As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.
Ansible 101 by Jeff Geerling: a YouTube streaming series
After the incredible response I got from making my Ansible books free for the rest of March to help people learn new automation skills, I tried to think of some other things I could do to help developers who may be experiencing hardship during the coronavirus pandemic and market upheaval.
The impact: Not everyone is a frontline worker in this crisis, but then not every problem it has created needs one. This is a great example of someone using their resources to help in a unique way.
Open source security tools for cloud and container applications
Open-source security tools play an important role in securing your container-based infrastructure. Tools such as Anchore can be used for strong governance capabilities, while on the other hand, Dagda can be used to perform static analysis of known vulnerabilities. Two other tools, OpenSCAP and Clair, also provide good capabilities for vulnerability scanning and compliance management. So, depending upon your business requirements and priorities, you can select the right tool to secure your container investments.
The impact: Containers are Linux, and container security is open source as well.
Cloud cover: Clearing up some misunderstandings about data centres
The carbon footprint of data is becoming more and more of a concern, but there appears to be little economic interest in decreasing the amount of data flowing around the world to mitigate this. In that scenario, finding the most energy-efficient and carbon-neutral ways to run purpose-built data centres could be the only answer.
The impact: I was talking to a colleague who manages a team of virtualization engineers about this very problem. He seemed optimistic about the amount of headway his team could make on improving the energy consumption of things like KVM at the kernel level; though at the moment customers aren't asking for it. I'd guess that if, for example, the price of carbon emissions were to go up for some reason, that situation would change pretty quickly.
Business culture is key in OpenStack network requirements
The main question is: What is your culture? Do you go to a vendor and say, 'Give me your design, tell me what to buy and how to support it'? Starting out, you evaluate systems. What are your options?
If you have siloed folks that work on a particular model of equipment, then OpenStack is probably not for you. If you have people that function at a higher level with some fundamental understanding about the underlying architecture that makes things work, then OpenStack can be very useful for you, and you're much less restricted.
The impact: Not every organization can adopt a given technology. Certainly not without a willingness to change at a fundamental level.
I hope you enjoyed this list and come back next week for more open source community, market, and industry trends.
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