Category: Containers

Next Generation Tools for Container Technology

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Karsten Wade

In this video from the 2018 Red Hat Summit, Dan Walsh and Mrunal Patel lead a journey through a set of next generation tools for creating, deploying, and maintaining containers.

This journey covers tools such as CRI-O, Buildah, and Skopeo, which are being developed with other tools by Red Hat and the community into a complete toolchain for developing, operating, and maintaining Open Container Initiative (OCI)-compliant containers.

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Kubernetes and the Platform of the Future

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Karsten Wade

In another installment from the Red Hat Summit track from the Office of the CTO, this video is an informal discussion between Brandon Philips (previously CTO of CoreOS, acquired by Red Hat) and Clayton Coleman (Chief Engineer for OpenShift), interviewed by Steve Watt. They focus on Kubernetes as a platform of the future, identifying interesting trends in the open source ecosystem.

This discussion is a good example of the type of technologists that comprise the modern open source ecosystem, and epitomized by these three from Red Hat. Their backgrounds in real world development and operations combines with a genuine desire to help people that fuels their work in open source communities and product creation.

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The Future of Storage in Container Space: Part 4

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Brian Proffitt

The challenges of maintaining persistent storage in environments that are anything but persistent should not be taken lightly. My recent conversation with Ceph founder Sage Weil certainly made that clear. Thus far, the conversation with Sage has highlighted key areas of focus for the Red Hat Storage team as they look to the horizon, including how storage plans are affected by:

  • Hardware trends (examined in Part 1)
  • Software platforms (reviewed in Part 2)
  • Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud (discussed in Part 3)

In the last segment of our interview, Sage focused on technology that’s very much on the horizon: the emerging workloads. Specifically, how will storage work in a world where artificial intelligence and machine learning begins to shape software, hardware, and networking architecture?

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The Future of Storage in Container Space: Part 3

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Brian Proffitt

It was not that long ago when organizations had in-house servers humming along running applications and storing data. Today, the opportunity afforded by containers means that applications can now live on a cloud platform (either public or private), or one of several available cloud platforms.

But while applications and microservices housed in stateless containers are easy to move from place to place (indeed, that’s a big part of the appeal of containers), the data the applications are accessing are stateful and very, very difficult to relocate while still maintaining consistency, latency, and throughput. This is one of the challenges faced by the Red Hat Storage team, and  addressed by Sage Weil in his recent presentation at Red Hat Summit: maintaining data availability with acceptable latency when working with applications in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.

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Clouds Today, Serverless Tomorrow: Your Future Apps and Platforms

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Karsten Wade

When we look to the future of applications and platforms, we need to keep an eye on the solutions of the past.

That is one of the main theses of Stephanos Bacon, Sr. Director of Portfolio Strategy at Red Hat, in this video from Red Hat Summit 2018, “Clouds Today, Serverless Tomorrow: Your Future Apps and Platforms”:

In order to understand the present situation around the many choices of languages and platforms a developer faces, Stephanos briefly walks through a 25 year year journey of enterprise software development. This journey is one of a “continuous-though-forward-moving cycle”.

This cycle looks back at itself to learn and adapt from the past while moving forward in response to changing market imperatives.  While we may need new solutions, we also reach back in time to find seemingly old solutions that address new classes of problems.

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The Future of Storage in Container Space: Part 2

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Brian Proffitt

In Part 1 of Now + Next’s closer look at the future of container storage, we examined the beginnings of the storage solution with a look at how hardware trends will affect the way storage and containers will evolve together.

In this installment, Ceph Project Lead Sage Weil continues our conversation, moving “up” the stack to software platforms. Specifically, Sage discusses where container technology is now and where it is going.

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10 Trends Reshaping the Developer Experience

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Karsten Wade

In this video, Director of Product Management for Developer Tools Brad Micklea talks through ten trends Red Hat is investing in that are already reshaping the developer experience.

The idea of software development as a major creative source for innovation has emerged in recent decades.  During most of that time for the people writing code and running it in production, instead of being deep in the act of painting a masterpiece, they have had to spend too much time building and cleaning brushes.

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The Future of Storage in Container Space: Part 1

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Brian Proffitt

The rise of container technology has created a new challenge for the storage industry. Within containers, applications, and computation resources are now incredibly mobile, while storage still has to remain persistent and accessible. Here’s how Red Hat is working to address the storage needs of container workloads.

In modern microservice-based architectures, each container is a transient object. It might live on one server for a while and then get moved over to another if directed by an orchestrator tool. While a container keeps its bundle of application software and dependencies during its lifecycle, it usually does not keep application data within the container. Nor should it. After all, in this model a container is designed to run only what is needed and when it is needed. When done, the container is allowed (in fact encouraged) to disappear. If an application’s data were held inside that same application container, too, then pfft!

That’s a challenge.

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Superfluidity Project: One Network to Rule Them All!

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Pano Xinos, Red Hat

The Superfluidity Project was a 33-month European (H2020) research project (July 2015–April 2018) aimed at achieving superfluidity on the Internet: the capability to instantiate services on-the-fly, run them anywhere in the network (core, aggregation, edge), and shift them transparently to different locations. The project especially focused on 5G networks and tried to go one step further into the virtualization and orchestration of different network elements, including radio and network processing components, such as BBUs, EPCs, P-GW, S-GW, PCRF, MME, load balancers, SDN controllers, and others.

For more information about it, you can visit both the official project website, as well as my previous blog post.

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Bringing Automation to Container Space

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Brian Proffitt

The wonders of automation have been thoroughly enjoyed by sysadmins in recent years with tools like Ansible enabling rapid deployment of applications and services across servers and cloud-based platforms. But as the IT world evolves to more container-based technologies, tools like Ansible have not translated well to orchestration-level actions.

This is changing rapidly, thanks to the new Automation Broker project. Part of the OpenShift ecosystem, Automation Broker connects the gap between provisioning servers and provisioning containers.

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