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Tag: operating system

  • Eclipse Foundation Launches Open Source Edge Computing Initiative

    Eclipse Foundation Launches Open Source Edge Computing Initiative

    The Eclipse Foundation in collaboration with the OpenAtom Foundation today launched the Oniro project and working group to create an independent implementation of OpenHarmony, an open source operating system.

    Created by the OpenAtom Foundation, the OpenHarmony operating system is based on a HarmonyOS originally created by Huawei. It is designed to support multiple kernels but uses the Linux kernel if a device has a large amount of memory.

    It also includes a DSoftBus capability for integrating physically separate devices into a single logical super device that enables one device to control others in addition to facilitating data sharing among distributed devices.

    Huawei, in collaboration with Linaro, Seco, Array, NOITechPark and Synesthesia, has also been contributing to a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that is part of the larger Oniro project.

    Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said the goal is to provide a common layer of abstraction platform that can be employed across a wide range of embedded systems that are typically being deployed at the network edge. That level of fragmentation surrounding platforms that don’t provide a lot of significant differentiated value only results in slowing down the deployment of applications, noted Milinkovich.

    As part of that effort, a dedicated working group has been created to provide a vendor-neutral structure through which contributions to the project can be made with greater transparency. The OpenAtom Foundation was created in Beijing last year with the support of Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, Inspur, Qihoo, Tencent and China Merchants Bank. The alliance with the Eclipse Foundation brings more traditional governance rules for building open source software to the OpenHarmony project.

    In general, DevOps teams should be tracking the development of proposed de facto standards for edge computing platforms closely. More applications are now being deployed on edge computing platforms that make it possible to process and analyze data at the point where it is being created and consumed. The DevOps challenges associated with building and deploying applications across a highly distributed computing environment are considerable.

    In many cases, organizations that never really attempted or mastered continuous delivery of applications and their associated updates will be sorely challenged when it comes times to support hundreds, possibly thousands of applications, running on embedded systems based on a wide range of processors.

    In addition, many of those same DevOps teams will start to see traditional batch-oriented applications being superseded by applications based on event-driven architectures that process data in near-real-time. In most cases, those applications are going to be built on microservices-based applications that are typically more challenging to build and deploy than a traditional monolithic application.

    Arguably, IT organizations are on the cusp of a new era of IT that assumes most organizations have not only mastered DevOps best practices but are now also embracing DevSecOps best practices to secure those application environments.

    It may be a while before the open source software that will be developed by the Orino project finds its way into production environments, but it should be apparent that reducing complexity at the network edge should be a high priority for all DevOps teams heading into 2022.

  • Red Hat Automates More Operating System Tasks

    Red Hat Automates More Operating System Tasks

    Red Hat today announced an update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that automates a wide range of manual tasks.

    Scott McBrien, a principal product manager for Red Hat, said RHEL 8.3, available in a few weeks, expands the Red Hat System Roles capability that provides a prescriptive and automated means of managing operating system configurations. Red Hat System Role now addresses kernel and log settings, identity management, certificate management and Network-Bound Disk Encryption (NBDE), as well as deployments of SAP HANA databases and SAP NetWeaver middleware. Red Hat has also updated Tuned, a set of pre-configured performance profiles it makes available.

    In addition, RHEL 8.3 provides an update to Application Streams, a set of developer frameworks, databases, container tools and other resources that now adds support for Node.js 14, Ruby 2.7 and other current versions of tools and languages. Red Hat is now committed to streaming support for updates to the frameworks include in Application Streams versus only making updates available each time the entire platform is updated, said McBrien. That approach is intended to make it possible for developers to embrace new capabilities faster while maintaining support for previous versions of frameworks, said McBrien.

    Red Hat is also furthering its effort to encourage organizations that have standardized on RHEL to embrace its tools for building and managing container applications. Updated container images for Buildah, a tool for building container images and Skopeo, a tool for moving container images across storage platform, have been added along with version 2.0 of Podman, a tool for managing containers and images that adds a REST application programming interface (API) that is compatible with Docker Container Engine.

    Red Hat is making the cases for a more modular approach to deploying tools for building and maintaining containers as an alternative to a more monolithic approach pursued by Docker Inc., said McBrien.

    Finally, Red Hat has added Secure Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) profiles for the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmark and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

    RHEL and the Red Hat OpenShift application development and deployment platform are at the core of the hybrid cloud computing strategy being advanced by Red Hat and its parent company, IBM. According to a Red Hat Enterprise Open Source Report, 63% of organizations surveyed have a hybrid cloud architecture today, with more than half of those who do not have one in place planning to implement one in the next two years.

    Beyond bundling developer tools with RHEL to reduce the number of IT vendors, an organization needs to engage, McBrien said Red Hat is committed to automating as many low-level IT tasks as possible. IT teams should be able to deploy operating systems in the cloud just as easily as they might in an on-premises IT environment, he noted.

