• Nominations open for 2021 Red Hat Innovation Awards

  Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it is accepting nominations for the 2021 Red Hat Innovation Awards.

  Since 2007, the Red Hat Innovation Awards have recognized organizations from around the world and across industries for the transformative projects and outstanding results they have experienced with Red Hat's open source solutions. Open source has helped transform technology from the datacenter to the cloud and the Red Hat Innovation Awards showcase its transformative impact in organizations around the world.

• Red Hat Virtualization 4.4 brings new features for managing virtual machines

  Red Hat today introduced a new version of its virtualization platform, Red Hat Virtualization 4.4, that will help customers more easily manage their applications and give its hybrid cloud strategy a boost in the process.

  Red Hat Virtualization is an alternative to VMware Inc.’s vSphere. The platform runs on the IBM Corp. subsidiary’s widely used enterprise Linux distribution, RHEL, and provides features for managing large fleets of virtualized applications.

  Red Hat Virtualization 4.4 has been updated with support for the latest release of RHEL that Red Hat launched in April. That release, officially RHEL 8.2, introduced performance improvements as well as monitoring features that make it easier to identify security and reliability issues. Red Hat Virtualization customers can now take advantage of those enhancements by upgrading the operating system installations in their deployments.

• Critical API security risks: 10 best practices [Ed: By Security Evangelist and Strategist, Red Hat]

  With the meteoric rise of microservices and the rush to build more applications more quickly, APIs are being used more than ever to connect services and transfer data. But with a growing number of smaller application "pieces" trying to communicate with each other, APIs (your own and those from third parties) are becoming increasingly challenging to secure.

• Red Hat Launches Remote Certification Exams

• A deep dive into Keycloak

  DevNation Tech Talks are hosted by the Red Hat technologists who create our products. These sessions include real solutions plus code and sample projects to help you get started. In this talk, you’ll learn about Keycloak from Stian Thorgersen and Burr Sutter.

  Keycloak is an open source identity and access management solution for modern applications and services. You might already be familiar with it and are curious about its capabilities and features, but if you aren’t, don’t worry. In this video tutorial, we’ll give you a great introduction to Keycloak and go through most of the capabilities and features that help you secure your applications and services. You’ll discover how to easily enable two-factor authentication, integrate with external user stores like LDAP, delegate authentication to other identity providers, and use many more of the other cool and useful features Keycloak brings to the table.

• Kubernetes is the future: But what does this future look like?

  When industry influencers and CIOs talk about the future of computing, they typically aren’t only discussing hardware advancements or cloud-based software. Increasingly, these conversations center on transformation through application innovation, providing new predictive services to customers that are driven by an integrated user experience. This could be something like inspecting customer data patterns to promote new banking services, analyzing health indicators to proactively recommend treatment or an immersive interface for personalized interactions.

  Whatever the end product, it’s about gaining a competitive advantage in an ever-evolving, highly-competitive marketplace through technological advancement. Enter containers. Containers enable these applications to evolve faster, increase developer velocity and bring a greater level of portability and consistency regardless of underlying infrastructure.

  Gartner predicts that, by 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, which is a significant increase from fewer than 30% in 2019.1

• Fedora 33 To Offer Stratis 2.1 For Per-Pool Encryption

  While Fedora 33 is slated to default to the Btrfs file-system for desktop spins, for those on Fedora Server 33 or otherwise not using the defaults will have Stratis Storage 2.1 as another option.

  Red Hat's Stratis Storage has been their effort to improve the Linux storage stack while building upon LVM, Device Mapper, and XFS for offering ZFS/Btrfs-like features. Stratis continues making great progress and is ultimately committed to by Red Hat as part of their Linux storage play, potentially with it being used by default come Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. Meanwhile the Fedora community has been dabbling with Btrfs on the desktop side for Fedora 33 and thankfully both technologies continue to be fostered by Fedora.

• Document APIs with open source OpenAPI Comment Parser

  Whether you’re building an application or website, great documentation is crucial to the success of your service. Developers need instructions on how to use your API and they need a way to try it out. Good documentation handles both.

  The OpenAPI Specification is an open standard for defining and documenting your API. The OpenAPI Specification enables the generation of great documentation, but creating an OpenAPI spec takes a lot of time and effort to create and keep up-to-date. Often, the OpenAPI spec ends up a large, forgotten, thousandl-ine file.

  To help make it as easy as possible to document an API, today we are launching the OpenAPI Comment Parser. The goal of OpenAPI Comment Parser is to give developers a way to generate this OpenAPI spec from comments inline with their code. When the OpenAPI spec lives inside the code, developers are much more likely to keep it up-to-date as their code changes.

