• Rook-Ceph storage Operator now on OperatorHub.io

  We are excited to announce the addition of the Rook-Ceph storage Operator to OperatorHub.io. Operators are design patterns that augment and implement common day one and day two activities with Kubernetes clusters, simplifying application deployments and empowering developers to focus on creation versus remediation. The Rook-Ceph Operator is an upstream effort that Red Hat is leading and is using as part of its work towards Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4.

  Developing and deploying cloud-native applications at scale can be complex and challenging. The new Rook-Ceph storage Operator is designed to automate the packaging, deployment, management, upgrading, and scaling of Ceph clusters that provide persistent storage to stateful applications as well as infrastructure services (logging, metrics, registry) in Kubernetes clusters. The release of Rook’s Ceph Operator augments Kubernetes scheduling with a complement of stateful storage services including block, filesystem and object storage.

• Red Hat Satellite 6.4.3 has been released

  Red Hat Satellite 6.4.3 is generally available. The main drivers for the 6.4.3 release are a Request for Feature Enhancement (RFE) for capsule syncing control as well as general stability fixes.

  The capsule syncing control feature enables the user to have control over when capsule syncs occur. Traditionally the capsule sync occurs automatically after a content view is updated, but some customers may want more granular control over when the synchronization occurs. Satellite 6.4.3 introduces a new setting in Administer —> Settings —> Content —> Sync Capsules after Content View promotion.

• Contributors are Empowered When They Know the Process
  

  There is a saying in the legal profession that you should never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to. Despite how this sounds, it is actually a rule most people follow in life. This is the source of that feeling you get when you’re too scared to raise your hand and ask a question. In Open Source we need to make sure that contributors feel like they already “know” the answers, so they will feel confident in making the request.

  As a university lecturer, I always encouraged my students to first think about what they thought the answer was and then ask the question. In some cases, I encouraged them to actually write down what they thought the answer was. In this way, they could judge both their skills and their ability to grow based on what the answer turned out to be. It created an additional feedback loop.

• Alisha and Shraddha: Positive feedback loops in Fedora

  This post is the second introduction to the Fedora Summer Coding interns Class of Summer 2019. In this interview, we’ll meet Alisha Mohanty and Shraddha Agrawal, who are both working on Fedora Happiness Packets to promote positive feedback loops in the Fedora community.

• The OpenStack User Survey is now open

  The 2019 OpenStack User Survey is now open and waiting for your input. Whether you’re a user of OpenStack, or an operator utilising it to power your offerings, the OpenStack Foundation (and the rest of the community) want to hear about your usage.

  2018 saw the 11th OpenStack User Survey unveiled at the Berlin OpenStack Summit, giving some fantastic insight into how and where people are using OpenStack across 63 different countries. Usage in Asia surged dramatically in 2018, with 48% of respondents based in that continent, with Europe 2nd at 26% and North America 3rd with 20% of respondents.

• Instagram: What’s the Technology Behind This Social Media Platform?

  It runs “Natty Narwhal (Ubuntu Linux version 11.04) on Amazon EC2. Though the developers found out that lower versions of Ubuntu had varieties of random freezing incidents on Amazon EC2, they are certain the Linux 11.04 has been firm.

• Four key tactics to better deliver APIs and improve customer experience through open banking

  Digital leaders are embracing open banking as a cornerstone to their banking distribution strategy. They are using APIs to connect with partners and bring innovative digital services to their customers who continue to seek better experiences.

  More broadly, customers want banking services that integrate into their digital life, explains Capgemini in its World Retail Banking Report 2018. "That’s why it makes strategic sense for banks to support the API-led economy and collaborate with third-parties to offer new-age services," the report says.

• Krazy Parties At KubeCon Barcelona

  Are you all set to attend the upcoming KubeCon in Barcelona? They have a jam-packed schedule for technical sessions, workshops, and great talks.

  But this KubeCon is special. “This year we’ll be celebrating Kubernetes’ 5th anniversary!,” said Janet Kuo, Software Engineer at Google, Co-Chair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon.

