• 2018-2019 Elections Underway with Calls for Candidates and New Members

  Earlier this week, on Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018, the Elections Committee posted the Schedule for the 2018-2019 openSUSE Board Elections, along with the announcement of a Membership Drive and a call for nominations and applications for Candidates to fill three vacant seats on the openSUSE Board.

  The annual Board Elections are normally expected to run in November and December, with ballots cast and results published in time for the newly-elected Board Members to take their seats on the Board at the beginning of January. However, some additional work needed to be completed for this election, and the elections were delayed in part to accommodate the additional work.

• SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 4 is Generally Available

  SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 4 is now generally available. Service Pack 4 marks the fourth generation of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12, a major code stream and product foundation with a lifecycle from 2014 to 2024 plus Long Term Support (10+3 years).
  This release consolidates all fixes and updates introduced since SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 3.

• Making the Selection

  You’ve likely read or heard a lot about today’s data explosion and how it’s affecting enterprises. After combing through all the overexcited rhetoric about how quickly data is multiplying or how

  many petabytes you’ll soon have to handle, one thing remains clear: You need to find a new way to store and manage your data or you’ll get left behind.

  While that mandate puts pressure on your organization to act quickly, it’s also the catalyst to a whole new world of exciting opportunities. More data can mean deeper, more accurate insights into your operations and customer needs, which empowers you to streamline processes and personalize experiences like never before. More data can also lead to greater innovation and new sources of revenue.

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.