Containers

Containerization technology is fundamentally changing the way applications are packaged and deployed. The ability to create a uniform runtime that can be deployed and scaled is revolutionizing how many organizations develop applications. Platforms such as OpenShift also provide additional benefits such as service orchestration through Kubernetes and a suite of tools for achieving continuous integration and continuous delivery of applications. However, even with all of these benefits, developers still need to be able to utilize the same patterns they have...

One of my favourite books is Antifragile by Nassim Taleb where the author talks about things that gain from disorder. Nacim introduces the concept of antifragility which is similar to hormesis in biology or creative destruction in economics and analyses it charecteristics in great details. If you find this topic interesting, there are also other authors who have examined the same phenomenon in different industries such as Gary Hamel, C. S. Holling, Jan Husdal. The concept of antifragile is the...

JBoss EAP 7 was recently released, and brings with it a whole host of new features and support, such as support for Java EE 7, reduced port usage, graceful shutdown, improved GUI and CLI management, optimizations for cloud and containers, and much more. EAP 7's small footprint, fast startup time and support for modern Java and non-Java frameworks make it uniquely suitable for deployment onto PaaS cloud environments, and Red Hat happens to have a leading one: OpenShift. I put...

I am sure this is the moment we have all been waiting for a long time, JBoss A-MQ 7 is finally out and is currently in Alpha. A-MQ is a fast and flexible messaging platform that reliably delivers information and easily integrates the various components in your application environments. A-MQ 7 consists of several new components and features, it is base on Project Apache ActiveMQ Artemis. The code base was donated by HornetQ. Having high performance journal base on NIO...

It was quite a trek to get to Oulu, Finland for the June 2016 C++ Standards Committee meeting, but we were warmly received and the meeting went well once we arrived. We had very pleasant weather most of the week, and it was fun to experience the midnight sun, even though it played havoc with my sleep schedule. The main order of business at this meeting was to vote on a first Committee Draft (CD) of the (expected) C++17 standard...

Following my introduction blog about why microservices should be event-driven, I’d like to take another few steps and blog about it. (Hopefully I saw you at jBCNconf and Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, where I spoke about some of these topics). Follow me on twitter @christianposta for updates on this project. In this article we discuss the first parts of carving up a monolith. The monolith I’m exploring in depth for these articles will be from the Ticket Monster...

I'm sure you have heard and read a lot about microservices in the recent past and how they are here to defend our end users from the horrible monolith. Breaking an application up into many components is a great start, but to take your organization to the next level requires a platform focused on integrating microservices into your continuous improvement process. Red Hat's James Rawlings & James Strachan led us through achieving our new goal of continuous delivery with containerized...

WildFly Swarm 1.0.0.Final was released this week at DevNation. It allows the developer to package his application and a JavaEE runtime in a "fat- jar" file. To execute the application, the developer will only need a Java SE Runtime installed and have access to the "fat-jar". No other downloads or configurations are needed. Besides being a well known (and consolidated) Java EE runtime, WildFly Swarm is also an excellent choice for Cloud-native Java apps through the "built-in support for third...

The Problem Several months back, our emerging Developer Programs engineering team assembled during the last breaths of Brno's Czech winter and dedicated a full day towards a deceptively complex task: Be a user. Assemble in groups and, using a technology stack of your choosing, conceive of and create an application to be presented to the full team in 6 hours. Keep in mind that I hold my colleagues in extremely high regard; they're capable, creative, and experienced. Surely churning out...

OpenShift 3 is all about Docker containers. More importantly, it is about management orchestration of containerized applications. Red Hat IT was a big consumer of OpenShift 2 and likewise, we are moving as many applications as possible to containers. OpenShift 3 is a big part of this strategy. On a personal note, OpenShift 3 is an incredible product. I even have it installed at home for various services :) Grant Shipley gave his talk on "making applications great again" using...

Yesterday, I did a live blogging post covering the Container Development Kit DevNation session. The CDK solves a fairly large problem, one that I have struggled with during my tenure as a Systems Administrator... giving developers a production-like environment. If you cannot tell, I'm a big fan of the CDK. It doesn't just give developers access to something approximating production, it also gives you an IDE combined with the tools to make you productive with the sandbox environment. However, I...

Red Hat's Peter Larsen, the OpenShift Domain Architect, gave a talk at DevNation, "Developing on OpenShift without the build waits". Developing with the OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service can be very compelling: developing and deploying software without having to worry about the infrastructure. When you first try OpenShift, it's quite impressive to see how easy it is to develop and deploy software using the built-in templates that include preconfigured components such as databases and application servers. This allows developers to start coding right...

