Practical Technology

for practical people.

March 12, 2019
by sjvn01
0 comments

Open Distro for Elasticsearch is Amazon’s move to show it’s pro-open source

Amazon Web Services (AWS) just launched Open Distro for Elasticsearch. This program takes AWS’s recent proprietary additions to Elasticsearch and open sources them under the Apache 2.0 license. That sounds good.

Shay Banon, co-founder of Elasticsearchand CEO of Elastic, its parent company, sees Amazon as forking and redistributing rebundled Elasticsearch for its own purposes: “From various vendors, to large Chinese entities, to now, Amazon. There was always a ‘reason,’ at times masked with fake altruism or benevolence” for “open-sourcing” their own Elasticsearch forks.

Open Distro for Elasticsearch is Amazon’s move to show it’s pro-open source More>

 

March 11, 2019
by sjvn01
0 comments

What’s the difference between containers and virtual machines?

I was at a conference recently when I realized the person I was talking with thought that containers were just smaller versions of virtual machines (VM). Ah, no. No, they’re not.

Yes, they can function in the same ways from a practical viewpoint. For example, they’re both commonly used to run server applications. How they do that is where things start to be different between them. This, in turn, leads to them being good for different kinds of IT jobs.

What’s the difference between containers and virtual machines? More>

March 11, 2019
by sjvn01
0 comments

Open source advances deeper into hardware: The CHIPS Alliance project

Open-source hardware is older than you might think. Sun released OpenSPARC in 2007, and IBM started OpenPOWER in 2013. OpenSPARC would die after Oracle bought Sun, and OpenPOWER remains largely IBM-driven. With the recent arrival of the RISC-V (pronounced Risk-Five), though, open-source CPU designs have finally caught fire. Now, the Linux Foundation is helping form the CHIPS Alliance project. CHIPS, in turn, will host and curate high-quality, open-source silicon device design code.

Open source advances deeper into hardware: The CHIPS Alliance project More>

 

March 4, 2019
by sjvn01
0 comments

CoreDNS: The DNS for cloud-native computing

I have a t-shirt which reads, from top to bottom: “It’s not DNS. There’s no way it’s DNS. It was DNS!” As every sysadmin knows, all too many network problems boil down to a Domain Name System (DNS) blunder. That’s already annoying, but when you have to deal with a DNS headache with fast-moving containers and cloud-native computing, DNS problems reach migraine headache levels of pain.

A double shot of aspirin answer to this pain is CoreDNS. This is a new DNS server that was designed expressly to be extensible, fast, and flexible. In short, it’s just what’s needed for containers and cloud-native computing.

CoreDNS: The DNS for cloud-native computing More>

February 20, 2019
by sjvn01
0 comments

The battle between real open source vs. faux open source heats up

On February 19, Redis Labs, the home of Redis, the popular open-source in-memory data structure store, announced it has raised $60 million in new financing. Redis Labs CEO Ofer Bengal told Ars Technica that one reason for this was its new “open-source” Common Clauselicense. “The community now understands that the original concept of open source has to be fixed because it isn’t suitable anymore to the modern era where cloud companies use their monopoly power to adopt any successful open-source project without contributing anything to it,” Bengal said.

Accept? I don’t think so. To quote, Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), “Give me a f***ing break.

The battle between real open source vs. faux open source heats up More>