• Deploying Services in Kubernetes

  In my opinion, services are the most potent resource provided in Kubernetes. A service is essentially a front-end for your application that automatically re-routes traffic to available pods in an evenly distributed way. This automation is a relief for administrators because you no longer have to specify exact IP addresses or hostnames of the server in the client’s configuration files. Having to maintain this while containers are being moved, shifted and deleted would be a nightmare.

• The Future of Cloud Providers in Kubernetes

  Approximately 9 months ago, the Kubernetes community agreed to form the Cloud Provider Special Interest Group (SIG). The justification was to have a single governing SIG to own and shape the integration points between Kubernetes and the many cloud providers it supported. A lot has been in motion since then and we’re here to share with you what has been accomplished so far and what we hope to see in the future.

• Pod Priority and Preemption in Kubernetes

  Kubernetes is well-known for running scalable workloads. It scales your workloads based on their resource usage. When a workload is scaled up, more instances of the application get created. When the application is critical for your product, you want to make sure that these new instances are scheduled even when your cluster is under resource pressure. One obvious solution to this problem is to over-provision your cluster resources to have some amount of slack resources available for scale-up situations. This approach often works, but costs more as you would have to pay for the resources that are idle most of the time.

  Pod priority and preemption is a scheduler feature made generally available in Kubernetes 1.14 that allows you to achieve high levels of scheduling confidence for your critical workloads without overprovisioning your clusters. It also provides a way to improve resource utilization in your clusters without sacrificing the reliability of your essential workloads.

• A Gardener To Manage Kubernetes At Scale

• Building a DNS-as-a-service with OpenStack Designate

  Designate is a multi-tenant DNS-as-a-service that includes a REST API for domain and record management, a framework for integration with Neutron, and integration support for Bind9.

• Build your Kubernetes armory with Minikube, Kail, and Kubens

  Kubernetes has grown to be a de facto development platform for building cloud-native applications. As developers, we want to be productive from the word go, or, shall we say, from the word code. But to be productive, we must be armed with the right set of tools. In this article, I will take a look at three important tools that should become part of your Kubernetes tool chest, or armory.

• Introduction to Kubernetes: From container to containers

  After being introduced to Linux containers and running a simple application, the next step seems obvious: How to get multiple containers running in order to put together an entire system. Although there are multiple solutions, the clear winner is Kubernetes. In this article, we’ll look at how Kubernetes facilitates running multiple containers in a system.

  For this article, we’ll be running a web app that uses a service to determine your location based on your IP address. We’ll run both apps in containers using Kubernetes, and we’ll see how to make RESTful calls inside your cluster from one service (the web app) to another (the location app).

• What Is Server Management?

  Server management, an essential activity for data center administrators, is a challenging topic. This is because the term server management can be used to refer to managing physical server hardware, virtual machines or many types of application servers and database servers. All of these needs to be managed – constantly.

  Adding complication, there are many types of server management tools and server management services that can help administrators to keep servers of all types working properly. The best server monitoring software applications provide system management application capabilities that serve an array of different use-cases. Let's look at server management in-depth.

• Formulus Black software stores data in persistent memory

  Persistent memory is one of the hottest topics in the data storage industry, and startup Formulus Black has launched a new Linux-based software stack designed to use it.

  [...]

  The ForsaOS software stack uses patented Formulus Bit Marker (FbM) algorithms to eliminate redundant data, so it can pack more data into the server's main memory. Rickard said ForsaOS typically reduces a data set stored in DIMMs by three to four times.

• Getting an Edge on Point of Service

  A Point of Service (POS) network is a highly specialized environment that requires specialized tools. Traditional solutions depend on proprietary hardware running proprietary software that limits flexibility and enforces vendor lock-in. An alternative approach is to build the retail environment around general-purpose, PC-based client systems and general-purpose management tools. Implementing a retail environment through general-purpose systems solves the lock-in problem, but it fails to provide the security, efficiency, and convenience of a system specifically designed for the needs of the retail industry. If you’re looking for a solution that is specifically designed for retail, but avoids the complications and added expense of proprietary tools, try SUSE Manager for Retail. SUSE Manager for Retail is an open source infrastructure management solution that is powerful, flexible, secure, and easy to customize.

