NFS is one of the easiest and most transparent ways to handle shared storage within an organization. Learn how to configure it on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
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LFX Mentorship for Me
A brief about my experience with the Linux Foundation Mentorship.
The post originally appeared on deprov477’s blog. The author, Anubhav Choudhary, particpated in the Linux Foundation’s Mentorship Program in 2022. The program is designed to help developers — many of whom are first-time open source contributors — with necessary skills and resources to learn, experiment, and contribute effectively to open source communities. By participating in a mentorship program, mentees have the opportunity to learn from experienced open source contributors as a segue to get internship and job opportunities upon graduation. If you are interested, we invite you to learn more and apply today here.
Hi everyone, I recently completed my LFX Mentorship project. I was a mentee for the LFXM summer term of 2022 at Pixie, a CNCF sandbox project donated by The New Relic.
In this blog, I will be sharing my experience of mentorship. (TLDR; just awesome, one-of-a-kind experience drop me a message. I’d be more than happy to help.
What is LFX Mentorship?
Let’s start this by knowing about The Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit organization, that standardizes the development of the Linux kernel and also promotes open source projects such as Kubernetes, GraphQL, Hyperledger, RISC-V, Xen project, etc.
The Linux Foundation Mentorship is a program run by LF, which helps developers with the necessary skills and resources to learn and contribute to open source projects, through 3 or 6 months of internship. During this period, the mentee is guided through the development workflow and methodologies used by open source organizations, through a project.
Selection procedure
I’ve been involved in open source for some time and have been applying for the mentorship, but got rejected every time.
This time also I was going through the projects and found a particularly interesting project. It was about parsing a protocol. This took my eye as at that time I was learning networking and experimenting a lot with communications. So naturally, I got interested. After reading the project details, I went to the project’s slack channel to find a mentor. Omid, one of Pixie’s founding engineers, was kind enough to reply to my message and asked for a quick call.
I talked to him and told him about my interest and how I made a preliminary Mongo wire protocol parser using Node.js as preparation. He seemed satisfied with this and told me about further steps and time commitment.
Other formalities included submitting a cover letter, and my resume.
A few days later got this:
Finally, after applying so many times, got selected !!!
Month 1
Started, and was introduced to my mentor Yaxiong Zhao, another founding engineer at Pixie. He told me about what we were going to do in the next 3 months. He demoed me the Pixie UI and explained to me the working of it, and how pixie catches packets (hint: eBPF). And then sent me the AMQP spec sheet, and how it needs to be implemented using C++.
Yes, the protocol changed from Mongo to AMQP, and the language from Node.js to C++. But I guess a very important survival quality of industry is being flexible.
So, in the first month, I got a theoretical knowledge about AMQP wire spec and experimented with it by deploying a local RabbitMQ server, and monitoring packets using Wireshark. My mentor also tried helping me build Pixie on my local machine, but we failed, even after switching distros. At last, we were able to set up my dev environment inside a container.
…quite a month
Month 2
In the first half of this month, I continued my research on AMQP (apparently implementing a protocol required a lot of extensive reading) and found analogies of it with protocols I was already familiar with, and kept on manually experimenting with packet translation.
3rd week of the month, It was finally time for me to start writing some code. Okay, so this was the difficult part. Having very limited knowledge of C++, continued forward. But my mentor was being an angel at this point, very patiently explaining to me, and pointing me in the right direction, making me understand every lex required. I started with implementing a data structure for storing and creating relations between packets. After some effort, finally got my PR merged.
Month 3
Continuing my code work, I started building a parser code. Yaxiong was very patient and helpful during this time, sending me blogs, and guides and explaining to me every little doubt I had. Thanks to him I was able to finally submit my preliminary code for parsing the code.
And a final thing for this was to write tests. Learned google’s C++ testing library. Wrote code, pushed.
Concluding the program
Like every good thing, this also came to an end. 12 weeks just fly by — faster than you can think — The program opened up a new world of open source and got me introduced to a lot of professional tools and etiquette. I appreciate the time and efforts my mentor put into this program.
Completing this internship was a dream come true, dodging tonnes of problems: internet, college, placement preparation, exams, everything. At many points in the internship, I was very certain I won’t be able to complete the project. but:
At some point, everything’s gonna go south on you… everything’s going to go south and you’re going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.
— Tail ender, The Martian.
The post LFX Mentorship for Me appeared first on Linux Foundation.
How to interrupt the Linux boot process
Interrupting the boot process is useful for troubleshooting and maintenance, but make sure you enable full disk encryption first.