• Announcing Enarx for running sensitive workloads

  Running software is something that most of us do without thinking about it. We run in "on premises"—our own machines—or we run it in the cloud - on somebody else's machines. We don't always think about what those differences mean, or about what assumptions we're making about the securtiy of the data that's being processed, or even of the software that's doing that processing. Specifically, when you run software (a "workload") on a system (a "host") on the cloud or on your own premises, there are lots and lots of layers. You often don't see those layers, but they're there.

• Monitoring For Organizations At Scale With M3 And Prometheus

  For the past few years Prometheus has solved the monitoring needs of many and it is exceptional at what it does. Being the second project to graduate from CNCF incubation, Prometheus has exploded in popularity and is the monitoring tool of choice for many cloud native adopters. While Prometheus is great at real time monitoring, it was not designed to be a long term persistent store of metrics.

• MANAGEDKUBE LAUNCHES NEW APPLICATION DEDICATED TO DEMOCRATIZING KUBERNETES INFORMATION, COLLABORATES WITH GOOGLE CLOUD

• What’s The Right Ingress Controller For My Kubernetes Environment?

• SUSE Teams Up with Veeam for Data Protection Support

  SUSE and Veeam are teaming up to offer a great solution for your data protection needs. Veeam has just granted their Veeam Ready-Repository (and soon, Veeam Ready-Object) designation to SUSE Enterprise Storage 5.5. Now enterprises get a high-performing and flexible backup target with high scalability. Together, SUSE and Veeam can deliver an extremely cost-effective, flexible, scalable solution for enterprise archive, backup and recovery implementations.

• KubeCon Barcelona: The New SUSE, and SUSE CaaS Platform.

  In a short while, SUSE will become the largest independently operating open source company in the world. Some have branded this era, “The New SUSE and wow it’s time to see what “The New SUSE” looks like at KubeCon Barcelona. We are here to talk about modern, Kubernetes-based application delivery solutions that you need today. We’ve upped our sponsorship and we’re ready to rock.

• What is a Kubernetes distribution, and why would you want one?

  Kubernetes (or K8s, if you want to be cool) is currently one of the fastest growing technologies in the world of open source. These days the technology in, and associated with, Kubernetes seems almost endless – and the innovation comes just as fast. Kubernetes was first introduced in 2014 as a brainchild of the citizens and people of Google-landia. 2017 saw Kubernetes start to take off in popularity largely due to an incredibly loyal following of contributors, and by 2018, Kubernetes was looking like a de-facto standard for container orchestration. As of recent, Kubernetes has seen advances in flexibility, governance, storage, and security. As with all things open source, you can just download it from the internet, too – what a time to be alive!!!

• The new application environment: engineered for excellence

  In the first part of this series, we looked at the role of containers as a fundamental enabler of fine-grained, microservices architectures that enable rapid, incremental, trial-and-error innovation. In the second part, we described in some detail the continuing importance of "middleware"—whether it's called middleware or something else—for development of enterprise applications in containerized, cloud-native environments. We arrived at the notion that not only must traditional middleware be substantially reimagined and refactored to optimally support cloud-native applications, it can also be substantially more powerful when it is "engineered together" in a way that creates a unified, coherent application environment. Let's unpack this a bit and understand the opportunities, benefits, and requirements.

• Red Hat Shares ― Linux: The hybrid cloud foundation

  We talk a lot about hybrid cloud because we believe it’s important to the IT strategy of most enterprises. (We dedicate an entire track to it at Red Hat Summit, happening this week.) But equally significant is the foundation of your hybrid cloud―the operating system (OS).

  Clouds are made up of the same interoperable technologies: OSs, virtualization software, management and automation tools, and application programming interfaces (APIs). The quality of those connections depends on the consistency, reliability, and flexibility of your OS.

