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Category Archives for "Systems"

Review: Magic Mouse 2 and Magic Trackpad 2 on Fedora

I recently purchased a new Apple Magic Mouse 2 and an Apple Magic Trackpad 2—not to use with my MacBook Pro, but to use with my Fedora-powered laptop (a Lenovo 5th generation ThinkPad X1 Carbon; see my review). I know it seems odd to buy Apple accessories for a non-Apple laptop, and in this post I’d like to talk about why I bought these items as well as provide some (relatively early) feedback on how well they work with Fedora.

The Justification/Background

First, let me talk about the why behind my purchase of these items. Several years ago, I started simultaneously using both an external trackpad/touchpad and an external mouse with my macOS-based home office setup. I realize this is probably odd, but I adopted the practice as a way of eliminating “mouse finger” on my right hand. With this arrangement, I stopped trying to scroll with my right-hand (either using a mouse wheel with older mice or using the scroll-enabled back of the Magic Mouse), and instead shifting scrolling to my left hand (using two-finger scrolling on the trackpad). This “division of labor” worked well. Because my existing Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad—both earlier generations—don’t work with Continue reading

Ansible Automates 2020

Today, the operational role of IT is obvious. The rapid developments enabled by automation create genuine business value. The results that can be achieved by automation have a direct link to a company’s business goals. 

As a CTO or CIO, sometimes you need help articulating this to stakeholders. Translating IT departments’ performance into business prioritized KPIs. Most see efficiency gains, cost and risk reductions, for example. Automation is clearly an executive-level issue.

At first, Ansible was a classical tool that was  utilized for specific automation. Ansible helps your team automate routine tasks, so that they can instead focus on what you want to do. The platform enables you to structure work by automating your processes.

 

Automation is a journey - start yours at Ansible Automates 2020

The global, all-day digital event – Ansible Automates 2020 – takes place on June 10. The event provides inspiration as to how the automation journey can be accelerated and taken to the next level. And no, we’re not going to discuss functionality and technology all day. We want to highlight the cultural and behavioral changes that are linked to the trend towards greater automation. 

For organizations to achieve the best results, Continue reading

DockerCon 2020: And … That’s a Wrap

DockerCon LIVE 2020 is a wrap, and you rocked it! Our first-ever virtual swing at the traditionally in-person event was a winner on so many levels.

One of our goals was to extend our reach to all developers and members of the community by making the conference digital and free of charge. Mission accomplished! A grand total of 78,000 folks signed up for the May 28 one-day online event.

You hailed from 193 countries (by some counts there are only 196 countries on the planet!). That includes far-flung places like Madagascar, Zimbabwe and even the Maldives. Heck, you even joined us from the Vatican City State (pop. about 800).

Whether you were a seasoned developer or just starting out, our content game was strong. Best practices, how-tos, new product features and use cases, technical deep dives, open source projects—you name it, it was on the menu.

One of our key challenges was replicating the interactivity and spontaneity of in-person events in a virtual setting, but our efforts paid off. We made sure speakers and interviewees were available for live Q&A for their whole session to engage with attendees, resulting in over 21K chats. And remember those popular Hallway Tracks Continue reading

Multi-arch build, what about CircleCI?

Following the previous article where we saw how to build multi arch images using GitHub Actions, we will now show how to do the same thing using another CI. In this article, we’ll consider CircleCI, which is one of the most used CI SaaS.

To start building your image with CircleCI, you will first need to create .circleci/config.yml file:

version: 2
jobs:
  build:
    docker:
      - image: docker:stable
    steps:
      - checkout
      - setup_remote_docker:
          version: 18.09.3
      - run: docker version

You may notice that we specified using version 18.09.3 of the Docker Engine because buildx requires version 18.09 or later but CircleCI doesn’t provide any version above 18.09.3.

At this point we are able to interact with the Docker CLI but we don’t yet have the buildx plugin installed. To install it, we will download a build from GitHub.

version: 2
jobs:
  build:
    docker:
      - image: docker:stable
    steps:
      - checkout
      - setup_remote_docker:
          version: 18.09.3
Continue reading

Stack Overflow Survey Reconfirms Developer Love for Docker

The 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey confirms what we already knew: there’s a lot of developer love out there for Docker and it is continuing from last year.

Docker was the #1 most wanted platform and #2 most loved platform, according to the survey results published last week. We also ranked as the #3 most popular platform.

That’s no fluke. The results are based on nearly 65,000 people who code. And it’s the second year running we’ve acquitted ourselves so admirably in the annual survey. As we shared with you here last summer, developers ranked Docker as the #1 most wanted platform, #2 most loved platform and #3 most broadly used platform in the 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey. Those responses came from nearly 90,000 developers from around the world.