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Juju and Charmed Operators Accelerating FINOS Open Source Projects Adoption
The article by Srikrishna ‘Kris’ Sharma with Canonical originally appeared in the FINOS Project’s Community Blog. It is another example of enterprises open sourcing their code so that they can “collectively solve common problems so they can separately innovate and differentiate on top of the common baseline.” Read more about Why Do Enterprises Use and Contribute to Open Source Software.
Orchestrating Legend with Juju
Goldman Sachs open sourced the code and contributed its internally developed Legend data management platform into FINOS in October 2020. Legend provides an end-to-end data platform experience covering the full data lifecycle. It encompasses a suite of data management and governance components known as the Legend Platform. Legend enables breaking down silos and building a critical bridge over the historical divide between business and engineering, allowing companies to build data-driven applications and insightful business intelligence dashboards.
Accelerate FINOS Open Source Project Adoption
Ease and speed of deployment enables innovation and lowers the barrier of entry to open source consumption and contribution. Engineering experience is about leveraging software ops automation to demonstrate impact of an open source project to the community. An awesome engineering experience is more often required to enable wider adoption and contribution to an open source project.
Over the last few months, Canonical has been working closely with FINOS and its community members to offer a consistent way to deploy and manage enterprise applications using Juju and Charmed Operators with a focus on Day 2 operations. The idea is to provide a software ops automation framework and toolkit that enables the DevOps teams at financial institutions to realise the benefits of rapid deployment/ testing and application management using a platform that is 100% open source, vendor-agnostic and hybrid-multi-cloud ready.
What is Juju and Charmed Operator?
Charmed Operator:
A charmed operator (also known, more simply, as a “charm”) encapsulates a single application and all the code and know-how it takes to operate it, such as how to combine and work with other related applications or how to upgrade it. Charms are programmed to understand a single application, its operations, and its potential to integrate with other applications. A charm defines and enables the channels by which applications connect. Hundreds of charms are available at charmhub.io.
Juju Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) is a hybrid-cloud application management and orchestration system for installation and day 2 operations. It helps deploy, configure, scale, integrate, maintain, and manage Kubernetes native, container-native and VM-native applications—and the relations between them.
Juju allows anyone to deploy and operate charmed operators (charms) in any cloud–including Kubernetes, VMs and Metal. Charms encapsulate the application plus deployment and operations knowledge into one single reusable artefact. Juju manages the lifecycle of applications and infrastructure stacks from cloud to the edge. Juju is cloud-vendor agnostic and hybrid-multi-cloud by nature: it can manage the lifecycle of applications in public clouds, private clouds, or on bare metal. Once bootstrapped, Juju will offer the same deployment and operations experience regardless of the cloud vendor.
The Legend Charm Bundle
In the spirit of providing an enterprise-grade automated deployment and maintenance experience to FINOS members, Canonical created a charmed bundle for Legend and contributed it to FINOS.
The Legend Charm Bundle provides a simple, efficient and enterprise-ready way to deploy and orchestrate a Legend instance in various environments across the CI/CD pipeline, from developer’s workstation to production environment. The bundle includes several Charmed Operators, one for each Legend component.
Why a Legend Charm Bundle?
A simple way to evaluate Legend
One can spin up a Legend environment from scratch using one single command juju deploy finos-legend-bundle
An intuitive approach (for banks and other financial institutions) to spin up production environments
Provides orchestration capabilities, not only deployment scripting
Easily plugs into Legend release lifecycle and simplifies Legend FINOS instance maintenance
The Legend charm documentation resides on finos/legend-integration-juju github repository and here is the link to related repositories.multiple components.
Detailed instructions are available for local and cloud installations if you would like to spin up your own Legend instance within a few mins and start using Legend either locally or on AWS EKS.
The post Juju and Charmed Operators Accelerating FINOS Open Source Projects Adoption appeared first on Linux Foundation.
How we use eBPF to observe OpenShift network metrics
The eBPF Agent is a portable network-flow exporter designed to be ubiquitous and optimized for Kubernetes observability use cases.
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Untold Stories of Open Source: Priyanka Sharma
In open source communities, we meet people every day. We probably know their current role and responsibilities, but we don’t always have perspective on the history, education, and career path that made them who they are. These are some of the untold stories of open source.
At the Linux Foundation, we’re a couple of weeks away from launching a new podcast series, The Untold Stories of Open Source. For our blog readers, you’re getting a sneak peek into a few of the stories that will kick off our series. Today, we’ll share perspectives from episode 1, Priyanka Sharma.
After Graduating
Priyanka Sharma is an evangelist for the power of community in open source. Okay, she is much more than that, and we will get to that in a bit, but her passion and what drives all of her other successes in open source is the power of an inclusive, supportive community.