    It may be a little while yet before every manual IT task becomes automated, but with each new update to the operating system the number of those rote tasks that IT administrators need to devote time to continues to diminish.

  • The Linux Foundation Throws Weight Behind Secure Microkernel

    The Linux Foundation Throws Weight Behind Secure Microkernel

    The Linux Foundation announced today it will host the seL4 Foundation, the nonprofit organization established by Data61, an arm of Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Australia that has been developing the seL4 microkernel operating system.

    Gernot Heiser, who will serve as chair of the new foundation, said the seL4 is unique in that it is mathematically proven to be secure, which provides a robust foundation on which a new generation of embedded systems can be built to drive, for example, internet of things (IoT) applications.

    Founding members of the seL4 Foundation include Data61, University of New South Wales in Sydney, HENSOLDT Cyber GmbH, Ghost Locomotion Inc., Cog Systems Inc. and DornerWorks Ltd.

    The hosting of the seL4 Foundation is sure to add more fuel to an increasingly fierce debate over the future of operating systems. Advocates of microkernels contend operating systems in terms of functions and size should be kept to an absolute minimum to both ensure security and maximize flexibility.

    Rather than loading functions into the operating system, most functions should be accessed in user space above the operating system. That approach allows organizations to take advantage of a modular architecture to swap capabilities out as they best see fit.

    However, supporters of traditional operating systems such as Linux and Windows contend organizations are better served by operating systems that run the same functions consistently. Linus Torvalds, who oversees the development of the core Linux operating system, has been especially critical of microkernel-based approaches to building operating systems.

    Between those two extremes have emerged containers, which package many of the functions once handled by the operating system into a container alongside application code to make it easier to run containers on multiple variants of operating systems. That shift has subsequently led to increased reliance on lighter-weight operating systems that only provide the basic functions required to run a container.

    Microkernel-based operating systems in time most will likely lend themselves better to many emerging use cases, especially on various emerging edge computing platforms where security is a paramount concern. The smaller the operating system, the less attack surface there is to defend. One of the issues that organizations of all sizes contend with today is the stack of software that needs to be defended is a lot larger than they may absolutely require.

    Of course, it remains to be seen how much momentum The Linux Foundation can generate for the seL4 project, which currently is supported only by a relatively small number of organizations. The degree to which organizations may back seL4 or some other similar initiative may come down to the degree to which they have grown tired of ceding control over what goes into an operating system to either Microsoft or the oligarchy that currently dominates the development of Linux. Regardless of where any organization falls on that spectrum, the one thing that is clear is given the scope of all the other open source projects supported by The Linux Foundation, it’s probable a lot more organizations are about to become a lot more involved in that debate whether they want to or not.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Red Hat Streamlines Operating System Update Cycle

    Red Hat Streamlines Operating System Update Cycle

    Red Hat is looking to make it easier for DevOps teams to absorb leading-edge innovations as they are slipstreamed into a new distribution of CentOS.

    CentOS is a distribution of Linux based on a fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The team that oversees CentOS operates independently of Red Hat. That team in collaboration with Red Hat is making available an additional distribution dubbed CentOS Stream, through which a continuous stream of content will be updated several times daily.

    Mike McGrath, senior director for Linux engineering at Red Hat, said those innovations eventually will find their way into RHEL, but until then developers who want to build applications using those features as they become available can use CentOS Stream.

    This latest distribution of Linux from Red Hat is intended to act as a bridge between Fedora, a distribution of Linux through which Red Hat makes available experimental technologies, and RHEL, he said.

    McGrath said developers have been asking for a more stable distribution of Linux that provides access to innovations that are likely to be incorporated in RHEL, which so many IT organizations today deploy in production environments. CentOS Stream will make it easier for developers to take advantage of those new capabilities a lot sooner than they can today, he noted.

    CentOS Stream will be maintained in parallel to CentOS, which means organizations that have decided to standardize on CentOS are not going to be impacted by updates to CentOS Stream.

    As more organizations subscribe to software, version numbers associated with any software platform are becoming less relevant. Many DevOps teams especially want to be able to take advantage of new capabilities within the context of a continuous integration process when and if they see fit, rather than waiting for a formal update of a piece of software to be released.

    It will be interesting to see how many IT organizations embrace CentOS Stream at a time when many of them are under increased pressure to build innovative applications faster. In many instances, those innovations are dependent on features and capabilities embedded in the operating system, so waiting for those capabilities to show up in a major RHEL upgrade isn’t especially helpful. Many developers want to be able to exploit those capabilities the minute they are certified to run on RHEL. In many cases, developers are gaining access to those features only a few short months ahead of time whenever a preview edition of the next version of RHEL is made available.

    Eventually, every software platform provider will need to come up with some similar approach to CentOS Stream to provide developers with early access to new capabilities. In many cases, developers already have access to next-generation features if they have a close relationship with the platform provider. However, the process for making new capabilities available to developers remains haphazard at best.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Red Hat Injects DevOps Flexibility into RHEL 8

    Red Hat Injects DevOps Flexibility into RHEL 8

    With the beta release of the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat is setting the stage for making it easier for DevOps teams to consume emerging operating system services without having to upgrade their entire operating system.

