A good, solid Linux kernel, and more industry trends

A weekly look at open source community and industry trends.
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As part of my role as a principal communication strategist at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends. Here are some of my and their favorite articles from that update.

Linux 5.9: Not a game-changer, but a good, solid Linux kernel

So, if you're feeling brave, and you know how to compile your own Linux kernel, you can download all 115.5 MBs of the compressed Linux kernel 5.9 archive from kernel.org. Most of you, though, can afford to wait for it to appear in Linux distributions. That means, if you use a mainstream Linux distribution such as Fedora or Ubuntu, you can expect to run in their first 2021 releases. 

The impact: Linux kernel development is a never-ending series of itches getting scratched. Sometimes those are big, widely felt itches, sometimes they're more niche or targetted ones, but the progress and the process never ceases to amaze me.

Q&A with creator of Envoy and Lyft engineer Matt Klein

I don’t think microservices and SOA are any different in practice. Cynically, “microservice” is a term created by consultants and vendors to help sell new offerings. If we assume that microservices and SOA are the same, we come back to the first question above, which is how to make their deployment less painful. This boils down to trying to make the network transparent to application developers. In this respect, Envoy acts as a “communications bus” that links together various services both at the edge and between the services.

The impact: A less cynical take might be that microservices is this generation of developer's work on an age-old problem.

Ansible's evolving DevOps use

Ansible’s popularity in the DevOps world has been driven by the tool’s ability to reduce the time needed to deploy infrastructure and applications. By automating configuration management, orchestration and cloud provisioning, DevOps staff are freed up to do more business-related strategic work.

The impact: A developer, an architect, and a sysadmin sit down to debug an app in production... That's it; that's the joke.

CNCF Cloud Native Survey China 2019

At CNCF, we regularly survey our community to better understand the adoption of open source and cloud native technologies. For the third time, we conducted the Cloud Native Survey China in Mandarin to gain deeper insights into the pace of cloud native adoption in China, and how that’s empowering developers and transforming development in this large and growing community. This report builds on the first two China reports, published in March 2018 and November 2018.

The impact: Doing these native language surveys is so important in getting a clear picture of open source adoption and development and clearly demonstrates the value of having a well-resourced foundation on your side.

I hope you enjoyed this list and come back next week for more open source community, market, and industry trends.

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Tim Hildred stands with arms crossed.
I'm Tim. I like to write about how technology affects people, and vice versa. I’m constantly engaging with the news, tech, and culture with an eye to building the best possible sci-fi future.

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