Priyanka didn’t begin in open source. After graduating from Stanford University in 2009 with a degree in computer science, she started her career at Google in the online partnership group, where she was a technical consultant onboarding new Doubleclick clients and acted as an interim project manager for internal insights tools. Following Google, she held roles at Outright and GoDaddy, including integrating the Outright product into the GoDaddy sales catalog. However, she was bitten by the build-a-business bug years earlier. In 2014, she gathered up some ideas and funding, experimenting with consumer products, but nothing was sticking.
A Road to TechCrunch Disrupt
She realized that her business partner had built a time-tracking app for himself that was geared towards software developers. It was plugin based, so you could put it into your IDE and have time tracking at your fingertips. After all, who wants to track time, so the easier you make it, the better.
All of the plugins were open source – introducing her to the world that she was about to live in. She noticed how people were drawn to the plugins, customizing them to work better for what they needed. She thought, “Maybe this is what we should focus on.” So, with a path she couldn’t have seen coming, she ended up getting into developer tools. The plugins were eventually used by 100,000 developers, featured by TechCruch Disrupt, and chosen by Y-Combinator.
Setting Out on Her Own
But, as she says, “All that glitters isn’t gold.” There were challenges every day as with any startup, from fundraising to public visibility. Getting into Y-Combinator was a pivotal moment, forcing the team to come to terms with what it would take to work together to make a real commitment to the project together, as a team.
Priyanka thought back to that time, “I think you can overcome anything when you are part of a team when you jive with each other, where everyone is aligned on the final outcome. When that is not the case, it is very tricky because everyone is going towards different goals. That is the meta issue that led us to go our different ways.”
Now out on her own, she realized that there were not many people who understood marketing developer tools or a go-to-market strategy for developer tools. So, she began working with Heavybit, an accelerator and incubator for developer products. “They really took me in and gave me opportunities to help their portfolio companies.” Her work helped Rainforest QA, Lightstep, LaunchDarkly, and Postman API.
Reflecting on Ben’s Approach
She ended up joining the Lightstep team because she saw not only the value of their reputation, but was drawn to the top-notch team and what they could teach her. Part of the draw was Dapper, a tool built at Google to provide developers with a distributed tracing system exploring the behavior of complex distributed systems. Dapper sparked many tools that weren’t anticipated by its initial developers. Ben Sigelman, co-creator of Dapper and the OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry projects, now part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). “Ben’s approach was very much as an educator. There are lots of experts out there, but if they aren’t interested in teaching, I don’t get any value in it.”
As the second hire at Lightstep, she had a variety of roles, including developer relations, marketing, documentation, and more.
The initial focus of the company was on OpenTracing. They initially were an independent open source project, but they eventually decided to join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to give them more firepower than “us by ourselves.”
Now, between her startup and Lightstep, she heard more and more about open source. She was drawn to the value placed on creation and collaboration.
Evolving to Cloud Native
Priyanka attributes the growth of cloud native to the fact that the core group welcomed everyone. You can see that in person at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, the largest open source events in the world. She recalls how nervous she was going to her first Kube Con, feeling out of her element, but as soon as she walked through the doors, everyone was so welcoming and inclusive.
Dan Kohn built CNCF into one of the most successful open source foundations in the world in large part because it was built on being an open and welcoming community. Priyanka recalls, “Dan baked DEI into everything at CNCF from day one. . . He set the example and put it into the structure.”
Priyanka felt welcomed into the community and began asking for opportunities to participate. Sometimes the answer was yes, sometimes it was no thank you. But she still felt she had the support of the community. She had a sense of belonging for the first time in her career.
In 2018, she joined GitLab as director of technical evangelism, where she formed the technical thought leadership team. She was also in charge of cloud native alliances. At the urging of her boss at GitLab, she put her name forward to be elected to the CNCF Board of Directors.
While on the CNCF Board, she was energized by several other women on the Board. She said they set the bar high with a focus on the project’s good at all times.
Fast forward. Now, Priyanka is the general manager of the CNCF, leading one of open source’s largest and most effective foundations.
Seeking More Insight
You can listen to the full episode with her story on the Untold Stories of Open Source podcast and hear about the power of the CNCF community and its impact.
The Untold Stories of Open Source is a new podcast from the Linux Foundation to share the stories behind those in open source. Take time to listen to all of the episodes and let us know what you think (or if you have suggestions of stories to be told). Look for the formal launch at Open Source Summit North America and OpenSSF Day on June 20, 2022.
There are thousands of incredible open source stories to share and we’re looking forward to bringing more of them your way. If you like what you hear, we encourage you to add the series to your playlist.