• How CIOs can improve business results through SAP and cloud management

We’ve witnessed a lot of success with our Linux Essentials program and are broadening that out to include security, Internet of Things (IoT)/embedded and web development topics.

• Breaking Out of the Hadoop Cocoon

  The announcement last fall that top Hadoop vendors Cloudera and Hortonworks were coming together in a $5.2 billion merger – and reports about the financial toll that their competition took on each other in the quarters leading up to the deal – revived questions that have been raised in recent years about the future of Hadoop in an era where more workloads are moving into public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) that offer a growing array of services that many of the jobs that the open-source technology already does.

  Hadoop gained momentum over the past several years as an open-source platform to collect, store and analyze various types of data, arriving as data was becoming the coin of the realm in the IT industry, something that has only steadily grown since. As we’ve noted here at The Next Platform, Hadoop has evolved over the years, with such capabilities as Spark in-memory processing and machine learning being added. But in recent years more workloads and data have moved to the cloud, and the top cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform all offer their own managed services, such as AWS’ Elastic Map Reduce (EMR). Being in the cloud, these services also offer lower storage costs and easier management – the management of the infrastructure is done by the cloud provider themselves.

• A guide for database as a service providers: How to stand your ground against AWS – or any other cloud

  NoSQL database platform MongoDB followed suit in October 2018 announcing a Server Side Public License (SSPL) to protect “open source innovation” and stop “cloud vendors who have not developed the software to capture all of the value while contributing little back to the community.” Event streaming company, Confluent issued its own Community License in December 2018 to make sure cloud providers could no longer “bake it into the cloud offering, and put all their own investments into differentiated proprietary offerings.”

• The CEO of DigitalOcean explains how its 'cult following' helped it grow a $225 million business even under the shadow of Amazon Web Services

  DigitalOcean CEO Mark Templeton first taught himself to code at a small hardwood business. He wanted to figure out how to use the lumber in the factory most efficiently, and spreadsheets only got him so far.

  "I taught myself to write code to write a shop floor control and optimization system," Templeton told Business Insider. "That allowed us to grow, to run the factory 24 hours a day, all these things that grow in small business is new. As a self-taught developer, that's what launched me into the software industry."

  And now, Templeton is learning to embrace these developer roots again at DigitalOcean, a New York-based cloud computing startup. It's a smaller, venture-backed alternative to mega-clouds like Amazon Web Services, but has found its niche with individual programmers and smaller teams.

• IBM’s Big-Ticket Purchase of Red Hat Gets a Vote of Confidence From Wall Street

• How Monzo built a bank with open infrastructure

  When challenger bank Monzo began building its platform, the team decided it would get running with container orchestration platform Kubernetes "the hard way". The result is that the team now has visibility into outages or other problems, and Miles Bryant, platform engineer at Monzo, shared some observations at the bank at the recent Open Infrastructure Day event in London.

  Finance is, of course, a heavily regulated industry - and at the same time customer expectations are extremely exacting. If people can't access their money, they tend to get upset.

• Kubernetes Automates Open-Source Deployment

  Whether for television broadcast and video content creation, delivery or transport of streamed media, they all share a common element, that is the technology supporting this industry is moving rapidly, consistently and definitively toward software and networking. The movement isn’t new by any means; what now seems like ages ago, in the days where every implementation required customized software on a customized hardware platform has now changed to open platforms running with open-source solution sets often developed for open architectures and collectively created using cloud-based services.

• Using EBS and EFS as Persistent Volume in Kubernetes

  If your Kubernetes cluster is running in the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS), it comes with Elastic Block Storage (EBS). Or, Elastic File System (EFS) can be used for storage.

  We know pods are ephemeral and in most of the cases we need to persist the data in the pods. To facilitate this, we can mount folders into our pods that are backed by EBS volumes on AWS using AWSElasticBlockStore, a volume plugin provided by Kubernetes.