• “Red Hat Will Remain Independent; I’m Not Buying Them To Destroy Them,” Says IBM CEO

  Ever since IBM announced that it’s going to acquire the open source giant Red Hat, Linux and open source enthusiasts have been voicing their concerns regarding the future of Red Hat? Is it going to become just another IBM subsidiary or is Red Hat going to adopt IBM’s corporate culture?

  At the Red Hat Summit in Boston, executives of both companies shared their thoughts and reiterated their commitments to move forward and drive more innovation. When asked if the Linux giant would remain independent, IBM CEO, chairman, and president Ginni Rometty said: “I don’t have a death wish for $34 billion.”

• At Red Hat Summit, RHEL 8 Unveiled Under IBM's Cloud

  The unveiling of RHEL 8 would normally steal the show at Red Hat Summit, but this year the deal with IBM may overshadow that announcement.

• What to look forward to on Day 3 of Red Hat Summit

  Two days are on the books, just one day left of Red Hat Summit 2019. We’re a bit sad, too, but don’t despair - there’s plenty left to do, see, and learn on Thursday. To cap it all off, we’re looking forward to Thursday night’s Red Hat Summit Party featuring Neon Trees and Fitz & the Tantrums. Let’s see what else is going on Thursday.

• Inside the IT industry’s largest commercial open source software ecosystem

  longside this week’s product announcements at Red Hat Summit 2019, Red Hat delivers yet another major milestone in building an open hybrid cloud ecosystem with new certification offerings, a new approach to RHEL-based container images, better tools for Red Hat and partners to support customers as well as addressing the need for application portability.

  Red Hat’s vision of an open hybrid cloud is: any application, in any environment, on any cloud, portable and operated consistently - from public and private clouds to bare metal and virtual environments in traditional datacenters, the extended datacenter (edge) and end-user devices.

• Journey to the hybrid cloud – it starts with the platform

  Organizations today are investing in new technologies and practices to transform the way they deliver value to their customers. This has become a critical investment area as we move into an era of disruption, and cloud computing plays a vital role in supporting both the technologies and processes driving the digital transformation imperative. Offering greater speed, cloud-based strategies leave more time for companies to focus on building and delivering innovation, value, and differentiation while creating financial efficiency.

  While moving to a single public cloud has many benefits, the reality is that for some workloads the public cloud simply doesn’t make sense, or meet requirements for things like control, security or regulatory compliance. As a result, a majority of today’s IT environments are inherently hybrid, comprising of applications deployed on-premises, and in both private and public clouds. Some highly optimized or secure workloads can continue to be deployed in bare metal and virtualized environments. As organizations embrace the public cloud, they may select multiple public clouds in order to take advantage of unique cloud capabilities as well as for optimizing vendors. According to IDC, 70 percent of customers already deploy multicloud environments and 64 percent of applications in a typical IT portfolio today are based in a cloud environment, whether public or private1. Therefore, many organizations are looking to embrace hybrid cloud strategies as the best way to achieve digital transformation.

• Meet Red Hat Open Studio: An open community where creativity is the code

  As I prepare for my talk at Red Hat Summit 2019, I can’t help but think about what led to today.

  Since the moment you arrived at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center for Red Hat Summit (or watched the livestream if you couldn’t join us in person) you’ve experienced the efforts of Red Hat’s Marketing Communications team. This is the big game for us, and we work all year long to deliver an immersive, creative experience to showcase what Red Hat and the open source community are up to.

  But we don’t do it in a vacuum. It takes a multitude of internal teams, stakeholders, and external collaborators to bring this to life. It takes the Red Hat Open Studio.

• Why open source holds the key to application portability in the hybrid cloud

  Gone are the days when IT decisions were black and white.

  The lines are blurred today. Virtualization and container platforms have started to converge. DevOps has taken on a central role as mediator between developers and system admins. Kubernetes has emerged as a platform for both infrastructure and applications. CIOs think in terms of on-prem and cloud deployments. Clearly, the operative word has changed from ‘or’ to ‘and’. This imperative is one of the drivers fueling the rise of hybrid cloud technologies.