  • This year, in the most wanted platform category, nearly 25 percent of developers expressed interest in developing with Docker, ahead of AWS (20.2 percent), Kubernetes (18.5 percent) and Linux (16.6 percent).
  • In the most loved platform category, 73.6 percent of developers expressed interest in continuing to develop with Docker, trailing only first-placed Linux (76.9 percent), and leading Kubernetes (71.1 percent) and AWS (66. Continue reading

Using Unison Across Linux, macOS, and Windows

I recently wrapped up an instance where I needed to use the Unison file synchronization application across Linux, macOS, and Windows. While Unison is available for all three platforms and does work across (and among) systems running all three operating systems, I did encounter a few interoperability issues while making it work. Here’s some information on these interoperability issues, and how I worked around them. (Hopefully this information will help someone else.)

The use case here is to keep a subset of directories in sync between a MacBook Air running macOS “Catalina” 10.15.5 and a Surface Pro 6 running Windows 10. A system running Ubuntu 18.04.4 acted as the “server”; each “client” system (the MacBook Air and the Surface Pro) would synchronize with the Ubuntu system. I’ve used a nearly-identical setup for several years to keep my systems synchronized.

One thing to know about Unison before I continue is that you need compatible versions of Unison on both systems in order for it to work. As I understand it, compatibility is not just based on version numbers, but also on the Ocaml version with which it was compiled.

With that in mind, I already had Continue reading

Installing and using collections on Ansible Tower

Ansible Collections are the new way to distribute and manage content. Ansible content can be modules, roles, plugins and even Ansible Playbooks. In my previous blog I provide a walkthrough of using Ansible Collections from Ansible Galaxy and Automation Hub.  Ansible Galaxy is the upstream community for sharing Ansible Collections.  Any community user can create a namespace and share content with anyone. Access to Automation Hub is included with a Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscription. Automation Hub only contains fully supported and certified content from Red Hat and our partners.

In this blog post we'll walk through using Ansible Collections with Ansible Tower, part of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.  There are a few differences between using command-line Ansible for syncing with Ansible Galaxy or the Automation Hub versus using Ansible Tower. However, it is really easy and I will show you how!

 

Accessing collections content from Automation Hub and Galaxy from Ansible Tower.

If the Ansible Collections are included in your project you do not need to authenticate to Automation Hub. This method is where you are downloading dynamically using a requirements file as outlined in my blog post. In general there are Continue reading

Technology Short Take 127

Welcome to Technology Short Take #127! Let’s see what I’ve managed to collect for you this time around…

Networking

Servers/Hardware

Nothing this time around, but I’ll stay alert for items to include next time!

Security

Cloud Continue reading

DockerCon LIVE is here!

DockerCon LIVE 2020 is about to kick off and there are over 64,000 community members, users and customers registered! Although we miss getting together in person, we’re excited to be able to bring even more people together to learn and share how Docker helps dev teams build great apps. Like DockerCon’s past there is so much great content on the agenda for you to learn and expand your expertise around containers and applications.

We’ve been very busy here at Docker and a couple of months ago, we outlined our refocused developer-focused strategy. Since then, we’ve made great progress on executing against it and remain focused on bringing simplicity to app building experience, embracing the ecosystem and helping developers and developer teams bring code to cloud faster and easier than ever before. A few examples:

Automation Services Catalog: A Deep Dive into What’s New in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform introduces automation services catalog, a new hosted service for Red Hat Ansible customers to extend their automation in a controlled way to the various end users who need it. This is a deep dive into the capabilities and features of the offering.

 

Users

The automation services catalog is designed to be a familiar experience, providing an easy and intuitive user interface for ordering products (automation resources). 

john hardy blog 1

Products to Order

The idea is that those using the automation services catalog may not know that what they are ordering is actually Ansible Automation. For example, a product could be a business function, like ordering a new OpenShift project or onboarding a user to a new platform.

Ordering a product will present the user with options to facilitate the order. This could be provisioning the datacenter or applying permissions for a Kubernetes project. Upon submitting the order, the user can see the progress in their order queue. Users can search for past orders and see those currently in progress indicated by statuses including: Order, Failed, Approval Pending and Completed. Orders that are pending approval can be compared with ordering a product from a website and seeing Continue reading

Shortening the developer commute with Docker and Microsoft Azure

Do you remember the first time you used Docker? I do. It was about six years ago and like many folks at the time it looked like this:

docker run -it redis

I was not using Redis at the time but it seemed like a complicated enough piece of software to put this new technology through its paces. A quick Docker image pull and it was up and running. It seemed like magic. Shortly after that first Docker command I found my way to Docker Compose. At this point I knew how to run Redis and the docs had an example Python Flask application. How hard could it be to put the two together?

version: '3'
services:
  web:
    build: .
    ports:
      - "5000:5000"
  redis:
    image: “redis”

I understood immediately how Docker could help me shorten my developer “commute.” All the time I spent doing something else just to get to the work I wanted to be doing. It was awesome! 

