devices. Time has come to present another largely awaited feature that is just landing in openSUSE Tumbleweed: support for multi-device Btrfs file systems.

As our usual readers surely know, Btrfs is a modern file system for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features that go beyond the scope and capabilities of traditional file systems. Such capabilities include subvolumes (separate internal file system roots), writable and read-only snapshots, efficient incremental backup and our today’s special: support for distributing a single file system over multiple block devices.

openSUSE's YaST Now Supports Multi-Device Btrfs Setups

For those wanting to install openSUSE Tumbleweed on a system where a single Btrfs file-system spans multiple block devices, that's now easily possible with the latest YaST. This includes the abilities for just a simple file-system spanning multiple devices to data duplication to the various RAID levels natively supported by Btrfs.

An application a year to an application a week on AWS

At the recent SUSECON conference in Nashville, Ryan Niksch from AWS discussed how shifting the focus from writing code to deploying applications to production has become more critical as business agility tops the list of customer requirements. He then introduces the benefits of Cloud Foundry in general, and SUSE Cloud Application Platform specifically, including the AWS service broker; its benefits are that it is a containerized distribution of Cloud Foundry that can very quickly and easily be deployed to AWS using a Quick Start template.

THE Forum exclusively for GSI Partners!

This year’s SUSE GSI Partner Forum will feature all these – you won’t want to miss it!

SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 5 Beta 1

A demo based introduction to SUSE Cloud Application Platform

At the recent SUSECON conference in Nashville, Peter Andersson and Peter Lunderbye from SUSE demonstrated SUSE Cloud Application Platform, including pushing your first app, buildpacks: what are they and how they can be utilised, scaling and how easy the platform makes it, and how to improve resiliency and availability of your app.
SUSE has posted all recorded talks from SUSECON on YouTube. Check them out if you want to learn more about what SUSE has to offer. We’re not just Linux anymore! I’ll be posting more SUSE Cloud Application Platform talks here over the coming days.

Enabling Discoveries with AI and HPC (and the Rise of Helium)

This week I am attending the International Supercomputing conference in Frankfurt, and I am in awe of the scientists and researchers that are here and their ability to dig in and understand super complex problems in very specialized areas.  While I am humbled by the world-changing work represented at a conference like this, I am also honored to be playing a small part in their success.  With the next iteration of SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing 15 SP1, we’ve expanded and refreshed our bundle of popular HPC tools and libraries that we make available along with every subscription to our SLE HPC operating system.

Using Kubernetes Operators to Manage Let’s Encrypt SSL/TLS Certificates for Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated

No Downtime Upgrade for Red Hat Data Grid on Openshift

In a blog post I wrote on the Red Hat Developer’s Blog, I wrote about multiple layers of security available while deploying Red Hat Data Grid on Red Hat Openshift. Another challenging problem I see for customer is performing a no downtime upgrade for Red Hat Data Grid images (published on Red Hat Container Catalog). That’s what we’re going to tackle in this post.

If you’re new to it, Red Hat Data Grid is an in-memory, distributed, NoSQL datastore solution. With it, your applications can access, process, and analyze data at in-memory speed designed to deliver a superior user experience compared to traditional data stores like relational databases. In-memory Data Grids have a variety of use cases in today’s environments, such as fast data access for low-latency apps, storing objects (NoSQL) in a datastore, achieving linear scalability with data distribution/partitioning, and data high-availability across geographies.

World domination with cgroups in RHEL 8: welcome cgroups v2!

One of the great things about open source development is that features can be designed and implemented organically and grow and change as needed. However, a drawback is that this methodology can sometimes lead to a hot mess and uncomfortable technical debt.

In the case of cgroups v1, as the maintainer Tejun Heo admits, "design followed implementation," "different decisions were taken for different controllers," and "sometimes too much flexibility causes a hindrance."

In short, not all of the controllers behave in the same manner and it is also completely possible to get yourself into very strange situations if you don’t carefully engineer your group hierarchy. Therefore, cgroups v2 was developed to simplify and standardize some of this.

Let’s take a look at how the two versions are different. I’m going to show two different diagrams - controllers are in yellow blocks and cgroup directories have a grey background.

Cloud Strategies in Frankfurt

Are We Ready to Ditch the Data Center? [Ed: Perpetuating the myth that when you outsource all business functions to the Pentagon through its partners the servers just vanish and cease to exist]

Over the past few decades, organizations have come to rely on their own data centers to run business applications, network their users together and for data storage. Initially, these data centers were largely hardware-centric.In the early days, a mainframe and terminals were the order of the day, before we moved onto the RISC/UNIX era, followed more recently by the server sprawl period of commodity X86 servers.
But now, the whole concept of an organization-owned data center is going through a radical change. It started with virtualization, which separated the direct relationship between application software and the underlying hardware infrastructure. This helped improve server utilization, efficiency, and provisioning speed. The next step towards an even greater level of abstraction is the move to a software-defined infrastructure (SDI), including compute, storage and networking.