Detecting String Truncation with GCC 8

msebor
By Martin Sebor

Continuing in the effort to detect common programming errors, the just-released GCC 8 contains a number of new warnings as well as enhancements to existing checkers to help find non-obvious bugs in C and C++ code. This article focuses on those that deal with inadvertent string truncation and discusses some of the approaches for avoiding the underlying problems. If you haven’t read it, you might also want to read David Malcolm’s article Usability improvements in GCC 8.

Why Is String Truncation a Problem?

It is well-known why buffer overflow is dangerous: writing past the end of an object can overwrite data in adjacent storage, resulting in data corruption. In the most benign cases, the corruption can simply lead to incorrect behavior of the program. If the adjacent data is an address in the executable text segment, the corruption may be exploitable to gain control of the affected process, which can lead to a security vulnerability. (See CWE-119 for more on buffer overflow.)

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Customizing an OpenShift Ansible Playbook Bundle

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By Alessandro Arrichiello

Today I want to talk about Ansible Service Broker and Ansible Playbook Bundle. These components are relatively new in the Red Hat OpenShift ecosystem, but they are now fully supported features available in the Service Catalog component of OpenShift 3.9.

Before getting deep into the technology, I want to give you some basic information (quoted below from the product documentation) about all the components and their features:

  • Ansible Service Broker is an implementation of the Open Service Broker API that manages applications defined in Ansible Playbook Bundles.
  • Ansible Playbook Bundles (APB) are a method of defining applications via a collection of Ansible Playbooks built into a container with an Ansible runtime with the playbooks corresponding to a type of request specified in the Open Service Broker API specification.
  • Playbooks are Ansible’s configuration, deployment, and orchestration language. They can describe a policy you want your remote systems to enforce, or a set of steps in a general IT process.

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Using Ansible Galaxy Roles in Ansible Playbook Bundles

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By Siamak Sadeghianfar

[In case you aren’t following the OpenShift blog, I’m cross posting my article here because I think it will be of interest to the Red Hat Developer commnity.]

The Open Service Broker API standard aims to standardize how services (cloud, third-party, on-premise, legacy, etc) are delivered to applications running on cloud platforms like OpenShift. This allows applications to consume services the exact same way no matter on which cloud platform they are deployed. The service broker pluggable architecture enables admins to add third-party brokers to the platform in order to make third-party and cloud services available to the application developers directly from the OpenShift service catalog. As an example AWS Service Broker created jointly by Amazon and Red Hat, Azure Service Broker created by Microsoft and Helm Service Broker created by Google to allow consumption of AWS services, Azure services and Helm charts on Kubernetes and OpenShift. Furthermore, admins can create their own brokers in order to make custom services like provisioning an Oracle database on their internal Oracle RAC available to the developers through the service catalog.

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Container Testing in OpenShift with Meta Test Family

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By Petr Hracek

Without proper testing, we should not ship any container. We should guarantee that a given service in a container works properly. Meta Test Family (MTF) was designed for this very purpose.

Containers can be tested as “standalone” containers and as “orchestrated” containers. Let’s look at how to test containers with the Red Hat OpenShift environment. This article describes how to do that and what actions are needed.

MTF is a minimalistic library built on the existing Avocado and behave testing frameworks, assisting developers in quickly enabling test automation and requirements. MTF adds basic support and abstraction for testing various module artifact types: RPM-based, Docker images, and more. For detailed information about the framework and how to use it check out the MTF documentation.

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Red Hat Summit signage: Keep Exploring

Red Hat Summit: Lowering the risk of monolith to microservices

dtidwell
By Doug Tidwell

Christian Posta, Chief Architect at Red Hat, presented the story of a fictitious company1 moving a monolithic application to microservices.

When considering risk, we think we know the bad things that can happen and the probabilities of those bad things actually happening. Christian defines a monolith as a large application developed over many years by different teams that delivers proven business value while being very difficult to update and maintain. Its architecture, elegant at one point, has eroded over time. That makes it difficult to assess the risk of migrating a monolith.