As time passed, unfortunately my commute started to get longer again. Maybe I needed to collaborate with a colleague or get more resources then I had locally. Ok, I can run Docker in the cloud, let me see how Continue reading

What’s New in Ansible Tower 3.7

We’re excited to announce the release of Ansible Tower 3.7, part of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Ansible Tower is the scalable execution framework of the Ansible Automation Platform, providing a REST API and UI framework that allows users to scale automation across their enterprise and integrate it into their processes and tools. 

The focus of the Ansible Tower 3.7 release is on scalability of automation and improving the experience of our users. 

 

Automate more without bottlenecks

These days automation often needs to work at large scales - both in terms of infrastructure, but also in terms of how many jobs are executed in parallel. With Ansible Tower 3.7 we have put in extra effort to handle job dependencies in a way that helps ensure your jobs aren’t blocked. By allowing project updates and inventory updates to happen while other jobs are running, we’ve eliminated many of the bottlenecks in job processing. This enables jobs to proceed faster and without the need to wait for each other.

 

Expand access to the Ansible Automation Platform without worries

Scale is not only about the IT technology itself, but also about users. As our customers Continue reading

Automation Analytics – ROI Calculator and Notifications enhancements

The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is continually offering enhancements through its hosted services on cloud.redhat.com. At Red Hat Summit 2020 the new automation services catalog took the spotlight, which provides lifecycle management, provisioning, retirement and cataloging of automation resources to your business. However I wanted to also talk about the additional new  enhancements coming to Automation Analytics! Specifically I have two big things I want to talk about:

  • Automations Calculator - a ROI (return on investment) calculator using aggregate data
  • Notification improvements and a dedicated panel

If you are unfamiliar with Automation Analytics it is included as part of a Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscription and allows customers to analyze, aggregate, and report on data for their Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform deployments. Check out the previous blog I wrote about Getting Started with Automation Analytics, or if you have concerns around what type of data is being shared with Red Hat check out my blog Automation Analytics: Part 2 - Looking at Data Collection.

 

Automation Calculator

I am super excited about this new feature of Automation Analytics. A lot of customers I get to meet with are trying to figure out how to Continue reading

The latest in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform – Using automation to effectively change your day to day

Last year, we made some significant changes to Red Hat Ansible Automation, including what is offered with it and alongside it, to bring you the first version of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. That change allowed users to harness the power of Ansible automation under one roof, one subscription - one platform.

Today, we are pleased to announce updates to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, the latest version of our enterprise-grade solution for building and operating automation at scale. The next time you log in to cloud.redhat.com, you can start utilizing the powerful new tools at your disposal. We’ve put in place the automation services catalog, a venue for developers and business users to manage, provision and retire resources. Customers told us this was a necessity and we agreed, with the automation services catalog now giving you a much deeper insight into how automation is improving efficiencies.  It also gives you visibility into redundant processes that may be costing you time and resources that you may want to sunset. Accentuate what is working and eliminate what is not. More information about automation services catalog can be found here.

Another enhancement we rolled out with the Continue reading

Creating the best Linux Development experience on Windows & WSL 2

We are really excited to have had Docker Desktop be featured in a breakout session titled “The Journey to One .NET” at MSFT Build by @Scott Hanselman  with WSL 2. Earlier in the his  keynote, we learned about the great new enhancements for GPU support for WSL 2 and we want to hear from our community about your interest in adding this functionality to Docker Desktop. If you are eager to see GPU support come to Docker Desktop, please let us know by voting up our roadmap item and feel free to raise any new requests here as well.

With this announcement, the launch of the Windows 2004 release imminently and Docker Desktop v2.3.02 reaching WSL2 GA , we thought this would be a good time to reflect on how we got to where we are today with WSL 2.

April 2019

Casting our minds back to 2019 (a very different time!), we first discussed WSL 2 with Microsoft in April. We were excited to get started and wanted to find a way to get a build as soon as possible.

May 2019

It turned out the easiest way to do this was to collect a laptop Continue reading

Helping You Better Identify Vulnerabilities in Partnership with Snyk

We are really excited that Docker and Snyk are now partnering together to engineer container security scanning deeply into Docker Desktop and Docker Hub. Image vulnerability scanning has been one of your most requested items on our public roadmap.

Modern software uses a lot of third party open source libraries, indeed this is one of the things that has really raised productivity in coding, as we can reuse work to support new features in our products and to save time in writing implementations of APIs, protocols and algorithms. But this comes with the downside of working out whether there are security vulnerabilities in the code that you are using. You have all told us that scanning is one of the most important roadmap issues for you.

