Containers

Containers are one of the top trend today. Starting working or playing with them could be really hard also if you've well understood the theory at their base. With this article I'll try to show you some useful tips and tricks to start into containers world, thanks also to the great web interface provided by the Cockpit project. Cockpit overview Cockpit is an interactive server admin interface. You'll find below some a of its great features: Cockpit comes “out of...

In part one of this series of blog posts, we discussed the importance of user experience within the mobile industry, and how your API has a significant effect on this. In the this article, we’ll outline a number of techniques that you can leverage on an MBaaS solution such as Red Hat Mobile Application Platform to reduce the data downloaded by mobile devices when they make requests to your RESTful API. Reducing the size of a response is conceptually simple...

The world is moving to microservices, where applications are composed of a complex topology of components, orchestrated into a coordinated topology. Microservices have become increasingly popular as they increase business agility and reduce the time for changes to be made. On top of this, containers make it easier for organizations to adopt microservices. Increasingly, containers are the runtimes used for composition, and many excellent solutions have been developed to handle container orchestration such as: Kubernetes/OpenShift; Mesos and its many frameworks...

Why? Recently, I have been following the Hyperledger project, and Fabric in particular, with fair bit of interest. The current deployment process 1 for Fabric Starter Kit uses Docker Swarm. Kubernetes is a leading platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of containerised applications. Using Kubernetes instead of Docker Swarm would allow Hyperledger Fabric to leverage features like: Automatic binpacking Horizontal scaling Automated rollouts and rollbacks Storage orchestration Self-healing Service discovery and load balancing Secret and configuration management Batch execution...

Welcome to the tenth and final installment of That App You Love, a blog series in which I show you how to you can make almost any app into a first-class cloud citizen. If you want to start from the beginning, jump back and check out Part 1: Making a Connection. You’ll need the docker service and the oc utility to follow along in this post; for instructions check out Part 5: Upping Our (Cloud) Game. Wow, we’ve come a...

Editor's note: Raffaele Spazzoli is an Architect with Red Hat Consulting's PaaS and DevOps Practice. This blog post reflects his experience working for Key Bank prior to joining Red Hat. A recount of the journey from three-months, to one-week release cycle-time. This is the journey of KeyBank, a super-regional bank, from quarterly deployments to production to weekly deployments to production. In the process we adopted all open source software migrating from WebSphere to Tomcat and adopting OpenShift as our private...

Welcome to the ninth installment of That App You Love, a blog series in which I show you how to you can make almost any app into a first-class cloud citizen. If you want to start from the beginning, jump back and check out Part 1: Making a Connection. You’ll need the docker service and the oc utility to follow along in this post; for instructions check out Part 5: Upping Our (Cloud) Game. In Part 8 we learned how...

It's been a while since our last deep-dive into the Docker project graph driver performance. Over two years, in fact! In that time, Red Hat engineers have made major strides in improving container storage: Introduced the docker-storage-setup package to help make configuring devicemapper-based storage a snap. Introduced full support for overlay FS in RHEL7.2+ when used with containers Introduced overlay2 as Tech Preview mode Gotten SELinux support to both overlay and overlay2 merged into upstream kernel 4.9 Added a warning...

OpenShift gives its administrators the ability to manage a set of security context constraints (SCCs) for limiting and securing their cluster. Security context constraints allow administrators to control permissions for pods using the CLI. SCCs allow an administrator to control the following: Running of privileged containers. Capabilities a container can request to be added. Use of host directories as volumes. The SELinux context of the container. The user ID. The use of host namespaces and networking. Allocating an 'FSGroup' that...

The recommended steps for setting up the Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS), on all supported platforms, are found here. The instructions are pretty straight-forward and it is enough to get started right away - as long as you have a suitable java SDK installed on your machine. However, if I go along that path, I would later have to deal with the Java SDK updates to go along with the compatibility of the existing tools. Eventually, I may end...

Welcome to the eighth installment of That App You Love, a blog series in which I show you how to you can make almost any app into a first-class cloud citizen. If you want to start from the beginning, jump back and check out Part 1: Making a Connection. You’ll need the docker service and the oc utility to follow along in this post; for instructions check out Part 5: Upping Our (Cloud) Game. In Part 7 we learned how...

This post describes how to manually integrate Red Hat OpenStack 9 (RHOSP9) Cinder service with multiple pre-existing external Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 (RHCS2) clusters. The final configuration goals are to have Cinder configuration with multiple storage backends and support for creating volumes in either backend. This post will not cover the initial deployment of OpenStack Cinder or the Ceph clusters. Configuration Rational There are multiple scenarios where RHOSP9 Cinder will need to be configure to multiple RHCS2 storage clusters...

