Category Archives: Open Source

Anaconda and Teradata partner to enhance open-source support for AI innovation

Anaconda and Teradata have unveiled a new integration to bring the most popular and widely used Python and R packages to Teradata VantageCloud through the Anaconda Repository. The integration with ClearScape Analytics, a powerful engine for deploying end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), is designed to provide enterprises with the ability to deploy… Read more »

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Ermetic releases CNAPPgoat open source project for assessing multi cloud security

Ermetic, a cloud infrastructure security company, has launched CNAPPgoat, an open source project that allows organisations to safely test their cloud security skills, processes, tools and posture in interactive sandbox environments that are easy to deploy and destroy. CNAPPgoat supports AWS, Azure and GCP platforms for assessing the security capabilities included in Cloud Native Application… Read more »

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How to run Linux on Mac without rebooting

We’ve outlined how to run Linux on Mac® and how easy it is to get started! Linux is an incredibly versatile operating system that has been designed to run on a wide range of devices—from mobile devices, to desktop computers, and even servers. Due to the open-source nature that ensures code has active community support, […]

The post How to run Linux on Mac without rebooting appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Bulgarian gov writes open source into law

Yellow road sign with a blue sky and white clouds: open sourceThe Bulgarian government has launched a number of amendments to the Electronic Governance Act which requires all code written for the government to be open source.

The announcement was made public through Bozhidar Bozhanov’s blog, who is currently acting as an advisor to the Deputy Prime Minister who is responsible for e-governance systems and policies. The new policy doesn’t mean the entire country will be moving towards Linux, though it is one of the first examples of a government putting the concept of open source into legislation. Article 58.a of the act states:

“When the subject of the contract includes the development of computer programs: (a) computer programs must meet the criteria for open source software. (b) All copyright and related rights on the relevant computer programs, their source code, the design of interfaces and databases which are subject to the order should arise for the principal in full, without limitations in the use, modification and distribution. (c) Development should be done in the repository maintained by the Agency in accordance with Art.7cpt.18.”

The amendment will not impact current contracts, or insist on the major vendors give away the source of their products, but only focuses on custom written code. When the government procures IT services or software which means custom code will be written specifically for the project, the act ensures this code will be outsourced for the rest of the country to use.

“After all, it’s paid by tax-payers money and they should both be able to see it and benefit from it,” said Bozhanov on the blog. “A new government agency is tasked with enforcing the law and with setting up the public repository (which will likely be mirrored to GitHub).

“The fact that something is in the law doesn’t mean it’s a fact, though. The programming community should insist on it being enforced. At the same time some companies will surely try to circumvent it.”

Red Hat boosts API management biz with 3scale acquisition

Money financingRed Hat has confirmed it has entered into a definitive agreement to 3scale, a provider of API management technology, reports Telecoms.com.

The two companies have been in partnership since early 2015 to create platform for API-based application development, though the acquisition is set to close in June 2016. 3scale currently provides developers with the tools to create, manage and scale APIs, and also recently introduced a containerized version of their API Gateway for Red Hat OpenShift. The tool enabls users to create applications with microservices distributed across diverse, hybrid environments. Upon completion of the transaction, the team commented on its blog it will open source the code almost immediately.

Red Hat claim the API management platform offered by 3scale complements various aspects of its portfolio well, most notably the JBoss Middleware portfolio, and also the elastic cloud environment provided by OpenShift. Although the company has not confirmed whether the 3scale brand will continue in the long-term, it does have a technology roadmap based on current customer requirements and the competitive landscape, which will be honoured.

“3scale complements our existing middleware product portfolio and Red Hat OpenShift by enabling companies to create and publish APIs with tools such as Red Hat JBoss Fuse, and then manage and drive adoption of those APIs once they have been published,” said Craig Muzilla, SVP of Application Platforms Business at Red Hat.

Ret Hat hope the acquisition will prove to be a differentiator in a crowded market, as it believes API management offerings could be the make-or-break factor in a number of new customer acquisitions who are looking at integration solutions. This coupled with API management offerings becoming a more important requirement in cloud application platforms, is the basis of the transaction. Acquiring 3scale enables Red Hat to address these evolving requirements quickly, as it continues the wider industry trend of acquire to innovate over organic growth.

Alongside the acquisition, the team also announced its quarterly results which demonstrated healthy growth. Q1 revenue was reported at $568 million, up 18% year-on-year, with subscription revenues at $502 million, also up 18% year-on-year. Subscription revenue from Application Development-related and other emerging technologies offerings for the quarter was $98 million, an increase of 39%.

“Digital transformation and cloud computing are changing the way companies compete in virtually every industry today,” said Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat. “Organizations that rapidly embrace agile IT technology are succeeding as industry innovation accelerates around them. Our open source-based technologies are helping customers capture the business benefits associated with this rapid rate of change.”

In terms of the outlook for the remainder of 2016 and beyond, containers were a technology which have been prioritized for the business.