• Total cost of ownership: The hidden part of the iceberg

  It seems like these days, everyone is talking about Containers, Kubernetes, microservices, serverless, cloud-native computing, and the Journey to Cloud or multicloud. These key technologies have many advantages, but you should be aware of some of the hidden costs associated with moving to the cloud so that you can plan in advance and avoid any surprises along the way.

• Cockpit 225 and Cockpit Podman 21

  Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from Cockpit version 223 and Cockpit Podman version 21.

  [...]

  When a virtual machine is not running and Cockpit makes a snapshot, only the disk contents will be saved. When a virtual machine is running, Cockpit will snapshot both the disk and memory state.

To a veteran user of other distributions, Fedora can be a challenge. Many things are not where you expect them to be. The default LVM volume allocations are a bit tricky. And packages including the kernel are frequently upgraded. So why switch after years of using other distributions?

In my case, for a variety of technical and political reasons, Fedora was the best option if I wanted to continue using Linux as my daily driver. If you are making the transition from another distribution, here are some observations and tips to get you started.

I’m sad to report that Thomas Gilliard (satellit), who was a valued member of the QA team for many years, passed away last week. His wife contacted me with the news. Thomas was a regular and reassuring presence at QA and blocker review meetings and ran many thousands of tests since he first joined the team in 2009. He was particularly dedicated to testing our Sugar builds. We’ll miss him.

Also: Implementation of varlink support for libnmstate – GSoC’20 nmstate project

       

• The Red Hat story

       

• Fedora Community Blog monthly summary: July 2020

  This is the second in what I hope to make a monthly series summarizing the past month on the Community Blog. Please leave a comment below to let me know what you think. Stats In July, we published 20 posts. The site had 6,463 visits from 4,128 unique viewers. 

• Fedora rawhide – fixed bugs 2020/07

• Red Hat Virtualization: The now and the next

  We’re excited to announce that Red Hat Virtualization 4.4, the latest update to our mature and trusted virtualization solution for traditional virtual machine (VM)-based workloads, will be generally available this week. As the established virtualization landscape shifts towards cloud-native technologies, Red Hat Virtualization has continued to provide the ability for businesses to deploy, configure and manage traditional workloads. With this latest release, Red Hat Virtualization is now rebased to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 and offers a more seamless integration with Red Hat OpenShift, providing a solution that can launch the next-generation of cloud-native applications while providing a foundation for VMs today.

  From traditional to cloud-native, virtualization here and now

  Red Hat is uniquely positioned to provide virtualization solutions for both traditional and containerized applications. With Red Hat Virtualization, we remain committed to providing customers robust and stable datacenter virtualization based upon KVM. 

  Based on RHEL 8.2, Red Hat Virtualization 4.4 inherits all of the stability, performance and security improvements that you trust for your most business critical workloads while adding new capabilities that make it even easier to manage a large virtual environment. We’ve also  improved observability with new dashboards for the Data Warehouse (DWH) showing performance and capacity of all your critical inventory. This leads to actionable results with unique analysis and trends of which workloads need attention, and when you need to add more hardware. Other improvements for virtualization admin include easier network configuration with NetworkManager. 

• Creating an enterprise service request bridge between ServiceNow ITOM and Red Hat Ansible Tower

  At Keyva, we see clients in all phases of their automation journey. Some organizations are just starting out and automating domain lifecycle tasks, such as provisioning firewall rules or automating server builds, while others may be well down the path of creating self-service IT capabilities. In most cases, regardless of where a team is on its journey, they eventually want to arrive at the point where they can provide self-service IT capabilities to the teams and users that want to consume them. 

  At a basic level, self-service IT requests require two primary pieces of functionality: a request portal and automated request fulfillment. Let’s briefly look at both components.

• Powering digital transformation at Royal Bank of Canada with Red Hat platforms

  Enterprises across the globe are looking to transform their operations and services to better align with current conditions. To succeed, they also need to adopt the latest technologies. Even the most traditional businesses - such as banks and financial institutions - need to use innovative approaches to deliver leading-edge solutions to their clients and partners.  

  As our customers begin to evaluate their digital transformation options, they are looking for a trusted partner to work with and a proven infrastructure platform to innovate upon. These are  often the key factors for success. Take Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), for instance. RBC is in the top 10 of global banks with over 86,000 employees and a complex IT environment.  As a leader in technology and innovation, RBC has been at the forefront of digital transformation. The bank has been recognized with multiple industry awards and honors, and continues to innovate to better serve their customers.