Servers: SUSE, Boltron, Virtual Machines, Containers, and 'Cloud' Computing

a Linux kernel that also offers applications and tools to manage and support a real-time environment. The kernel uses different scheduler queues and makes a distinction between normal processes and real-time processes. If there is a shortage of available resources, the Linux kernel will service the real-time resources first.

Last summer at Flock Langdon White, Ralph Bean and couple folks around them announced work on new release tools and a project called Modularity. The goal was simple but aspirational - for couple years we've talked about rings proposal, splitting applications from the core of the OS, having alternatives available and easily installable for certain components and even though for all of these usecases you could always find a way how to achieve them they weren't really supported by the build infrastructure and software management tools. Once you would update your system or install something else it would usually break or do something unexpected. Modularity goal was to come up with a straightforward way how to deliver a bulk of content thru our build pipeline, offer multiple versions of components and different installation profiles. At the same time this new approach to delivering content would not break existing workflows and will be super easy for package maintainers.

Fedora developers have announced the first preview release of Boltron, their Modular Server effort. Fedora Modular Server is aiming to separate the lifecycle of applications from each other and the operating system itself. This is part of Fedora's broader modularity efforts while this Boltron preview today is about the server components.

Serverless computing is becoming yet another way for cloud service providers to parse out access to enterprises looking to take advantage of virtualized services. Think containers, only slightly different.

Serverless computing architectures are designed to reduce the amount of overhead associated with offering services in the cloud. This includes the ability for a cloud provider to dynamically manage server resources.

As we gear up to release our next e-book on the Kubernetes open source container orchestration engine (check with us in about a month), we have been reviewing how well K8s has been making its way into the enterprise — the true determinant of whether the software becomes an essential component of “the new stack,” so to speak.

Reviewing our notes from Kubecon 2017, held earlier this year in Berlin, we found some powerful testimonies from both Salesforce and Comcast. Salesforce is using it in a pilot program to power three cloud-native services, with plans to be running 20 services by the end of the year. When the company’s engineers were considering different orchestration options, they immediately appreciated the smarts behind the Kubernetes. After all, many had come from other jobs managing large at-scale workloads. “We were, frankly, blown away. The development velocity was incredible, even back then,” Salesforce Principal Architect Steve Sandke said of the developers behind Kubernetes. “These people clearly knew what they were doing.”

Open source software (OSS) and cloud computing are distinctly different concepts that have independently grown in use, both in the public and private sectors, but have each faced adoption challenges by federal agencies. Both OSS and cloud computing individually offer potential benefits for federal agencies to improve their efficiency, agility, and innovation, by enabling them to be more responsive to new or changing requirements in their missions and business operations. OSS improves the way the federal government develops and also distributes software and provides an opportunity to reduce costs through the reuse of existing source code, whereas cloud computing improves the utilization of resources and enables a faster service delivery.