Yes We Do it Again: SUSE Doc Day at SUSECON 2020

A Doc Day is a time when a group of people gathers to collaborate on writing documentation on one or more given topics. The main premise for our Doc Day is to get a group of interested people – YOU – in a room together and have you work towards shared goals. To help you feel more comfortable, we will give a short overview of our documentation, how we usually work, and how you can contribute.
Of course, you cannot write entire manuals or guides in one single day. But you can help us to improve existing documentation by reviewing, editing and updating it. In addition, we will use the Doc Day to kick-off the creation of new guides and papers for topics that you think are not yet covered (well enough).

openSUSE Board election 2019-2020 – Call for Nominations, Applications

Two seats are open for election on the openSUSE Board. Gertjan Lettink completed his second term. Simon Lees completed his first term and thus he is eligible to run as a Board candidate again should he wish to do so.

status.opensuse.org updated

Our infrastructure status page at https://status.opensue.org/ is using Cachet under the hood. While the latest update brought a couple of bugfixes it also deprecated the RSS and Atom feeds, that could be used to integrate the information easily in other applications.

While we are somehow sad to see such a feature go, we also have to admit that the decision of the developers is not really bad - as the generation of those feeds had some problems (bugs) in the old Cachet versions. Instead of fixing them, the developers decided to move on and focus on other areas. So it's understandable that they cut off something, which is not in their focus, to save resources.

SSL cipher updates

Sometimes it's a good idea to follow best practices. This is what we did by following the recommendations for "general-purpose servers with a variety of clients, recommended for almost all systems" from https://ssl-config.mozilla.org/.

What is Cloud Native?

Cloud native is more than just a buzzword, though. It's an approach used by some of the largest organizations on the planet, including Walmart, Visa, JP Morgan Chase, China Mobile, Verizon and Target, among others. Cloud native is an approach that enable developers and organization to be more agile, providing workload portability and scalability.

What is Kata Containers and why should I care?

Kata Containers can significantly improve the security and isolation of your container workloads. It combines the benefits of using a hypervisor, such as enhanced security, and container orchestration capabilities provided by Kubernetes.

Together with Eric Erns from Intel, we have recently performed a webinar in which we presented the benefits of using Kata Containers in a Charmed Kubernetes environment. In this blog, we aim to highlight the key outcomes from this webinar.

An idiot's guide to Kubernetes, low-code developers, and other industry trends

As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.

A blueprint for OpenStack and bare metal

The bare metal cloud is an abstraction layer for the pools of dedicated servers with different capabilities (processing, networking or storage) that can be provisioned and consumed with cloud-like ease and speed. It embraces the orchestration and automation of the cloud and applies them to bare metal workload use cases.

The benefit to end users is that they get access to the direct hardware processing power of individual servers and are able to provision workloads without the overhead of the virtualization layer—providing the ability to provision environments in an Infrastructure-as-code methodology with separation of tenants and projects.

Software Development, Microservices & Container Management – Part III – Why Kubernetes? A Deep Dive into Kubernetes world

Together with my colleague Bettina Bassermann and SUSE partners, we will be running a series of blogs and webinars from SUSE (Software Development, Microservices & Container Management, a SUSE webinar series on modern Application Development), and try to address the former questions and doubts about K8s and Cloud Native development and how it is not compromising quality and control.

Epic Performance with New Tuning Guide – SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on AMD EPYC* 7002 Series Processors

EPYC is AMD’s flagship mainstream server microprocessors and supports 1-way and 2-way multiprocessing. The first generation was originally announced back in May 2017 and replaced the previous Opteron server family with the introduction of the Zen microarchitecture for the mainstream market.

Content Lifecycle Management in SUSE Manager

Content Lifecycle management is managing how patches flows through your infra in a staged manner. In ideal infra, latest patches will always be applied on development servers. If everything is good there then those patches will be applied to QA servers and lastly to production servers. This enables sysadmins to catch issues if any and hence preventing patching of prod system which may create downtime of live environments.

SUSE Manager gives you this control via content lifecycle. In this, you create custom channels in SUSE Manager for example dev, qa and prod. Then you register your systems to those channels according to their criticality. Now whenever channels gets the new patches it will be available to respective systems (registered to those channels) to install. So if you control channels you control the patch availability to systems.

In content lifecycle management, suse manager enables you to push patches to channels manually. Like on first deploy all latest patches will be available to dev channels and hence dev systems. At this stage, if you run update commands (zypper up, yum update) they will show latest patches only on dev servers. QA and prod servers wont show any new patches.

The Early History of Usenet, Part VII: Usenet Growth and B-News

For quite a while, it looked like my prediction — one to two articles per day — was overly optimistic. By summer, there were only four new sites: Reed College, University of Oklahoma (at least, I think that that's what uucp node uok is), vax135, another Bell Labs machine — and, cruciallyy, U.C. Berkeley, which had a uucp connection to Bell Labs Research and was on the ARPANET.

In principle, even a slow rate of exponential growth can eventually take over the world. But that assumes that there are no "deaths" that will drive the growth rate negative. That isn't a reasaonable assumption, though. If nothing else, Jim Ellis, Tom Truscott, Steve Daniel, and I all planned to graduate. (We all succeeded in that goal.) If Usenet hadn't shown its worth to our successors by then, they'd have let it wither. For that matter, university faculty or Bell Labs management could have pulled the plug, too. Usenet could easily have died aborning. But the right person at Berkeley did the right thing.