  We can also use EFS as storage by using efs-provisioner. Efs-provisioner runs as a pod in the Kubernetes cluster that has access to an AWS EFS resource.

• Everything You Want To Know About Anthos - Google's Hybrid And Multi-Cloud Platform

  Google's big bet on Anthos will benefit the industry, open source community, and the cloud native ecosystem in accelerating the adoption of Kubernetes.

• Raise a Stein for OpenStack: Latest release brings faster containers, cloud resource management

  The latest OpenStack release is out in the wilds. Codenamed Stein, the platform update is said to allow for much faster Kubernetes deployments, new IP and bandwidth management features, and introduces a software module focused on cloud resource management – Placement.

  In keeping with the tradition, the 19th version of the platform was named Stein after Steinstraße or "Stein Street" in Berlin, where the OpenStack design summit for the corresponding release took place in 2018.

  OpenStack is not a single piece of software, but a framework consisting of an integration engine and nearly 50 interdependent modules or projects, each serving a narrowly defined purpose, like Nova for compute, Neutron for networking and Magnum for container orchestration, all linked together using APIs.

• OpenStack Stein launches with improved Kubernetes support

  The OpenStack project, which powers more than 75 public and thousands of private clouds, launched the 19th version of its software this week. You’d think that after 19 updates to the open-source infrastructure platform, there really isn’t all that much new the various project teams could add, given that we’re talking about a rather stable code base here. There are actually a few new features in this release, though, as well as all the usual tweaks and feature improvements you’d expect.

  While the hype around OpenStack has died down, we’re still talking about a very active open-source project. On average, there were 155 commits per day during the Stein development cycle. As far as development activity goes, that keeps OpenStack on the same level as the Linux kernel and Chromium.

• Community pursues tighter Kubernetes integration in Openstack Stein

  The latest release of open source infrastructure platform Openstack, called 'Stein', was released today with updates to container functionality, edge computing and networking upgrades, as well as improved bare metal provisioning and tighter integration with popular container orchestration platform Kubernetes - led by super-user science facility CERN.

  It also marks roughly a year since the Openstack Foundation pivoted towards creating a more all-encompassing brand that covers under-the-bonnet open source in general, with a new umbrella organisation called the Open Infrastructure Foundation. Openstack itself had more than 65,000 code commits in 2018, with an average of 155 per day during the Stein cycle.

• Why virtualisation remains a technology for today and tomorrow

  The world is moving from data centres to centres of data. In this distributed world, virtualisation empowers customers to secure business-critical applications and data regardless of where they sit, according to Andrew Haschka, Director, Cloud Platforms, Asia Pacific and Japan, VMware.

  “We think of server and network virtualisation as being able to enable three fundamental things: a cloud-centric networking fabric, with intrinsic security, and all of it delivered in software. This serves as a secure, consistent foundation that drives businesses forward,” said Haschka in an email interview with Networks Asia. “We believe that virtualisation offers our customers the flexibility and control to bring things together and choose which way their workloads and applications need to go – this will ultimately benefit their businesses the most.”

• Happy 55th birthday mainframe

  7 April marked the 55th birthday of the mainframe. It was on that day in 1964 that the System/360 was announced and the modern mainframe was born. IBM’s Big Iron, as it came to be called, took a big step ahead of the rest of the BUNCH (Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data Corporation, and Honeywell). The big leap of imagination was to have software that was architecturally compatible across the entire System/360 line.

• Red Hat strategy validated as open hybrid cloud goes mainstream

  “Any products, anything that would release to the market, the first filter that we run through is: Will it help our customers with their open hybrid cloud journey?” said Ranga Rangachari (pictured), vice president and general manager of storage and hyperconverged infrastructure at Red Hat.

  Rangachari spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Google Cloud Next event. They discussed adoption of open hybrid cloud and how working as an ecosystem is critical for success in solving storage and infrastructure problems (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)