For those seeking even more open source stories from across the Linux Foundation and the communities we serve, you might start with some of the other storytelling pioneers including: Open Source Stories, , FinOpsPod, I am a Mainframer, and The Changelog. As we grow deeper roots in the podcasting arena, we’ll introduce more news about a network of open source podcasts.
Have even more time? Feedspot recently covered an additional 40 Open Source Podcasts worth listening to on your morning walk or commute home from the office.
The post Untold Stories of Open Source: Priyanka Sharma appeared first on Linux Foundation.
A Guide to Enterprise Open Source: Why Your Organization Needs It Now
There are some universal truths about open source software (OSS). It has revolutionized our world and become the foundation of our digital society, the backbone of our digital economy, and the basis of our digital existence. Every household and enterprise brand name in technology is built upon it, whether that name is Alexa or Android, Azure, or AWS.
Open source software has played a significant part in everything from the internet and mobile apps we use every day to operating systems and programming languages used to construct the future. Even the systems we traditionally think of as being closed, such as Microsoft Windows and Apple’s Mac and iPhone, are developed using open source software.
Just as a powerful current drives the arteries of a river, open source software is the force that propels our digital economy and allows for scientific and technological advancements that benefit our lives.
But only a few decades ago, few people had even heard of open source software, and it was limited to a small group of enthusiastic devotees. Yet the concept of free and open source software (FOSS) has been around a long time, going back to the early days of the user communities for IBM mainframes and academic institutions. FOSS is software that anyone can use, study, modify, and distribute without restriction. The term “open source” was coined to describe this type of software, and the concept was formalized with the launch of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in 1998.
Organizations involved in building products or services involving software, regardless of their specific industry or sector, are likely to adopt OSS and contribute to open source projects deemed critical to their products and services. Organizations are creating open source program offices (OSPOs) to manage their open source activities, from adopting OSS and compliance with applicable licenses to participating in open standards and foundations.
Many new industries and thousands of businesses have joined the open source revolution. Those organizations that chose a deliberate OSS strategy, incorporating best practices, methods, and engineering processes, emerged as leaders in their industries or verticals for open source initiatives.
And yet, many organizations have not embraced open source at all. Some see it as a risky undertaking, lacking a strategy to move forward, needing pathways to see the value proposition of free and open source software, and requiring migration from a risk point of view to a value point of view. In addition to challenges with open source consumption, many organizations prohibit their employees from open source contributions either on their behalf or personally in the employee’s spare time.
To help guide organizations through their own open source journeys, Ibrahim Haddad, Ph.D., Executive Director of LF AI & Data, has written a report that offers a practical and systematic approach to establishing an OSS strategy, which includes developing an implementation plan and accelerating an organization’s open source efforts.
The past two decades have been critical for open source software in enterprise engagement and adoption. The challenge for organizations is their transition from ad hoc and incidental adoption to open source value delivered back to the business using a strategic and planned methodology. This report delivers on the promise of helping enterprises establish an open source strategy, develop and execute an implementation plan, and accelerate their open source efforts to support their business goals.
Ibrahim Haddad, Ph.D.
This research is a collection of learnings and best practices that Dr. Haddad has developed, collaborating with the LF AI & Data community members who have pursued their own open source journeys for years.
Effective organizations have guided their open source usage through strategy, honed over time with communities such as LF AI & Data and the TODO Group to guide their ongoing use of OSS and their engagement with the open source ecosystem.
This report helps to address the fears of transitioning to open source and explore the many opportunities it offers by covering the following topics:
The business case for open source softwareHow to develop an open source strategyCreating an open source program officeImplementing an open source strategyMeasuring success with open sourceBest practices for organizational involvement in open source projects
The post A Guide to Enterprise Open Source: Why Your Organization Needs It Now appeared first on Linux Foundation.
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Why Do Enterprises Use and Contribute to Open Source Software
When people find out I work at the Linux Foundation they invariably ask what we do? Sometimes it is couched around the question, As in the Linux operating system? I explain open source software and try to capture the worldwide impact into 20 seconds before I lose their attention. If they happen to stick around for more, we often dig into the question, Why would enterprises want to participate in open source software projects or use open source software? The reality is – they do, whether they know it or not. And the reality is thousands of companies donate their code to open source projects and invest time and resources helping to further develop and improve open source software.
