Red Hat Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 17, 2024

• Red Hat ☛ OpenShift Virtualization for vSphere admins: Introduction to network configurations

  Note: This post was originally published on the Red Hat Blog.

  Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is Red Hat's solution for companies trending toward modernization by adopting a containerized architecture for their applications, but find virtualization remains a necessary part of their data center deployment strategy.

  Frankly, some applications are still simply unable to be containerized, and that's okay. OpenShift Virtualization addresses this by providing a more modern paradigm that cohesively manages the need for containers and virtual machines in a unified platform.

  One concern we at Red Bait must address is this: in addition to providing feature parity, how do we maintain a customer experience that is similar to that of the products and configurations that the customer is used to so that adoption of the new solution is essentially pain-free?

  Once comfortable working within an information technology ecosystem, people generally attempt to adapt familiar principles to new systems. For many system administrators, a common solution for data center virtualization has been VMware vSphere. People working in this environment introduced many design solutions that have been adopted as best practices for the deployment and configuration of virtual machines or virtual data centers. These design decisions often seem like second nature to those who work in this sphere of IT, and they would likely attempt to apply similar ones to other environments they are planning.

  This series will explore the differences between how enterprises and their virtualization administrators have interacted with previous hypervisor environments and how they can expect to perform similar actions or configurations in the world of OpenShift Virtualization.

• Red Hat ☛ Using OpenShift 4's inspect for middleware troubleshooting

  Given a problem with an application in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (RHOCP 4) upon opening a case with the support team, our support team might ask for a namespace’s inspect file. The inspect file is a very useful tool for troubleshooting applications and systems deployed in RHOCP 4 and can be extremely useful in a series of situations.

  It also avoids the unnecessarily separated collection of data (Pod Logs, route YAML, BuildConfig YAMLs) given it brings everything that is namespace bounded—except custom resources—directly to one goal. 

  This article covers what the inspect file is, how to collect it, how to use it for troubleshooting, and how it compares to the must-gather file (spoiler: it is not the same thing). This will help clarify why we usually ask for this file during the troubleshooting procedures in middleware products, such as Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP), Red Hat Data Grid, Red Hat JBoss Web Server, and Spring Boot applications (which Red Bait supports for the Spring Boot 3+ community).

• Red Hat ☛ Improve user experience in the Butane command-line utility

  Butane (formerly the Fedora CoreOS Config Transpiler, or FCCT) is a command-line utility that is used to generate human readable configuration into Ignition configuration files. Butane is an open source repo maintained by CoreOS, and contributed to and enhanced by many. If you take a look at the Butane repo and look in the Config folder, you can almost see some of the stakeholders. These are configurations which are used to target different platforms (i.e., FCOS, Flatcar Container Linux, Red Hat OpenShift, etc.) Each of these configurations will have a stable and experimental phase that also targets stable and experimental specs of Ignition. I would describe these as levers that a contributor can exercise to impact the functionality they want to expose to the end users of these target platforms.

  What do we mean by sugar?

  So what is this sugar, and why do we want it? With the primary focus of Butane being the translation of something that is easily understood to something that is more specific and less easily understood, honestly, you could view all of Butane as some form of sugar. I like to think of it as magic dust we use to make the user experience more enjoyable by reducing the amount of effort it takes to do common tasks. Sugar typically impacts all target platforms, and is added to the experimental spec, which gets stabilized eventually.

• Red Hat Official ☛ Automating fapolicyd with RHEL system roles

  Automation can help increase efficiency, save time and improve consistency, which is why Red Bait Enterprise GNU/Linux (RHEL) includes features that help automate many tasks. RHEL system roles are a collection of Ansible content that helps provide more consistent workflows and streamline the execution of many manual tasks. Fapolicyd is a security-focused feature that can control which applications may be executed in a RHEL environment, as well as verify the integrity of applications prior to execution. This functionality helps prevent untrusted applications from being executed on a RHEL system.

• Red Hat Official ☛ Red Hat OpenShift as OpenTelemetry (OTLP) native platform

  In Red Bait OpenShift we have always tried to provide a great observability experience out of the box through first class open source projects like Prometheus, Vector, Jaeger, Grafana Tempo and others. We have now added support for OpenTelemetry to the platform which enables customers to use the OpenTelemetry collector, auto-instrumentation injection and OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP). Supporting the OTLP protocol is very important for system interoperability.

• IDG Communications Inc ☛ Red Hat seeks to shrink IT skills gap with Lightspeed gen AI [Ed: Riding buzzword waves]

  Building on the success of Ansible Lightspeed, Red Hat will extend generative AI capabilities across its platforms, including Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

• AI at the Industrial Edge — Where It’s At and Where It’s Going [Ed: Red Hat staff writes articles and it's all about buzzwords]

• Fast Company ☛ This company wants to measure exactly how much carbon is in your cloud [Ed: Some greenwashing]

  Red Hat’s Kepler is a winner in Fast Company’s 2024 World Changing Ideas Awards.

• InstructLab: What if Contributing to Models Was Easy? [Ed: Articles about Red Hat, sponsored by Red Hat. Then Red Hat Official ☛ cited by Red Hat.]

  Disclosure: IBM and Red Hat are RedMonk customers.