"Linux containers (sometimes managed using the docker command) keep applications and their runtime components together by combining lightweight application isolation with an image-based deployment method". ( https://developers.redhat.com/topics/kubernetes ) Red Hat Developer program brings a very useful cheat sheet to those who need to create or work with containers, images, volumes and networks. When you download the sheet, you will find: An illustrated cheat sheet with commands related to the management of containers, Dockerfile instructions to craft your own image, and...

As a systems engineer, I enjoy building deploying production and pre-production services. These production services tend to be built at scale in a highly redundant architecture. The problem has always been how do we give developers a sandbox that matches production in all the ways that matters-- but without the pain (and love), overhead, compute and networks resources actual production environments require. Moreover, how does one snapshot this environment so it can be recreated at will. This has been a...

Today we’re releasing version 2.1 of the Red Hat Container Development Kit. With the CDK, developers can easily create enterprise-ready containerized applications which target both OpenShift 3 development and Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments. Enjoy the ease and experience of developing this type of solution locally, on your own machine, without sacrifice or compromise. Here are the key features in the CDK 2.1 release: OpenShift upgraded to OpenShift Enterprise 3.2. See here to find out more about the new features...

In a world where agility matters, the pursuit to reduce wasted time in environment configurations is apparent in many technologies. Some techniques, such as Virtual Machines, that enable distribution of pre-configured images have existed for decades, while others like Linux containers are more recent. Even platforms like Java allow developers to package all dependencies, resources and configuration files in single JAR (Java Archive) file. What started initially as way to have executable Java classes in Java SE (Standard Edition), has...

Apache Camel is a mature integration library (over 9 years old now) that implements all the patterns from Enterprise Integration Patterns book, but Camel is not only an EIP implementation library, it is a modern framework that constantly evolves, adds new patterns and adapts to the changes in the industry. Apart from tens of connectors added in each release, Camel goes hand-in-hand with the new features provided by the new versions of Java language itself and other Java frameworks. With...

Kubernetes is a great tool for container orchestration on a server cluster. It makes it easy to deploy lots of containers in a resource-efficient way using a simple interface. But one thing that is not easy to do with Kubernetes is to deploy it locally. Kubernetes is designed to run on an actual cluster, which means using it only on a single computer is tough. I know. You're probably wondering why you'd want to use Kubernetes locally in the first...

Red Hat Linux was the first version of Linux I ever used. Until succumbing to The Cult of Macintosh a few years ago, I was a faithful Red Hat (and later Fedora) junkie. Hell, I still have my 15 year old Red Hat 7.2 discs. But, as a developer, it has been tough to do any substantial work with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) unless working for an organization that has a license. That is, until relatively recently, when Red...

Ready to develop container application in just over 4 minutes? Since I started playing around with OpenShift in its various forms, such as Online with cartridges and then later as containerized images, nothing has gotten me more excited than the availability of the Red Hat Container Development Kit (CDK). This kit has made it possible to easily gain access to a full, product based installation of OpenShift as you would interact with it in application development in just minutes. While...

With the release of the Red Hat Container Development Kit (CDK), it’s been easier to set up a development environment with OpenShift to create, develop and test your own containerized applications, and easier evaluate different CI/CD strategies with Jenkins --- strategies that reflect your team's unique culture. However, when you want to access applications by their DNS names, you cannot do so because there is no DNS server pointing to that name. That is, of course, until now! Vagrant provides...

Red Hat has always given operations teams value in deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and that's no different in a containerized world. But, as a developer, why should I build on RHEL? Does the underlying operating system really affect me? It might if you want to: get your app to production faster work on new products, not maintain old ones avoid compatibility issues at scale (And yes RHEL is available at no cost for development use.) 1) Take Your...

In the world of containers, there is a desperate need to be able to scan container images for known vulnerabilities and configuration problems, and as we proliferate containers and bundled applications into the enterprise, many groups and companies have started to build container scanning tools. Even Red Hat has been building a scanning tool based on the tried and true OpenSCAP project, but there were several problems we saw time and again. The problems with existing container scanning tools included...

I've been working with some of our teams recently on microservices and how we can assist our customers and communities with best practices and recommendations, whether they're Java EE developers, Vert.x coders, writing Node.js applications or something else. If you've read any of my previous articles then you'll know I have a few thoughts on microservices, and yet there are many things I still feel I need to get straight in my own head. That's why I love talking with...