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Apache Camel URI completion: easy installation for Eclipse, VS Code, and OpenShift.io

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By Aurélien Pupier

Discoverability and ease of installation of Apache Camel tooling based on the Language Server Protocol has been improved. Manual download and installation of binaries is no longer necessary!  For the Eclipse desktop IDE and the VS Code environment you can now find and install the Camel tooling directly from the marketplaces for each development environment.

Camel Language Server is now also available in Red Hat OpenShift.io!

In this article, I will show you how you can install Camel tooling via the marketplaces for Eclipse and VS Code.  I will also show how to enable Camel tooling in your OpenShift.io workspace.

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Red Hat Summit: An Eventful Tour from Enterprise Integration to Serverless

dtidwell
By Doug Tidwell

Red Hat Senior Architects Marius Bogoevici and Christian Posta recently presented an overview of event-driven architecture, taking the audience from the basics of enterprise integration to microservices and serverless computing. Standing in front of a packed room at Red Hat Summit, their talk addressed four basic points:

  1. Event-driven architectures have been around for a while. What are they, why are they powerful, and why are back en vogue?
  2. Messaging is often used as a backbone for event-based distributed systems. What options do we have for cloud-native event-driven architectures?
  3. Integration is necessary for any organization. How do streaming, cloud-native architectures, and microservices fit in?
  4. Are Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) the next utopian architecture? Where do functions fit in a world of microservices?

The entire session was done with three enterprise concerns in mind. First is the divide between agile systems and purpose-built systems. While the purpose-built system is optimized for a small set of use cases, it is very difficult to change if new use cases arise or the old use cases become irrelevant. We have to be agile to adapt to a constantly changing environment. Another concern is resource utilization. We want to eliminate waste and get the most out of our systems and resources, although the cloud in general and containers in particular make more distributed architectures practical. Finally, Christian made the observation that we cannot build complex systems from complex parts. The components we develop must be as simple and understandable as possible.

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Scaling AMQ 7 Brokers with AMQ Interconnect

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By Roman Martin Gil

Red Hat JBoss AMQ Interconnect provides flexible routing of messages between AMQP-enabled endpoints, including clients, brokers, and standalone services. With a single connection to a network of AMQ Interconnect routers, a client can exchange messages with any other endpoint connected to the network.

AMQ Interconnect can create various topologies to manage a high volume of traffic or define an elastic network in front of AMQ 7 brokers. This article shows a sample AMQ Interconnect topology for scaling AMQ 7 brokers easily.

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Next DevNation Live: Serverless and Servicefull Applications: Where Microservices Complements Serverless, May 17th, 12pm EDT

burrsutter
By Burr Sutter

Join us for the next online DevNation Live on May 17th at 12pm EDT for Serverless and Servicefull Applications: Where Microservices Complements Serverless hosted by Burr Sutter.  Serverless is a misnomer. Your future cloud-native applications will consist of both microservices and functions, wrapped in Linux containers, but in many cases where you, the developer, will be able to ignore the operational aspects of managing the infrastructure and even much of the runtime stack.

In this technical session, we will start by using Apache Whisk, a Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) engine,  deployed on Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift to explore how you can complement cloud-native Java applications (microservices) with serverless functions. Next, we’ll open up a serverless web application architecture and deploy an API Gateway into the FaaS platform to examine the microservices talking to the serverless functions. We finish with a look at how event sinks and event sources map in the serverless world.

Register now and join the live presentation at 12pm EDT, Thursday, May 17th.

Session Agenda

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Signage for the Red Hat Summit at Moscone West in San Francisco

Red Hat Summit: Functions as a Service with OpenWhisk and OpenShift

dtidwell
By Doug Tidwell

Serverless computing (often called Functions-as-a-Service, or FaaS) is one of the hottest emerging technologies today. The OpenWhisk project, currently in incubation at Apache, is an open-source implementation of FaaS that lets you create functions that are invoked in response to events. Our own Brendan McAdams gave a presentation and demo that explained the basics of serverless, how the OpenWhisk project works, and how to run OpenWhisk in OpenShift.

Brendan outlined the three properties of a serverless / FaaS platform:

  1. It responds to events by invoking functions
  2. Functions are loaded and executed on demand
  3. Functions can be chained together with triggered events from outside the FaaS platform itself.

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