Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Adds Linkerd, gRPC, and CoreDNS to Growing Portfolio
Since the beginning of 2017 the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has added three new projects to their portfolio for hosting and stewardship, including: linkerd, a transparent proxy ‘service mesh’ that provides service discovery, failure handling and visibility; gRPC, a language agnostic high performance RPC framework; and CoreDNS, a fast and configurable cloud native DNS server.
Is it Possible to Test Programmable Infrastructure? Matt Long at QCon London Made the Case for "Yes"
At QCon London, Matt Long, QA Consultant at OpenCredo presented “Testing Programmable Infrastructure with Ruby”. Key takeaways included: it is possible to test programmable infrastructure at the unit, integration, and acceptance level; Ruby provides the power of a full programming language for integration and acceptance tests, and is often understood by both testers and sysadmins;
HashiCorp Release Terraform 0.8, Including an Interactive Console, and Vault and Nomad Providers
HashiCorp has released v0.8 of Terraform, an open source tool that enables the building, combining and launching of programmable infrastructure providers such as Amazon Web Services, VMware vSphere, and UltraDNS. Major new functionality includes an interactive console, conditional values, and HashiCorp Vault and Nomad providers.
Using Cloud Sandboxes to “Shift Left” Testing within Production-Like Environments
InfoQ recently sat down with Joan Wrabetz, CTO at Quali, and discussed the role ‘cloud sandboxes’ can take within the modern software development lifecycle (SDLC). Cloud sandboxes allow a user to create and publish replicas of infrastructure and application configurations for on-demand usage. The primary use cases for cloud sandboxes include development and quality assurance testing.
Design for Continuous Evolution: Immutable Model Is Key for Robustness
At QCon New York, Eric Brewer described how advancing from continuous delivery to fast and stable continuous evolution requires a discrete construction step to define an immutable model of the system. Brewer’s compute infrastructure design team uses Helm to construct and safely validate new deployment models, prior to attempting real deployment, although the concepts are technology agnostic.
Building Microservice Infrastructure with Cisco's Mantl 1.0
At Cisco Live 2016, held in Berlin, the latest version of Cisco’s open source microservice platform, Mantl, was released. New features include multi-data center configuration via tooling like Project Calico, simplified version control of a developer's entire infrastructure configuration, and blue/green testing as part of a service upgrade process.
Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces New Members and Begins Accepting Technical Contributions
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and organisation created with the purpose of advancing the development of ‘cloud native’ applications and services, has announced the joining of new members, the creation of a formal open governance structure, and new details about the associated technology stack.
Migrating Traditional Workloads to the Cloud: Q&A with Kris Bliesner
InfoQ recently sat down with Kris Bliesner, founder and CTO of 2nd Watch, who has developed deep experience in migrating workloads from traditional IT estates to the cloud. Bliesner identified common challenges with cloud workload migration, discussed recommended processes, and offered his thoughts on the topics of security, compliance, DevOps and automation.
HashiCorp Release Nomad Scheduler and Otto Application Delivery Tool
At the inaugural HashiConf conference, held in Portland, USA, HashiCorp announced the release of a new distributed scheduler platform named ‘Nomad’ that is capable of scheduling containers, VMs and standalone applications; and a new application delivery tool named ‘Otto’ that builds upon the existing Vagrant tool by enabling the management of remote application deployments.
Puppet Enterprise 2015.2: An Interview With Michael Olson
Puppet Labs’ latest version of Puppet Enterprise - version 2015.2 - includes new features like node graph visualization, inventory filtering, and a VMware vSphere module. It provides users with major enhancements of the Puppet Language and an updated web UI. InfoQ spoke with Michael Olson, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Puppet Labs .
New Linux-Only Mainframes Support Chef
IBM has announced LinuxONE, a Linux-only hardware portfolio which runs SUSE, Red Hat or Ubuntu distributions and adds support for different open-source tools such as Docker and Chef. This offering is targeted to both large enterprises and mid-size businesses.
HashiCorp Publicly Release Atlas, a Version Control System for Infrastructure
HashiCorp have publicly released Atlas, a commercial platform that unites their open source tools for development and operations to create a version control system for infrastructure management. Atlas integrates HashiCorp’s Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, and Consul tooling, with the primary goal of promoting ‘automation, audit and collaboration on infrastructure changes’ across the modern datacenter.
Lessons on Building Continuous Delivery for Infrastructure
Lindsay Holmwood, Flapjack's creator, offers advice to enable fast, with quality, feedback loops and to support small, discrete changes. Holmwood asserts that to get quality feedback there are five main issues to think about: the CAP theorem; SLA definition; SLA validation; interfaces between services; data and infrastructure immutability.
CoreOS App Container Spec Gains Support from Google, Apcera and Red Hat
At the inaugural CoreOS Fest in San Francisco, the CoreOS team announced that the App Container specification (appc) has recently gained support from Google, Apcera, Red Hat and VMware. Google have added support for CoreOS’s appc implementation ‘rkt’ into Kubernetes, and Apcera have created a new implementation of appc, named ‘Kurma’.
Dave Farley on the Rationale for Continuous Delivery
At QCon London 2015, Dave Farley proposed that although the state of software development has been suboptimal in the past, studies are revealing that the implementation of continuous delivery leads to considerable improvement. Farley stated that continuous delivery changes the economies of software development, and provides more rapid business idea validation and reduced defect rates.
