As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.
A look at the most exciting features in OpenStack Train
But given all the technology goodies (you can see the release highlights here) that the Train release has to offer, you may be curious about the features that we at Red Hat believe are among the top capabilities that will benefit our telecommunications and enterprise customers and their uses cases. Here's an overview of the features we are most excited about this release.
The impact: OpenStack to me is like Shia LaBeouf: it reached peak hype a couple of years ago and then continued turning out good work. The Train release looks like yet another pretty incredible drop of innovation.
Building Kubernetes Operators in an Ansible-native way
Operators simplify management of complex applications on Kubernetes. They are usually written in Go and require expertise with the internals of Kubernetes. But, there’s an alternative to that with a lower barrier to entry. Ansible is a first-class citizen in the Operator SDK. Using Ansible frees up application engineers, maximizes time to automate and orchestrate your applications, and doing it across new & existing platforms with one simple language. Here we see how.
The impact: This is like finding out you can make pretty good ice cream with a blender and frozen bananas: Ansible (which is generally thought of as being pretty simple to pick up) lets you do some pretty impressive Operator magic way easier than you thought you could.
Kubernetes networking: Behind the scenes
While there are very good resources around this topic (links here), I couldn’t find a single example that connects all of the dots with commands outputs that network engineers love and hate, showing what is actually happening behind the scenes. So, I decided to curate this information from a number of different sources to hopefully help you better understand how things are tied together.
The impact: An accessible, well-written take on a complicated topic (with pictures). Guaranteed to make Kube networking 10% less confusing.
Securing the container supply chain
With the emergence of containers, Software as a Service and Functions as a Service, the focus in on consuming existing services, functions and container images in the race to provide new value. Scott McCarty, Principal Product Manager, Containers at Red Hat, says that focus has both advantages and disadvantages. “It allows us to focus our energy on writing new application code that is specific to our needs, while shifting the concern for the underlying infrastructure to someone else,” says McCarty. “Containers are in a sweet spot providing enough control, but offloading a lot of tedious infrastructure work.” But containers can also create disadvantages related to security.
The impact: I sit amongst a group of ~10 security people, and can safely say that it takes a certain disposition to want to think about software security all day. When you stare into the abyss for long enough, it stares back into you. If you are a software developer who is not so disposed, please take Scott's advice and make sure your suppliers are.
Fedora at 15: Why Matthew Miller sees a bright future for the Linux distribution
In a wide-ranging interview with TechRepublic, Fedora project leader Matthew Miller discussed lessons learned from the past, popular adoption and competing standards for software containers, potential changes coming to Fedora, as well as hot-button topics, including systemd.
The impact: What I like about the Fedora project is it's clarity; the project knows what it stands for. People like Matt are why.
I hope you enjoyed this list of what stood out to me from last week and come back next Monday for more open source community, market, and industry trends.
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