How extensively used is open source software
To quote from our recently released report, A Guide to Enterprise Open Source, “Open source software (OSS) has transformed our world and become the backbone of our digital economy and the foundation of our digital world. From the Internet and the mobile apps we use daily to the operating systems and programming languages we use to build the future, OSS has played a vital role. It is the lifeblood of the technology industry. Today, OSS powers the digital economy and enables scientific and technological breakthroughs that improve our lives. It’s in our phones, our cars, our airplanes, our homes, our businesses, and our governments. But just over two decades ago, few people had ever heard of OSS, and its use was limited to a small group of dedicated enthusiasts.”
Open source software (OSS) has transformed our world and become the backbone of our digital economy and the foundation of our digital world.
But what does this look like practically:
In vertical software stacks across industries, open source penetration ranges from 20 to 85 percent of the overall software used
Linux fuels 90%+ of web servers and Internet-connected devices
The Android mobile operating system is built on the Linux kernel
Immensely popular libraries and tools to build web applications, such as: AMP, Appium, Dojo, jQuery, Marko, Node.js and so many more are open source
The world’s top 100 supercomputers run Linux
100% of mainframe customers use Linux
The major cloud-service providers – AWS, Google, and Microsoft – all utilize open-source software to run their services and host open-source solutions delivered through the cloud
Why do companies want to participate in open source software projects
Companies primarily participate in open source software projects in three ways:
They donate software they created to the open source community
They provide direct funding and/or allocate software developers and other staff to contribute to open source software projects
The question often asked is, why wouldn’t they want to keep all of their software proprietary or only task their employees to work on their proprietary software?
The 30,000-foot answer is that it is about organizations coming together to collectively solve common problems so they can separately innovate and differentiate on top of the common baseline. They see that they are better off pooling resources to make the baseline better. Sometimes it is called “coopetition.” It generally means that while companies may be in competition with each other in certain areas, they can still cooperate on others.
It is about organizations coming together to collectively solve common problems so they can separately innovate and differentiate
Some old-school examples of this principle:
Railroads agreed on a common track size and build so they can all utilize the same lines and equipment was interchangeable
Before digital cameras, companies innovated and differentiated on film and cameras, but they all agreed on the spacing for the sprockets to advance the film
The entertainment industry united around the VHS and Blu-Ray formats over their rivals
Now, we see companies, organizations, and individuals coming together to solve problems while simultaneously improving their businesses and products:
Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority with the goal of dramatically increasing the use of secure web protocols by making it much easier and less expensive to setup. They are serving 225+ million websites, issuing ~1.5 million certificates each day on average.
The Academy Software Foundation creates value in the film industry through collectively engineering software that powers much of the entertainment, gaming, and media industry productions and open standards needed for growth.
The Hyperledger Foundation hosts enterprise-grade blockchain software projects, notably using significantly fewer energy resources than other popular solutions.
LF Energy is making the electric grid more modular, interoperable, and scalable to help increase the use of renewable energy sources
Dronecode is enabling the development of drone software so companies can use their resources to innovate further
OpenSSF is the top technology companies coming together to strengthen the security and resiliency of open source software
Kubernetes was donated by Google and is the go-to solution for managing cloud-based software
These are just a small sampling of the open source software projects that enterprises are participating in. You can explore all of the ones hosted at the Linux Foundation here.
How can companies effectively use and participate in open source software projects?
Enterprises looking to better utilize and participate in open source projects can look to the Linux Foundation’s resources to help. Much of what organizations need to know is provided in the just-published report, A Guide to Enterprise Open Source. The report is packed with information and insights from open source leaders at top companies with decades of combined experience. It includes chapters on these topics:
Leveraging Open Source Software
Preparing the Enterprise for Open Source
Developing an Open Source Strategy
Setting Up Your Infrastructure for Implementation
Setting Up Your Talent for Success
Challenges
Additionally, the Linux Foundation offers many open source training courses, events throughout the year, the LFX Platform, and hosts projects that help organizations manage open source utilization and participation, such as:
The TODO Group provides resources to setup and run an open source program office, including their extensive guides
The Openchain Project maintains an international standard for sharing what software package licenses are included in a larger package, including information on the various licensing requirements so enterprises can ensure they are complying with all of the legal requirements
The FinOps Foundation is fostering an, “evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology, and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.”
The Software Data Package Exchange (SPDX) is an open standard for communication software bill of materials (SBOMs) so it is clear to every user which pieces of software are included in the overall package.
Again, this is just a snippet of the projects at the Linux Foundation that are working to help organizations adapt, utilize, contribute, and donate open source projects.
The bottom line: Enterprises are increasingly turning to open source software projects to solve common problems and innovate beyond the baseline, and the Linux Foundation is here to help.
The post Why Do Enterprises Use and Contribute to Open Source Software appeared first on Linux Foundation.