today's leftovers

This is the 90th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news.

SUSE, a global leader in innovative, reliable and enterprise-grade open source solutions, and Udacity, the global online learning platform, have introduced the Cloud Native Application Architecture Nanodegree program in an effort to combat the technical skills gap affecting current students and recent higher education graduates.

Once upon a time, automating tasks on Linux servers was as simple as crafting a few Bash scripts and cron jobs. For some tasks, that process still works fine. You could create a simple backup script and run it with cron every night. Done and done. But with today’s increasingly challenging software stacks, the old Bash script approach won’t cut it. Instead, you need a real automation tool that can handle increasingly complex tasks and work with multiple platforms, clusters, containers, and more.

I joined the Apache CloudStack community in 2012 and became a committer in 2013, eventually becoming a PMC (Project Management Committee) member in 2017. My journey to becoming a PMC was both physical and literal, and included several forks in the road. The forks presented themselves in all aspects of my journey – although the literal forks came later, mainly because my journey began in China.

The OpenStack cloud-infrastructure project has made its 23rd release, Wallaby. "The Wallaby release strengthens open infrastructure for cloud native applications with enhanced security and integration with other open source technologies. More than 17,000 code changes authored by over 800 contributors from 140 different organizations and 45 countries were merged into the release. In addition to delivering a wide range of improvements to the stable and reliable OpenStack core and its highly flexible project integration capabilities,

There are thousands of Linux distribution variants, some of them incredibly obscure and niche-y, while others are enterprise-ready. Some are desktop only, while others are server-only.

if you’re new to the game, you might not know where to start.

ThisTechRepublic Premium PDF download offers a helping hand so that you might have a better idea of which Linux server distribution is best suited for your needs, especially if your business is in the market for a new server operating system. You cannot go wrong with any one of these five.

So, ultimately, a lot of it comes down to tech-savviness and patience. If you fancy yourself brave and looking to become a little savvier, it can never hurt to install Linux on an old machine to practice and play with. It is a fantastic way to build up your skills and understanding of the complexities of computers and how they operate behind the scenes vs fancy GUI interfaces that do everything for you. Linux can be used in so many ways to build stable environments for various services (ie, Plex, Octopi for 3D printing, PiHole for network-wide ad-blocking, other complex custom firewall solutions, web servers, and more).

If you are tech-savvy, usually Linux is always going to be your best bet. You can build it, configure it, and generally let it sit there until you are ready to update something.

If you prefer to keep things as simple as possible, then Windows will be. You’ll just have to deal with administering it more often to keep Windows Update happy and reboot it from time to time to keep things fresh.

Given, the war between OS environments comes in so many flavors as you can always find other reasons to like one over the other. So feel free to share your own experiences in the comments below. Which do you prefer to use for Plex?