Mary Horton was then a PhD student there. (After she graduated, she joined Bell Labs; she and I were two of the primary people who brought TCP/IP to the Labs, where it was sometimes known as the "datagram heresy". The phone network was, of course, circuit-switched…) Known to her but unknown to us, there were two non-technical ARPANET mailing lists that would be of great interest to many potential Usenet users, HUMAN-NETS and SF-LOVERS. She set up a gateway that relayed these mailing lists into Usenet groups; these were at some point moved to the fa ("From ARPANET") hierarchy. (For a more detailed telling of this part of the story, see Ronda Hauben's writings.) With an actual traffic source, it was easy to sell folks on the benefits of Usenet. People would have preferred a real ARPANET connection but that was rarely feasible and never something that a student could set up: ARPANET connections were restricted to places that had research contracts with DARPA. The gateway at Berkeley was, eventually, bidirectional for both Usenet and email; this enabled Usenet-style communication between the networks.

Raytheon Leans on Red Hat to Advance DevSecOps

Jon Check, senior director for cyber protection solutions for Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services, said Raytheon has developed a set of DevSecOps practices for organizations building applications deployed in highly secure environments, involving government contracts.

Raytheon and these customers have been challenged by a chronic shortage of IT professionals with the appropriate level of clearance to work on these classified projects. To overcome that issue, Check said Raytheon developed what it describes as a “code low, deploy high” approach to DevSecOps. Developers who lack security clearances can still build applications; however, those applications can only be deployed by IT professionals having the appropriate security clearance.

In addition, Check said Raytheon has developed integrations between its DevSecOps framework and various IT tools based on the ITIL framework, which so many IT operations teams depend on to foster collaboration across the application development and deployment process. For example, he said, whenever code gets checked into a repository, an alert can be sent to an IT service management application from ServiceNow.

[Older] IBM: ‘Mac users are happier and more productive’ [iophk: duh]

                       

IBM CIO Fletcher Previn talked up fresh IBM findings that show those of its employees who use Macs are more likely to stay with IBM and exceed performance expectations compared to [Windows] users.

[Older] IBM: Mac users perform better at work and close larger high-value sales compared to [Windows] users

                       

Today, IBM announced some major news showing the benefits of using a Mac over a [Windows machine] at work. According to IBM research, there are 22% more macOS users who exceed expectations in performance reviews compared to Windows users. High-value sales deals also tend to be 16% higher for Mac users compared to [Windows] users.

[Older] IBM: Our Mac-Using Employees Outperform Windows Users in Every Way

                       

According to IBM, one staff member can support 5,400 Mac users, while the company needed one staff member per 242 [Windows] users. Only 5 percent of Mac users called the help desk for assistance, compared with 40 percent of [Windows] users. This Mac-IBM love affair has been ongoing for a few years, and the same IBM PR points out that in 2016, IBM CIO Fletcher Previn declared that IBM saves anywhere from $273 to $543 when its end users choose Mac over [Windows].

Centiq receives highest SUSE Solution Partner certification to bolster best-in-class enterprise cloud application migration and implementation expertise for SAP projects

Noop now named none

Lately more and more people approached me with saptune warnings regarding ‘noop’ being an invalid scheduler.
With new Servie Packs we see a transition from non-multiqueue schedulers (noop, cfq, deadline) to multiqueue schedulers (none, mq-deadline, bfq, kyber).
This transition will be finished with kernel 5.x (SLES 15 SP2). Only multiqueue schedulers will remain.
Even if you do not have upgraded lately, new hardware like NVMe’s can come with multiqueue support only.

SUSE welcomes cooperation of Open Invention Network, Linux Foundation, IBM and Microsoft in co-funding Unified Patent’s new Open Source Zone

An eternal truth is that everything has its opposite for good and evil. Patents are no exception. In fact, even the simple word ‘Patent’ evokes much positive and negative emotion in today’s software world – particularly as news continues to circulate around baseless patent lawsuits by non-practicing entities (NPEs).
But in news this week there is a bit of positive for a change. The positive news is the announcement of the efforts by Unified Patents to reduce NPE assertion of invalid patents in the open source software zone.

SC19: Empowering SUSE HPC customers with expanded options

SC19, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis is just around the corner. For SUSE, it’s a great opportunity to reconnect with customers and partners working in one of the sectors of our industry driving significant innovation in all aspects of computing.

If I tried to succinctly define SUSE’s message at SC19, it would be: “As with any journey, who you travel with is more important than the destination”. In SUSE’s instance, customers and partners make up our travel companions. In this journey, the customer is in the driver’s seat and elects the destination. Our role at SUSE is to empower HPC customers with choice across processor and GPU platforms as well as delivery options (on-premise, cloud, or hybrid).

SUSE and Iguazio Break the Mold by Providing an Open Source Solution for Enterprise Data Science Teams

The notions of collaborative innovation, openness and portability are driving enterprises to embrace open source technologies. Anyone can download and install Kubernetes, Jupyter, Spark, TensorFlow and Pytorch to run machine learning applications, but making these applications enterprise grade is a whole different story. Delivering enterprise grade applications involves scalability, high-performance, tuning, monitoring, security and automation of infrastructure tasks. It can take months and typically requires a large team of developers, data scientists and data engineers.