The Intel Dynamic Load Balancer is a PCIe accelerator designed for use with their Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) Event Device Library and provides load-balanced, prioritized scheduling of core-to-core communication. Intel DLB aims to provide greater performance than software-based load balancing and the current generation Dynamic Load Balancer is found within the Atom P series for performance / latency optimizations for edge computing workloads. Public information still appears limited but Intel describes the current DLB simply as "Intel Dynamic Load Balancer (Intel DLB) improves performance and reduces latency by dynamically and efficiently distributing processing across up to 24 CPU cores."

Our customer reference team was born out of necessity. It was the early days of Linux, and Red Hat needed to prove that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) could stand up to the competition. We needed validation that enterprises were taking this operating system seriously and that mission-critical workloads could run on top of Red Hat technology. From the beginning of the customer reference team, we knew that customer content was going to be a key part of Red Hat’s marketing mix. This is how our team adapted and evolved over the years to tell innovative stories of customer success, and the four lessons we learned that can help you focus on customer storytelling.

This is the 88th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news.

The newest version of ownCloud, ownCloud Infinite Scale (OCIS), is a complete rewrite of the venerable open source enterprise file sharing and syncing software stack. It features a new backend written in Go, a frontend in Vue.js, and many changes, including eliminating the need for a database. This scalable, modular approach replaces ownCloud's PHP, database, and POSIX filesystem and promises up to 10 times better performance.

Traditionally, ownCloud was centered around the idea of having a POSIX-compatible filesystem to store data uploaded by users—different versions of the data and trash files, as well as configuration files and logs. By default, an ownCloud user's files were found in a path on their ownCloud instance, like /var/www or /srv/www (a web server's document root).

Every admin who has maintained an ownCloud instance knows that they grow massive; today, they usually start out much larger than ownCloud was originally designed for. One of the largest ownCloud instances is Australia's Academic and Research Network (AARNet), a company that stores more than 100,000 users' data.

Containers and OpenShift are clear at this point and that should narrow our scope.

The next main tool which will help you is… Automation!

If you need to do manual steps to achieve parts of the development workflow, it’s just a burden which is holding you back to progress further. The automation doesn’t need to be perfect - in fact, it will never be, just make sure it’s implemented, you can always improve it with spending further development cycles on it once you are aware of the main drawbacks.

Actual tooling? Whatever fits you and your team: e.g. we are using Ansible to achieve most of the automation paired with OpenShift Jobs and expanding into GitHub actions.

Some (Red Hat) teams are using Argo CD, Tekton and Kustomize. Make sure to do your research and pick tooling which is best for your use cases.

The principle remains the same though: use continuous integration to verify the change passes automated tests and continuous delivery for users and developers to try the change before (or after) it’s merged with as little disruption in production as possible.

Microservices and APIs (short for Application Programming Interfaces) have become almost commonplace in sustainable modern application development. APIs drive microservices (an architectural design that structures an application into small, self-contained, and manageable services/pieces) and they define how a consumer (of the API) can interact with and use the underlying service.

To businesses and other organizations, APIs have become the core of digital transformation strategies. The growth in the use of APIs has increased the use of API management solutions by developers to publish their APIs to the public or external developers, internal developers as well as other partners.

We talked with open source developers with years of experience with remote software dev to find out what proprietary developers can learn.

I knew Mastondon was popular among the Free Software world, and I’m aware of individuals who run their own private or public instances. One thing I discovered is how these instances reveal themselves to website owners, like me! This isn’t a secret, or ‘hack’ or whatever, I just found it interesting, so I’m sharing it.

When I publish a blog post, I tend to share it on Twitter, Mastodon, LinkedIn (sometimes) and Facebook (rarely). I don’t use a tool for this, unless “my hands” and “the keyboard” are “tools” (they are). I basically type the entry on one site and paste it on the others. Yes, tedious, but it takes seconds, and I don’t end up annoying people with stuff shared in a weird broken way that leaks back to another social network.

On 1 October 2020, Collabora Online moved to its new home on GitHub, and started settling in the new infrastructure, expanding its fantastic community, and continuing the work to deliver the latest and greatest developments in productivity and collaboration together. Check our new community website for all the details!

The Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL) project is moving development to GitHub today despite what a core developer calls "calamitous design choices" in git, for the sake of familiarity and wide tool support.

SDL is a cross-platform and open-source multimedia library mainly written in C and widely used in game development. Previously it used Mercurial for source code version control and Mozilla's Bugzilla for bug tracking, hosted on their own Linux Server co-located at Digital Ocean, according to a core developer Ryan Gordon.

As we announced back in January, we have offered in partnership with ST on February 9 a free webinar titled Device Tree 101, which gives a detailed introduction to the Device Tree, an important mechanism used in the embedded Linux ecosystem to describe hardware platforms. We were happy to see the interest around this topic and webinar.

LibrePlanet, the world's premier free software conference, is coming up soon. We have two great days of talks planned, with over forty speakers from all over the globe, on March 20th and 21st, 2021. One keynote speaker has been confirmed, copyleft activist Julia Reda, and more keynote will be announced shortly. There will be workshops and lightning talks as well, and all of it will be presented remotely.

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Please help us have the best online free software conference ever -- we can't do it without you!

Pooja Derashri shares the story of how she went from being an introvert from a small village in India to becoming a developer and working on international projects, thanks to the WordPress community.

As her interest grew, Pooja started following some WordPress-based groups on Facebook, where she first heard about conference-style WordPress events known as WordCamps. She later joined her first WordCamp in Ahmedabad, India. This three day event in 2017 opened up a new world—the WordPress community—and what would become a life changing moment. “WordCamp Ahmedabad has one of the best WordPress communities in India,” she said, “and everyone, including organizers and attendees were so humble and welcoming.”