We have just begun the deployment of the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform v3.14 to all our actively updated grids. This will be complete by Oct 21st. Please pay particular attention to the notes below on Node.js 0.10.x, Cordova Light and CocoaPods 1.x. Highlights Removal of Cordova Light Templates CocoaPods 1.0.1 support - Possible Action Required JavaScript Template App dependencies in NPM New Devices in Studio App Preview Retirement of docs.feedhenry.com Reminder - Node.js 0.10.x End of Life – Action...

Welcome to the seventh installment of That App You Love, a blog series in which I show you how to you can make almost any app into a first-class cloud citizen. If you want to start from the beginning, jump back and check out Part 1: Making a Connection. You’ll need the docker service and the oc utility to follow along in this post; for instructions check out Part 5: Upping Our (Cloud) Game. In Part 6 of our adventure...

Last June, we announced the availability of version 4.0 of our product. This was the culmination of months of hard work and demonstrated our constantly expanding set of capabilities. I went on to recap the key technology choices made over five years ago, choices that proved to be visionary for our mobile platform’s architecture and functionality: Node.js and containers. We are very proud of our accomplishments with Red Hat Mobile Application Platform 4.0 and the new technologies we introduced to...

Welcome to the sixth installment of That App You Love, a blog series in which I show you how to you can make almost any app into a first-class cloud citizen. If you want to start from the beginning, jump back and check out Part 1: Making a Connection. You’ll need the docker service and the oc utility to follow along in this post; for instructions check out Part 5: Upping Our (Cloud) Game. We’ve been on a pretty amazing...

Developers have a lot of choices when deciding how to start using OpenShift and Kubernetes locally --- without going through a native OS installation. We all need to have a development environment as close as possible to production (to prevent defects caused by environmental differences), but ideally we need to do this without spending a lot of time to setup and a lot of computational resources (cpu, memory and disk space). This post will present four alternatives to create a...

Welcome to the fifth installment of That App You Love, a blog series in which I show you how to you can make almost any app into a first-class cloud citizen. If you want to start from the beginning, jump back and check out Part 1: Making a Connection. The previous posts of this series have focused on how to package ZNC in a way that exposes run-time configurability into the immutable world of containers. But forget about ZNC -...

Welcome to the fourth installment of That App You Love, a blog series in which I show you how to you can make almost any app into a first-class cloud citizen. If you want to start from the beginning, jump back and check out Part 1: Making a Connection. In Part 3, we looked at how to customize the configuration of ZNC using an expect script and environment variables. But forget ZNC, because we’re really talking about That App You...

One of our most popular Red Hat JBoss BRMS demo's, and one that has been available for quite some time, is the CoolStore demo. The CoolStore demo shows how business rules can be used to calculate values like promotional and shipping discounts in a shopping-cart. It furthermore illustrates concepts like ruleflow-groups and dynamic rule updates using KieScanner. Rules and micro-services: the JBoss BRMS Decision Server One of the more interesting features we've recently released in the Red Hat JBoss BRMS...

Welcome to the third installment of That App You Love, a blog series in which I show you how to you can make almost any app into a first-class cloud citizen. If you want to start from the beginning, jump back and check out Part 1: Making a Connection. In Part 2 of this series, we looked at ZNC’s configuration options to decide which settings we wanted to expose to the user, and which settings we could hard-code straight into...

Inspired by a great blog post by Jakub Scholz on "Scalable AMQP infrastructure using Kubernetes and Apache Qpid", I wanted to write a post about the ongoing effort to build Messaging-as-a-Service at Red Hat. Messaging components such as the Apache Qpid Dispatch Router, ActiveMQ Artemis and Qpidd scales well individually, but scaling a large deployment can become unwieldy. As Scholtz demonstrates, there are a lot of manual setup when creating such a cluster using kubernetes directly. The EnMasse project was...

Red Hat Developers and author N. Harrison Ripps have just released the first pieces of a ten-part series ("That app you love") in which Harrison describes the process of deploying an application using containers into a clustered environment on the cloud. Using the ZRC IRC client as a sample application, Harrison demonstrates each step in the process of containerizing software, dealing with issues like statelessness, security, and robustness that are typically architectural hurdles for most development teams moving to a...

Welcome to the second installment of That App You Love, a blog series in which I show you how to you can make almost any app into a first-class cloud citizen. If you want to start from the beginning, jump back and check out Part 1: Making a connection. In our last post, we met my ZNC container, good ol’ znc-cluster-app - but don’t fret about ZNC because we’re really talking about That App You Love - whatever it happens...

I am going to show you how I took an everyday, off-the-shelf application and turned it into a cluster-ready juggernaut of persistent usefulness. Along the way, I’ll share the pitfalls that I hit in getting this all working so that you can chuckle at my misfortune and avoid having to make the same mistakes yourself. This series will run every Tuesday and Thursday until we've accomplished our goals, so stay tuned in, subscribe, and thanks for reading! Meet “That App...