DevOps

One of the main principles of microservices is to be independently deployable. As a consequence, Microservices development and operation tend to be much more complex than a Monolith because of their distributed nature --- if your IT team has not moved out yet from its silos and has adopted DevOps practices, the operations team will not really understand why they have to deploy hundreds of independent software pieces in opposite to the "good old monolith". "You need a mature operations...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In the microservices landscape, the API provides an essential form of communication between components. To allow secure communication between microservices components, as well as third-party applications, it's important to be able to consume API keys and other sensitive data in a manner that doesn't place the data at risk. Secret objects are specifically designed to hold sensitive information, and OpenShift makes exposing this information to the applications that need it easy. In this post, I'll demonstrate securely consuming API keys...

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...

Last June, Eclipse IDE had a great release, named Neon. It features, among many other less visible but still quite useful improvements, many new functionalities for everyone. If you did not migrate yet and are still using an older Eclipse version, just move to Neon right now, it’s worth it! For this Neon release, Red Hat managed to increase its contributions to the Eclipse IDE. The 2 main teams doing Eclipse IDE development (to package Eclipse IDE as .rpm for...

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...

In order for businesses to stay agile, developers must be able to deploy apps -- quickly, efficiently, and in a streamlined manner. Red Hat Open Innovation Labs uses a container-driven application development framework to perform continuous delivery and accelerate innovation. In this video, I’ll give you a peek into some of the work we at Labs are undertaking to accelerate application development. Specifically, I’ll walk you through the steps to create a deployment pipeline in Jenkins using the JBoss TicketMonster...

One of the greatest advantages of using docker containers is the fact that you can move them between environments. A promotion from Development to a Production environment, shouldn’t take more than some few seconds. This is one aspect of “Continuous Delivery” Because Microservices Architectures are “independently replaceable and upgradeable”, they are the best scenario to show a “Deployment Pipeline”. Red Hat Developers has produced a sample and free application called “Red Hat Helloworlds MSA” that demonstrates different aspects of microservices...

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...

JBoss Enterprise Application Server 7 has been out since June, and if you build and deliver using a Java EE environment and haven’t yet upgraded to EAP7, it’s time to make the jump. Here’s a look at what’s new in JBoss EAP 7, what has changed since JBoss EAP 6, and how to get the most out of JBoss EAP 7 as your Java EE7 server. Overview JBoss EAP 7 is bassed on WildFly Application Server 10, which provides a...

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been working on some Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite workshop material. One part of the workshop is a four-hour lab that guides the attendees through the development of JBoss BPM Suite 6.x processes, rules and applications (note that this workshop is available to our customers, please contact your Red Hat account manager or local Red Hat sales representative for more information), but I'm going to be sharing part of the story with you...

Note: This post is from 2016. For current instructions, reference the documentation. https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/index.html https://docs.ansible.com/ansible-tower/ With DevOps taking hold in businesses ranging from small design agencies to large enterprises, there has been a real push to automate deployments and make them consistent. As part of this, maintaining configuration as code and utilizing a version control system such as Git or Subversion to house it is becoming more prominent. Tools like Puppet and Chef have been around for a number of years...

From a developer’s perspective, “incident management” can be a pretty ambiguous term. While the first thing that comes to mind is receiving and responding to alerts, most IT professionals know it is so much more than that. Effective incident management starts with data collection and continues through alerting, escalation, collaboration, and resolution. At the server level, the most important pieces of incident management are infrastructure monitoring and log management, the vast majority of which are easily configurable on a Red...

Around this time last year, Fedora 22 brought a major update for anyone working under the Fedora hood -- Yum was deprecated and replaced by DNF. It brings some significant changes: Faster, more mathematically correct method for solving dependency resolution A “clean”, well documented Python API with C bindings & Python 3 support Isn’t this a Release by Another Name? No, DNF marks a shift, and not just a fork to Python 3, C support and cleaner docs. The move...

If you like pipelines—specifically the kind that facilitate continuous software delivery, not the ones that drain stuff from your kitchen sink—you'll love Jenkins 2.0. Pipelines-as-code are one of the headline features in the latest version of Jenkins. Keep reading for more on pipelines and other cool enhancements in Jenkins 2.0, and how you can take advantage of them. Jenkins 2.0: New Features Outline Released in April, Jenkins 2.0 is the much-updated version of the open source continuous integration and delivery...

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...

Situation: You’re a great software developer and a fearless leader. Your CEO bursts into your cubicle and he is giving you vast amounts of investment capital, no data center, and limited staff. Your task: build a multi-region, highly available presence in AWS (or your favorite cloud provider) that can be maintained by minimal man-power. Your multi-tier Java EE app is almost ready. You are going to be required to create, maintain, and monitor a large amount of servers, RDS instances...

As far as automated configuration management tools go, Ansible is “the new hotness” on the market. I admit, I am pretty new to Ansible. Until recently, the majority of my configuration management experience has been rooted solely in Puppet. Tack onto that my recent foray back into the world of Red Hat and I have a lot to learn, starting with getting Ansible installed and running on RHEL. There are two ways to install Ansible—via yum, or directly from source...

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...

In a previous post, where-have-all-my-subscriptions-gone, I mentioned that you can access the Red Hat Content Delivery Network (CDN) using its API --- allowing you to query CDN for subscriptions and their usage, registered hosts, and more as well as unregistering hosts, and more. I wanted to do some analysis for my own subscription usage, so I wrote some scripts that let me more easily tell where my subscriptions are being used. Since Python scripting is still fairly new to me...