“We actually see containers as a great opportunity for us to continue to differentiate around, a, kernel space and user space being consistent,” said Whitehurst in the company’s earnings call. “So having the same host and technology in the container itself. And then secondly just ability to lifecycle manages against that.

“So containers overall are good for Linux because it helps it grow overall share versus Windows. And then within that we think we have a definitely differentiated position given our position in the OS. So that’s why we can see continue double digit growth in general in the OS category which includes containers.”

Wipro open sources big data offering

Laptop Screen with Big Data Concept.Wipro has announced it has open sourced its big data solution Big Data Ready Enterprise (BDRE), partnering with California based Hortonworks to push the initiative forward.

The company claims the BDRE offering addresses the complete lifecycle of managing data across enterprise data lakes, allowing customers to ingest, organize, enrich, process, analyse, govern and extract data at a faster pace. BDRE is released under the Apache Public License v2.0 and hosted on GitHub. Teaming up with Hortonworks will also give the company additional clout in the market, at Hortonworks is generally considered one of the top three Hadoop distribution vendors in the market.

“Wipro takes pride in being a significant contributor to the open source community, and the release of BDRE reinforces our commitment towards this ecosystem,” said Bhanumurthy BM, COO at Wipro. “BDRE will not only make big data technology adoption simpler and effective, it will also open opportunities across industry verticals that organizations can successfully leverage. Being at the forefront of innovation in big data, we are able to guide organizations that seek to benefit from the strategic, financial, organizational and technological benefits of adopting open source technologies.”

Companies open sourcing their own technologies has become somewhat of a trend in recent months, as the product owners themselves would appear to be moving towards a service model as opposed to traditional vendor. According to ‘The Open Source Era’, an Oxford Economics Study which was commissioned by Wipro, 64% of respondents believe that open source will drive Big Data efforts in the next three years.

The report also claims open source has become a foundation stone of the technology roadmap of a number of businesses, 75% of respondent believe integration between legacy and open source is one of the main challenges and 52% said open source is already supporting development of new products and services.

Container Solutions brings production environment to the developers laptop

Global Container TradeLondon-based Container Solutions has released the latest version of its minimesos project, an open source testing and experiment tool for Apache Mesos, which it claims brings production orchestration testing to the development environment.

The new offering targets the challenge of moving microservice applications from a developer’s laptop to the production environment, which can prove to be complicated as the target platform is different than the local one. The offering allows developers to bring up a containerised Apache Mesos cluster on their laptop, creating a production-like environment on their desktops for building, experimenting and testing.

“When we started building a number of Mesos frameworks, we found it hard to run and test them locally,” said Jamie Dobson, CEO of Container Solutions. “So, we ended up writing a few scripts to solve the problem. Those scripts became minimesos, which lets you do everything on your laptop. We later integrated Scope so that developers could visualise their applications. This made minimesos even more useful for exploratory testing.”

The company claims developers can now start a Mesos cluster through the command line or via the Java API, which is logically isolated as each of the processes run in separate Docker containers. Minimesos is aslo integrated: it exposes framework, state and task information to its Cluster State API.

Atlassian launches Bitbucket Pipelines

Door to new opportunityAtlassian has announced a number of new developments within its team collaboration software portfolio, including the launch of Bitbucket Pipelines platform.

The new platform extends its cloud-based Bitbucket code repository to provide teams with entire continuous delivery workflows from source to deployment in the cloud. The team claim the new proposition helps developers who are struggling to apply on-premises continuous integration and delivery tools as software development and production applications are shifting into the cloud.

“Atlassian is helping teams across all industries do amazing things. We’re helping developers at Cochlear build aural implants to help people hear, The Telegraph to inform millions of readers each day, and Lufthansa Systems to provide IT services for everything from aviation safety to entertainment,” said Sri Viswanath, CTO, Atlassian. “The common thread between these teams and your own is the need to work smarter and faster. We’re seeing more and more of these teams choosing to collaborate in the cloud. In fact, over half of our customers choose to collaborate in the cloud and an even higher number of new customers select our cloud offerings.”

Elsewhere, the team also launched a native mobile platform to increase connectivity between departments who are using the Confluence and JIRA tools, building on the enterprise mobility trends, as well opening up its JIRA Service Desk product, to developers to build add-ons that create and update requests or extend JIRA Service Desk’s automation capabilities to react to changes in requests.

The company has also joined the Open API Initiative and replace the company’s existing API documentation, using a custom site generator, RADAR and it has released this software as open source to be used by any Open API provider.

“Collectively, we have a lot to gain from an open, widely accepted definition language for REST APIs,” said Viswanath. “We’re committed to actively contributing to the standard and are now a member of the Open API Initiative and the Linux Foundation, alongside industry leaders like Google, Microsoft, PayPal and others.”