    The beta release of RHEL 8 adds an Application Streams capability designed to make it possible to leverage userspace more flexibly, as modules running in userspace now can be updated more quickly than the core operating system.

    Matt Micene, the technical product marketing manager for RHEL 8, said it’s also now possible for multiple versions of the same package—for example, an interpreted language or a database—to be made available via an application stream. That means different DevOps teams will be able to more easily work with different versions of various classes of technologies without having to wait for the next upgrade of the operating system, he said.

    As part of that focus on flexibility, Red Hat is also moving to make it easier for organizations that have embraced microservices based on containers to build applications. Open source tools such as Buildah for container building, Podman for running containers and Skopeo for sharing and finding containers are now fully supported in the operating system. Red Hat is also extending support for container networking using IPVLAN, which enables containers nested in virtual machines (VMs) to access networking hosts. There’s also a new TCP/IP stack with Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR) congestion control. As organizations increasingly adopt containers, many of them are starting to make operating systems decisions based on which platform has the most containerized optimized services built in.

    Other capabilities being added include support for OpenSSL 1.1.1 and TLS 1.3 along with Systemwide Cryptographic Policies; a Stratis file management system for dealing with lots of volumes; a Composer tool for building custom images that can deployed on hybrid clouds; support for the Yum 4 packager; and a new web console for managing the RHEL environment that presents administrators the same user interface experience regardless of their experience.

    Micene said Red Hat is trying to strike a balance between stability and IT agility. There are plenty of organizations that still prefer to upgrade their operating systems at very well-defined intervals. But there are also an increasing number of organizations that want to be able to take advantage of the latest IT innovations without having to wait for an operating system upgrade. Many of those organizations increasingly view IT as being core to their ability to compete, he said.

    Over time most organizations will develop a more schizophrenic approach to IT. There will be some application workloads where stability trumps all other requirements. At the other end of the scale, innovation will be the most prized attribute. To one degree or another, every workload is going to fall along a spectrum between those two extremes. The challenge is defining the right mix of DevOps processes to serve the needs of every and any workloads regardless of its attributes.

    — Mike Vizard

  • VMware Ties Desktop Virtualization to DevOps Productivity

    VMware Ties Desktop Virtualization to DevOps Productivity

    It’s no secret that when it comes to building applications, many developers prefer to use the Apple Macintosh. However, that preference can create multiple DevOps challenges. VMware is moving to reduce the friction with the release of VMware Fusion Pro 10, a desktop virtualization offering for Apple Macs that now supports REST application programming interfaces (APIs) to more easily programmatically invoke virtual machines on Macs.

    In addition, VMware has significantly improved support for graphical processors units (GPUs) and 3D graphics within VMware Fusion Pro 10 that are now more commonly being invoked by developers.

    At the same time, VMware is also updating VMware Workstation 14 and Workstation Player, which adds support for Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 along with updated Linux support for Fedora 26 and Ubuntu 17.04 guest operating systems to the desktop virtualization software. Workstation Player is a subset of VMware Workstation 14 that IT organizations can employ to limit the size of a virtual machine running on a local workstation.

    Other new capabilities include support for Microsoft’s Virtualization Based Security (VBS) features of Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows Server 2016 guests, enhanced virtual networking and new support and controls for working with vSphere and the vCenter Server Appliance software.

    Michael Roy, product line marketing manager for VMware Fusion, says more organizations are making GPUs available to developers as part of an effort to build more robust applications. Support for GPUs make it easier for developers to build compute-intensive applications for multiple operating system environments within the context of a DevOps environment managed by an IT organization, he notes.

    Other new capabilities include a revamped user interface and support for the Apple Touch Bar to simplify moving between native applications and virtual machine environments, including applications hosted on the VMware PhotonOS distribution of Linux optimized for hosting container applications.

    In this release of Fusion Pro, VMware is also adding support for Microsoft’s VBS features—which include Credential Guard for Windows 10 virtual machines, unified extensible firmware interface (UEFI) Secure Boot and a virtual Trusted Platform Module—in the same way it supports them on VMware Workstation 14.

    Finally, VMware is providing access to enhanced networking controls to enable management of network address translation (NAT) rules, network packet loss and latency simulation and renaming of VM networks.

    The updates were announced ahead of VMware’s VMWorld annual conference, being held Aug. 27-31 in Las Vegas.

    Developers typically require more access to more IT environments than almost any other employee, so maximizing the number of operating systems that can be deployed on their systems is in the best financial interests of the organization. Even when an organization can afford multiple machines most developers don’t want to have to move files between physical machines. Desktop virtualization software provides a means to not only increase productivity but also reduce the amount of machine overhead associated with developing applications across multiple operating environments.

    — Mike Vizard