News

Survey Indicates Rise in Container-based Stateful Applications

A survey revealed that more than 75% of IT decision makers are interested in running stateful applications like databases inside containers.

VMware Open Source 'Photon Controller' Infrastructure Control Plane at DockerCon EU

At DockerCon EU 2015, VMware made available their Photon Controller as an open source product via the organisation’s GitHub account. The Photon Controller is a component within VMware’s Photon platform that is designed as an infrastructure stack optimised for ‘container and cloud’ workloads. The platform offers an API-first user experience, a scalable control plane, and native container support.

VirtualBox 5.0 released

Oracle released Oracle VM VirtualBox 5.0. It supports Paravirtualization for Windows and Linux guests, offers improved CPU utilization, supports USB 3.0, enables bi-directional Drag and drop, and lets you encrypt your disk images. It works seamlessly with current versions of Vagrant.

Google Release 'Preemptible' VMs with Fixed Pricing in Beta

Google have released Google Compute Engine ‘preemptible’ virtual machines in beta, which are the same as normal instances with the exception that they are limited to a maximum 24 hour runtime, and may be shut down at any time. Preemptible VMs are offered at a fixed price, which is discounted up to 70% off the prices of normal instances.

VENOM Vulnerability Threatens Several Major VM Hosts

Users of the popular virtual machine tools Xen, KVM, VirtualBox, and QEMU are urged to patch their systems as soon as possible due to a newly found bug that exposes flaws in the code providing virtual floppy disk support. The VENOM vulnerability affects all operating systems that are hosting these environments.

The Peril and Promise of the Early Adoption of Technology

At the inaugural O’Reilly Software Architecture conference, Bryan Cantrill shared lessons learnt from building a business around the early adoption of OS-virtualised containers. Core advice included; don’t innovate in too many directions at once; identify the technical differentiators, and focus on ease of use/adoptions for everything else; and don’t give up - technological revolutions take time.

Alex Bordei on Scaling NoSQL Databases

Network performance, virtualization and testing are some of the considerations to address performance and scalability issues with NoSQL databases. Alex Bordei wrote about scaling NoSQL databases and tips for increasing performance when using these data stores.

Shippable Launches Version 2.0 Leveraging Docker-Based Applications

Shippable recently announced its new platform in the virtualization space, which now supports containerized workflows

HashiCorp Announces Atlas and Receives $10 Million in Funding

Xen Bug Forces Amazon and Rackspace to Reboot Their Services

Last week Amazon Web Services and Rackspace notified customers that their servers would be rebooted as a part of Xen hypervisor patching. This is the second time that AWS has scheduled reboots as a part of its cloud infrastructure maintenance, and AWS published guidance for building applications resilient to reboots and restarts.

Docker Gets Ignore, Auto-Pauses Containers On Commit

Docker 1.1.0 was recently released, within a month of the 1.0 release, with several features such as .dockerignore, pausing of containers when a commit is made to them, tailing logs and several other improvements.

Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto on Vagrant Cloud End of Beta

HashiCorp has released Vagrant Cloud to the public. Vagrant Cloud enables developers to share their locally running Vagrant instances remotely. Additionally Vagrant Cloud is a central place for storing and discovering Vagrant Boxes. With the new Organizations feature, Vagrant Cloud users can limit access to their boxes or shared Vagrant instances with Access Control Lists (ACL).

John Willis on the "State Of The Union" for DevOps

John Willis, one of the leading lights of the DevOps community, addressed the "State Of The 'DevOps' Union" at DevOpsDays Amsterdam. He started by mentioning the findings of the 2014 State of DevOps Report, went on to discuss Software Defined Everything and asserted that the future will be built around "consumable composable infrastructure".

Docker + Apache Brooklyn = Clocker

Clocker, an open source project, enables users to manage and auto-scale Docker containers, in a cloud-agnostic manner. The project is built on top of Apache Brooklyn, a multi-cloud application, management software.

Ravello Now Supports Google Cloud Platform

Ravello Systems spreads its effort on leveraging the job of development and testing teams by integrating with Google Cloud Platform, adding to Amazon AWS/EC-2, Rackspace and HP Cloud, the cloud solutions already supported in Ravello