Platform9 launches OpenStack channel partner program

Key Hole Solution PartnershipPlatform9 has launched a new channel partner program designed for resellers who are focused on deploying enterprise-ready OpenStack private clouds for their customers.

The Platform9 proposition, delivers OpenStack private clouds as a SaaS-based managed service, is built on the continuing wave of OpenStack enthusiasm from enterprise-scale organizations. The team claim to be able to deliver the benefits of public cloud through opensource technologies, without the vendor lock-in and “VMware or AWS” tax.

At the OpenStack Summit last month numerous organizations outlined their commitment to the technology, including Wal-Mart, AT&T, SAP and Wells Fargo, and the OpenStack Foundation also claimed more than 50% of the Fortune 100 is now using an OpenStack platform.

“Our new channel program helps our partners capitalize on the significant business opportunity surrounding customers’ cloud transformation needs. Platform9’s unique SaaS-based OpenStack solution enables partners to deliver immediate value to their customers while enhancing their status as a private cloud ‘trusted advisor,’” said Adam Ulfers, Platform9 VP of Sales. “Most importantly, we can help increase our partners’ share of cloud spending by extending their solutions and services as they build out their customers’ data centre ecosystems.”

Last month, the team also announced a number of updates to its OpenStack-as-a-Service proposition, aimed at increasing the ‘readiness’ of the platform for enterprise organizations. As part of updates, Platform9 included a SAML integration with Okta to provide SSO integration across groups of users and internal organizations, a zero-touch upgrade to OpenStack Liberty and a trial version of Platform9 Managed OpenStack which is available on a USB stick.

The Platform9 Channel Partner Program enables its resellers to implement an on-premises private cloud, which the company claims offers the same self-service provisioning and open APIs as a public cloud proposition. The program also offers resellers a number of sales leads, joint marketing and demand generation campaigns, for resellers who take part.

“With growing concerns about runaway costs and data lock-in with the public cloud, many customers are pursuing hybrid cloud strategy, with IT as internal service providers,” said Alvin Chu, Senior Director, Cloud Practice, FusionStorm, one of Platform9’s resellers. “With Platform9’s private-cloud-as-a-service, we can transform our customers’ existing data centre resources into flexible, enterprise-grade private cloud infrastructure in just minutes – all backed by an operational SLA. Platform9 accelerates the time to value for our customers and for our business as well.”

Red Hat bets on OpenStack, DevOps and Containers in new product offerings

redhat office logoRed Hat has launched general availability of Red Hat Cloud Suite and Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, leaning on wider DevOps trends within the industry.

The company claims the new offerings will assist enterprise organizations in bridging the gap between development and operations teams at the scale of cloud computing, and successfully implement a DevOps business model.

“Everyone is now aware that Uber doesn’t own a car or Facebook doesn’t generate its own content, this is nothing new, but it does highlight the digital disruption which is taking place in the industry,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, General Manager, OpenStack at Red Hat. “These disruptions are impacting decisions on infrastructure within the organization, but also what kind of development methodology gets adopted. Customers are demanding an agile infrastructure and a Devops model to ensure they can reduce time to market and accelerate innovation within their own organization.

“When you generally look at the CIO agenda, the need to be more responsive to business needs is a priority within almost every organization by default. Given that they are viewing DevOps as a means to facilitate the change in thinking and culture, DevOps is here now and it’s not a fad which the industry has grabbed onto.

“Even internally, we have been aggressive in embracing DevOps. Our oldest business is Enterprise Linux and security updates is an area which of key value to our customers. Heartbleed was a huge issue for our customers 12 months ago, and since we are following the DevOps methodology, we were not only able to provide a patch, but we also pushed out a tool which customers can use to see if they are now compliant. None of this would have been possible without DevOps, so we are seeing the benefits internally as well.”

Red Hat is currently pinning its ambitions on the growth of OpenStack and the belief it will become the choice operating system for cloud infrastructure and the data centres of the future. The company backed the growth of Linux in a similar fashion, effectively riding the wave to its $2 billion annual sales, and is now placing the same bet on OpenStack, and its adoption throughout the industry.

The launch is based on OpenStack Kilo, the release which came out last year, combining the Red Hat cloud, DevOps and container offerings on a single cloud suite, within a private cloud environment. Keeping on the theme of ‘openness’, the tools will also be available as individual products should customers want to work with other offerings also.

Building on another industry trend, Red Hat has also prioritized containers as a technology for its service offering.

“Containers are probably the most attractive technology we at Red Hat have seen in years. Every large customer we have wants to have a conversation around containers,” said Balakrishnan. “We’re including OpenShift in the cloud suite, which is a service offering which was designed from the ground up on Docker (for container image) and Kubernetes (for orchestration layer). We are excited about the fact that we are one of the first in the industry to be bringing container technology to mainstream.

“Containers are one of the biggest priority areas for us as a company, so much so that we include container technology in our Enterprise Linux offering. It’s pervasive both in our technology as well as in our customer minds.”