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linux

CoreOS matchbox

You may still have some bare metal servers lying around, freed by the heavy use of public clouds. But don’t throw them away yet, tooling exist to offer almost as much agility as virtual machine provisionning. Tools like Foreman, Cobbler, Razor, MAAS or OpenStack Ironic fills that gap. Today we’ll look at matchbox from CoreOS, it has a pretty name now, it used to be called coreos-baremetal and bootcfg. matchbox offers a HTTP and gRPC service which will help to easily build out CoreOS clusters out of your servers.

CoreOS Container Linux

Evolution is drastic in IT, we now see applications running in containers, public clouds eating the world with self-service offerings. The world of computing has to adapt and provide a foundation for this constant innovation. This is exaclty what the CoreOS team have been doing for almost four years. It all started with CoreOS a minimalistic Linux operating system which have recently been renamed Container Linux, which gives a quick overview of what it is built for. It’s only purpose is to be a foundation layer to run your containerized and distributed cloud-native application. Having such a reduced footprint makes it way more secure, it was the driving force behind it. Also by reducing the adherence between your application and the infrastructure operating system, updates becomes way easier, so your environment will be kept secured. Container Linux offer a minimum set of binaries, mostly systemd, etcd, rkt and flannel for networking. Anything else can run as containers on top of Container Linux.

Ubuntu Core (Snappy) on OpenStack / vSphere

For years a big gap existed between embedded OS for smartphone and server operating system. Mark Shuttleworth and his team have been working for quite some time on optimizing their Ubuntu operating system for the smartphone world. Beginning of december, they’ve announced a new transactionnally updated version of Ubuntu optimized for the cloud, the result of their years of working for the embedded world. Snappy is a minimal server image where applications can be upgraded and rolled back atomically. It’s not the only similar initiative, it started with CoreOS, a reachitected Linux OS to run modern infrastructure stacks, but RedHat is also trying to keep up with project Atomic. Snappy can be used to run Docker containers but not only, it’s one of the main differentiator of Canonical solution.

Unfortunately Canonical doesn’t offer a VMDK version of their Snappy technology, which we need to deploy it on our OpenStack vSphere environment. This article we’ll show you how to proceed then.

Byobu

Summer is a great period to find ways to improve your workflow a bit. One great little tool in this category is Byobu from Dustin Kirkland, it’s a light, text-based window manager which allow you to detach/reattach to session and quickly create and move between different windows over a single SSH connection. It improve on the idea of previous tools like Tmux or GNU Screen but with a simpler approach.

Cheat

I’ve been playing with cheatsheets for years, it all started when I studied mathematics. I still have few booklets back from university. I love cheatsheet to tell you the truth, the one thing I love the most is to reduce as much as possible the paper estate taken by information. I have the impression to memorize everything easily when I shrink it. Computers have changed that radically, back when the first programmable calculators appeared on the market, the first digital cheatsheet appeared. It was the beginning of a long story which bring us today to Cheat . A small Python command line program that will be on your side when for god sake you completely forgot the options to block a port using iptables or how to quickly share a file thru HTTP using Python, etc…

Suse Cloud conference - part 1

Julien Niedergang, is a pre-sales SUSE engineer, curious about OpenStack, he presented SUSE strategy and solutions based on Crowbar, Chef and OpenStack.

nanoc

nanoc is a tool that runs on your local computer and compiles documents written in formats such as Markdown, Textile, Haml,… into a static web site consisting of simple HTML files, ready for uploading to any web server.