Recall a famously huge data breach from the use of an unpatched version of the Apache Struts library, due to CVE 2017-5638. The CVE was issued in March 2017, and according to the official statement, while the patch should have been applied within 48 hours, it was not, and during May 2017 the websites were hacked, with the attackers having access until late July. This is everyone’s nightmare now. How can we help Continue reading

Announcing the DockerCon LIVE Container Ecosystem Track

With just 2 weeks away from DockerCon LIVE going, LIVE, we are humbled by the tremendous response from almost 50,000 Docker developers and community members, from beginner to expert, who have registered for the event. 

DockerCon LIVE would not be complete without our ecosystem of partners who contribute to, and shape, the future of software development. They will be showcasing their products and solutions, and sharing the best practices they have culminated in working with the best developers and organizations across the globe. 

We are pleased to announce the agenda for our Container Ecosystem Track with sessions built just for devs. In addition to actionable takeaways, their sessions will feature interactive, live Q&A, and so much more. Check out the incredible lineup:

Access Logging Made Easy With Envoy and Fluent Bit – Carmen Puccio, Principal Solutions Architect | AWS

Docker Desktop + WSL 2 Integration Deep Dive – Simon Ferquel, Senior Software Developer | Docker | Microsoft

Experience Report: Running a Distributed System Across Kubernetes Clusters – Chris Seto, Software Engineer | Cockroach Labs

Securing Your Containerized Applications with NGINX – Kevin Jones, Senior Product Manager | NGINX

You Want To Kubernetes? You MUST Know Docker! – Angel Rivera, Continue reading

Ansible and IBM Community Grid

The world is currently a very different place than it was only a few months ago and we have come up with some ideas on how we can help our community in dealing with this new reality. The Ansible team has started a “Here to Help” webinar series where myself and other Ansible engineers are spending time with smaller groups of people to try and help them with technical challenges: https://www.ansible.com/here-to-help-webinar-series. The goal of these webinars is strictly to help! Regardless of if folks are only using open source technologies and not Red Hat products, we want to use this time to help them solve automation challenges, and help us brainstorm use-cases that can help others.

Another idea we recently implemented is integrating IBM’s World Community Grid into our workshops. World Community Grid enables anyone with a Linux, Windows or Mac computer (or an Android smartphone for some projects)  to donate their unused computing power to advance scientific research on topics related to health and sustainability. In fact, one of their projects is specifically going to help combat COVID-19. This blog post will cover what our workshops are and how we can use idle CPU time to help Continue reading

Automate App Monitoring with Ansible Platform & Dynatrace

The Dynatrace software intelligence platform automates the monitoring lifecycle.  The OneAgent automatically discovers and instruments your applications, processes, containers, and log files.  Smartscape topology provides real-time dependency mapping without any configuration.  The Davis AI continuously analyzes metrics, traces, logs, dependencies, and more to automatically detect problems and determine the root cause.  This automation helps enable organizations to monitor their IT portfolio more quickly and easily - without the headaches that can occur from manual configuration required by traditional monitoring tools.

Dynatrace is designed to work for any environment, but it’s generic.  How can we automate the personalization of Dynatrace and enable monitoring as a self-service (MaaSS) Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.  With the power of automation provided by Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and the Dynatrace API, we can automate the onboarding of applications into Dynatrace in a way that’s tailored for application stakeholders.

Dynatrace automation begins when the OneAgent is deployed on your hosts.  The rollout of the OneAgent can be automated on hosts that are managed by Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.  A playbook will download and execute the OneAgent installer on your Linux hosts (via SSH) and your Windows Continue reading

How Docker is Partnering with the Ecosystem to Help Dev Teams Build Apps

Back in March, Justin Graham, our VP of Product, wrote about how partnering with the ecosystem is a key part of Docker’s strategy to help developers and development teams get from source code to public cloud runtimes in the easiest, most efficient and cloud-agnostic way. This post will take a brief look at some of the ways that Docker’s approach to partnering has evolved to support this broader refocused company strategy. 

First, to deliver the best experience for developers Docker needs much more seamless integration with Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). Developers are increasingly looking to cloud runtimes for their applications as evidenced by the tremendous growth that the cloud container services have seen. We want to deliver the best developer experience moving forward from local desktop to cloud, and doing that includes tight integration with any and all clouds for cloud-native development. As a first step, we’ve already announced that we are working with AWS, Microsoft and others in the open source community to extend the Compose Specification to more flexibly support cloud-native platforms. You will see us continue to progress our activity in this direction. 

The second piece of Docker’s partnership strategy is offering best in class Continue reading

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