Containers

Customizing an OpenShift Ansible Playbook Bundle

aarrichi
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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Container Testing in OpenShift with Meta Test Family

phracek
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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Street Signs for the Red Hat Summit

Red Hat Summit: Clouds today, serverless tomorrow

dtidwell
By Doug Tidwell

Have you ever thought to yourself, “Today’s world would be so much richer if we had 29 kinds of hummus?” Neither has Stephanos Bacon, Senior Director of Portfolio Strategy for Red Hat Application Platforms. His entertaining presentation moved from the options available to humans hungry for hummus to a discussion of the bewildering array of choices available to developers and architects. Although too many choices can be a bad thing1, it’s important to understand what choices are relevant today and that the relevance of those choices is always shifting.

There are several things that don’t change, however. Some of the concerns that have been with us since before the dawn of time2 include:

  • Making developers as productive as possible
  • Balancing productivity with governance and compliance
  • Delivering software predictably and in a timely manner
  • Making software as robust as possible
  • Prioritizing usability and accessibility

But beyond these goals, there are three factors that are always in flux:

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Moscone West graced with the Shadowman logo

Red Hat Summit: Containers, Microservices, and Serverless Computing

dtidwell
By Doug Tidwell

You’re in an IT department. How does the rest of the organization see you? As a valuable asset whose code and APIs make a difference in the marketplace, or as a necessary evil that should be trimmed as much as possible? Containers, microservices, and serverless computing can make you more responsive, flexible, and competitive, which in turn makes your organization more effective. And that puts you solidly in the asset column.

After sprinting through the streets of San Francisco from the stage of the opening keynote at Red Hat Summit 2018 (replay available here), Burr Sutter hosted a packed house in Moscone South to talk about these technologies. Containers are widely accepted (see the announcement from Red Hat and Microsoft for an example), microservices are increasingly popular as an approach to modernizing monolithic applications, and serverless computing is emerging as an important new programming model.

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Getting Started with Istio and Jaeger on Your Laptop

ssadeghi
By Siamak Sadeghianfar

[Cross posted from the OpenShift blog]

About a year ago Red Hat announced its participation as a launch partner of the Istio project, a service mesh technology that creates an application focused network that transparently protects the applications from abnormalities in environments. The main goals of Istio are enhancing overall application security and availability through many different capabilities such as intelligent routing, circuit breaking, mutual TLS, rating, and limiting among others. Ultimately Istio is about helping organizations develop and deploy resilient, secure applications and services using advanced design and deployment patterns that are baked into the platform.

As part of our investments in making the technology easily consumable to Kubernetes and OpenShift users, Red Hat has created a ton of content:

  • learn.openshift.com: A web-based OpenShift and Kubernetes learning environment where users get to interact through the web browser with a real running instance of OpenShift and Istio service mesh with zero install time and no sign-up required.
  • Istio tutorial: Want to try the web-based scenario yourself from scratch? This Git repo contains instructions on how to set up an environment for yourself.
  • Introducing Istio Service Mesh for Microservices book by Christian Posta and Burr Sutter
  • Blog posts on the OpenShift and Red Hat Developer blogs

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Announcing AMQ Streams: Apache Kafka on OpenShift

dingham
By David Ingham

Hi all,

We are excited to announce a Developer Preview of Red Hat AMQ Streams, a new addition to Red Hat AMQ, focused on running Apache Kafka on OpenShift.

Apache Kafka is a leading real-time, distributed messaging platform for building data pipelines and streaming applications.

Using Kafka, applications can:

  • Publish and subscribe to streams of records.
  • Store streams of records.
  • Process records as they occur.

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Istio Service Mesh Blog Series Recap

donschenck
By Don Schenck

The past nine weeks of blog posts have introduced, explained, and demonstrated some of the many features of the Istio service mesh when combined it is with Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes. This, the final post in this series, is a recap.

[This is part ten of my ten-part Introduction to Istio series. My previous article was Part 9: Istio Egress: Exit Through the Gift Shop.]

Week one was an introduction to the concept of a service mesh. The concept of a Kubernetes sidecar container was explained and diagrammed, and it was the beginning of a constant theme throughout the blog posts: You don’t have to change your source code.

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Red Hat Summit Spotlight: Getting Started with Cloud-Native Apps Lab

ssadeghi
By Siamak Sadeghianfar

Cloud-native application development is the new paradigm for building applications and although is it often mistaken for microservices, it is much more than that and encompasses not only the application architecture but also the process through which applications are built, deployed, and managed.

New apps are often seen as the focus of cloud-native applications; however, we believe existing and new applications are alike and can incorporate cloud-native practices if they have the four defining characteristics of cloud-native applications:

  • Service-based: Build modular loosely coupled services (for example, microservices).
  • API-driven: Expose services via lightweight technology-agnostic APIs.
  • Containers: Package and deploy in containers as a portable unit of compute.
  • DevOps: Adopt agile and DevOps principles.

The Getting Started with Cloud-Native Apps lab at Red Hat Summit 2018, which takes place in San Francisco on May 8–10, has a packed agenda that focuses on walking participants through the principles of building and operating cloud-native applications.

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Istio Smart Canary Launch: Easing Into Production

donschenck
By Don Schenck

First to fall over when the atmosphere is less than perfect

Your sensibilities are shaken by the slightest defect

You live your life like a canary in a coalmine…

When Sting and The Police sang those lyrics, I doubt they had microservices, Istio, Kubernetes, and OpenShift in mind. Yet here we are, years later, using the Canary Deployment pattern to ease code into production.

[This is part eight of my ten-week Introduction to Istio series.  My previous article was Part 7: Istio Dark Launch: Secret Services.]

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Announcing Developer Studio 11.3.0.GA, JBoss Tools 4.5.3 for Eclipse Oxygen.3a

jmauryredhat-com
By Jeff Maury

The community editions of JBoss Tools 4.5.3 and JBoss Developer Studio 11.3 for Eclipse Oxygen.3a are here waiting for you. Check it out!

Installation

JBoss Developer Studio comes with everything pre-bundled in its installer. Simply download it from our JBoss Products page and run it like this:

java -jar jboss-devstudio-<installername>.jar

JBoss Tools or Bring-Your-Own-Eclipse (BYOE) JBoss Developer Studio require a bit more:

This release requires at least Eclipse 4.7 (Oxygen) but we recommend using the latest Eclipse 4.7.3a Oxygen JEE Bundle since then you get most of the dependencies preinstalled.

Once you have installed Eclipse, you can either find us on the Eclipse Marketplace under “JBoss Tools” or “Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio”.

For JBoss Tools, you can also use our update site directly.

http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/oxygen/stable/updates/

What is new?

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