Containers

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...

Recent: Red Hat was invited to be part of Eclipse Che keynote at EclipseCon 2016 and Pete Muir gave a quick look at working with OpenShift and Eclipse Che. When we create software today , we often hit a brick wall and waste many hours because creating copies of another system is far too hard. We create copies for many reasons - a few common examples are: replicating production issues; asking another developer for help; running test suites; copying the...

Cloud based technology offers the ability to build, deploy and scale applications with ease; however, deploying to the cloud is only half of the battle. How cloud applications are monitored becomes a paramount concern with operations teams. When issues arise, teams and their monitoring systems must be able to detect, react, and rectify the situation. CPU, system memory, and disk space are three common indicators used to monitor applications, and are typically reported by the operating system. However, for Java...

Introduction The GNU Toolchain is a collection of programming tools produced by the GNU Project. The tools are often packaged together due to their common use for developing software applications, operating systems, and low level software for embedded systems. This blog is part of a regular series covering the latest changes and improvements in the components that make up this Toolchain. Apart from the announcement of new releases however, the features described here are at the very bleeding edge of...

A recent blog post, 10 things to avoid in docker containers , describes ten scenarios you should avoid when dealing with docker containers. However, recommendation # 3 - Don’t create large images and the sentence "Don’t install unnecessary packages or run “updates” ( yum update) that download files to a new image layer" has generated quite a few questions. Some of you are wondering how a simple yum update can create a large image. In an attempt to clarify the...

So you finally surrendered to containers and discovered that they solve a lot of problems and have a lot of advantages: First: Containers are immutable - The OS, library versions, configurations, folders, and application are all wrapped inside the container. You guarantee that the same image that was tested in QA will reach the production environment with the same behaviour. Second: Containers are lightweight - The memory footprint of a container is small. Instead of hundreds or thousands of MBs...

Everything on a computer system eventually ends up being run as a sequence of machine instructions. People want to keep things simple and understandable even if that is not really the way that things work. The simple programmer's model of a Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) processor executing those machine language instruction is a loop of the following steps each step finished before moving on the the next step: Fetch instruction Decode instruction and fetch register operands Execute arithmetic computation...

Occasionally, there's a need for a new GNU C Library for a given application to run. For example, some versions of the Google Chrome browser started to warn users on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 that future versions of Chrome would not support their operating system. The Chromium source code contained a version check, flagging all versions of the GNU C Library (glibc) older than 2.19 as obsolete. This check has since been relaxed to 2.17 (the version in Red...