  Recently, Joe Brockmeier wrote a great blog post on the value of enterprise open source technologies. I’d like to extend that discussion to the value of open source in the era of the hybrid cloud.

• Red Hat Shifts Kubernetes Into High Gear as Linux Advances

  At Red Hat Summit, OpenShift version 4 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 are announced, as new foundations on which enterprise applications can be developed and delivered.

  When looking at the modern IT landscape, few if any technologies are as pervasive for enterprise application and cloud deployment as Linux. Leading the charge for enterprise Linux has long been Red Hat, which held its annual Red Hat Summit May 7- 9, announcing new Linux and Kubernetes container platform releases.

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL) is the first major release of Red Hat's flagship Linux platform since July 2014. The RHEL 8 release benefits from a new web console project that makes it easier for users to manage a system.

• OpenShift 4: Red Hat's on ramp for the hybrid cloud

  Traditionally, a hybrid cloud runs simultaneously on a public and private cloud. Historically, that's been done with three models: Hybrid-cloud management software such as HPE Helion; vendor-native hybrid cloud platforms, such as Microsoft with Azure and Azure Stack; and Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS) clouds, including Cloud Foundry, which can bridge over Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. Or, you can do what Red Hat announced at Red Hat Summit: Use Kubernetes container orchestration with Red Hat OpenShift 4.

• Inspiration and Learning at SAS Global Forum

  As a technology partner with SAS, it is inspiring to see that real life challenges are being addressed with SAS Viya and other SAS products. SUSE plays an important role by providing open infrastructure which is reliable, secure, high performing, available on all major architectures and public clouds, with SUSE’s world class global support. We work closely with SAS to ensure an excellent platform for their applications, and a great experience for our joint customers. Masood Noori, solution architect at SUSE, worked closely with SAS R&D and SUSE’s performance experts to create a tuning guide for running SAS with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). This SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Tuning and Configuration for SAS guide was the basis of Masood’s session topic at the event. Along with covering the tuning recommendations and methodology, Masood also provided background about SUSE, including news of becoming independent (see blog from CEO Nils Brauckmann), and our partnership with SAS.

• SUSE Expert Days – Your kind of Open

  SUSE Expert Days are free, one-day training sessions, full of technical conversations and demos that will provide you with the tools you need to keep pace with your evolving business. Sessions are delivered by SUSE engineers, experts, and IT professionals that realize that in today’s business environments, every company is a digital company. The content is curated knowing that you not only have to keep up, you need to be ready to transform in an agile and strategic way.

KDE applications got a big update to 18.12. Dolphin (file manager) received many improvements, including the ability to hide the Places panel and dock the Terminal panel. The folder view and settings dialog have been updated. Ocular (PDF and document viewer) has a new typewriter annotation feature that enables you to type everywhere on a page. Konsole (terminal application) now has full support for emoji. The Gwenview (image viewer) has seen many improvements, including the crop tool, the reduce red eye tool, improved zooming and better drag and drop functionality. Spectacle (screenshot tool) gained the ability to sequentially number screenshot files and now remembers the lastest save settings. With the rectangular region selection mode, you can select a part of the screen . Ark (unzip tool) now supports the tar.zst archive file standard.

Krita is updated to 4.1.8 and introduces the new reference images tool that lets you place and edit a reference image to help you with drawing. Another help with drawing is provided by the improved vanishing point assistant. Krita 4.1 features many animation improvements and a better color picker tool.

LibreOffice 6.1 offers 2 new icon themes ‘Colibre’ and ‘Karasa Jaga’, it loads documents with many images faster, the gradient tool has been improved and new fill gradients are available, you can now add page numbers and page counts in the header and footer sections of Writer, you can insert a Signature line in Writer, you can now sort images anchored to cells in Calc, the merge cells dialog box has become much clearer in Calc, you can now use CSVs as data sources in Calc and a new page menu has been added in Impress.