Containers

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...

Today, we made the following products generally available: Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio 10.1. -- Download JBDS Red Hat Container Development Kit 2.2. -- Download CDK Red Hat Development Suite 1.1. -- Download DevSuite Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio 10.1 The ever popular JBoss Developer Studio 10.1 has been updated with support for: Eclipse Neon Container labels Docker Compose, Automatically detect known Docker daemon connections Docker image hierarchy view, and more. Learn more about the new features in this 10.1...

The last 4-5 years have seen the debut of many new software products specifically targeting both infrastructure services and IT automation. The consumerization of IT has caused its architects to take a fresh look at their existing, often times monolithic apps and IT infrastructure and asking: Can we do better? How do I keep IT relevant? How do I keep track of all these VMs and data? How do I scale out my IT environment without a huge budget increase...

UPDATE: Read the new article " How to run systemd in a container" for the latest information. What is the scoop on running systemd in a container? A couple of years ago I wrote an article on Running systemd with a docker-formatted Container. Sadly, two years later if you google docker systemd this is still the article people see --- it's time for an update. This is a follow-up for my last article. docker upstream vs. systemd I have given...

Prior to working at Red Hat, I worked for a software company, building financial software for large institutions. From my experiences I knew that some customers required, or demanded, a very aggressive Service Level Agreement (SLA). If we consider an SLA of 99.999% (generally referred to as “five nines”) then this would allow for a six-second unavailability or downtime over a full week, anything more and penalties would have to be paid. To provide this level of uptime, it is...

We have just completed the deployment of the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform v3.13 to all our actively updated grids. This is mainly a bug-fix and enhancement release with no major new features. Please pay particular attention to the extra notes below on Node.js 0.10.x, Cordova Light and CocoaPods 1.x. Highlights Fixed: Release builds of Forms Apps failing for Android in Build Farm Fixed: Photos saved as drafts are not being displayed in Forms App Fixed: Cordova push template does...

In an earlier article, Debugging Java Applications using the Red Hat Container Development Kit, it was discussed how developer productivity could be improved through the use of remotely debugging containerized Java applications running in OpenShift and the Red Hat Container Development Kit. Not only does remote debugging provide real time insight into the operation and performance of an application, but reduces the cycle time a developer may face as they are working through a solution. Included in the discussion were...

Ansible serves as a great tool for those system administrators who are trying to automate the task of system administration. From automating the task of configuration management to provisioning and managing containers for application deployments, Ansible makes it easy. In this article, we will see how we can use Ansible to provision Vagrant boxes. So, what exactly is a Vagrant box? In simple terms, we can think of a vagrant box as a virtual machine prepackaged with the development tools...

The charter of Open Innovation Labs is to help our customers accelerate application development and realize the latest advancements in software delivery, by providing skills, mentoring, and tools. Some of the challenges I frequently hear from customers are those around Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment provisioning and configuration. This article is first in the series of articles that guide you through installation configuration and usage of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This...

You’ve heard of microservices. You’ve heard of OpenShift. You’ve heard of Kubernetes. Actually, you may already have considerable experience with each of these three concepts and tools. But do you know how to combine all of them in order to deploy microservices effectively? If not, this article is for you. Below, I’ll explain how microservices, OpenShift and Kubernetes fit together, and provide an overview of how you can leverage the orchestration tools provided by OpenShift and Kubernetes in order to...

This year’s middleware keynote address at Red Hat Summit talked about microservices, the power of the pipeline, and how developers and devops can work together to release code to production at a much higher rate. The keynote also demonstrated how releases can be shipped so you can switch from the existing deployment to a new deployment (blue/green deployments), and demonstrated how to roll out a canary deployment to a subset of users to test out new features. (If the canary...

Red Hat Mobile Application Platform lets teams extend their development capabilities to mobile by developing collaboratively, centralizing control of security and using back-end integration with a range of cloud deployments. We have just completed the deployment of the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform v3.12 and v4.1 to all our actively updated grids. The main features of this release are: MBaaS v4.1 v4.1 of our MBaaS, which runs on the OpenShift Container Platform 3, includes the following: Support for OpenShift Container...

Microservices are standing at the " Peak of Inflated Expectations". It's immeasurable the number of developers and companies that want to bring in this new development paradigm and don't know what challenges they will face. Of course, the challenges and the reality of an Enterprise company that has been producing software for the last 10 or 20 years is totally different from the start-up company that just released its first software some months ago. Before adopting microservices as an architectural...

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...