Friday Five — April 15, 2016

Channel partners may have disregarded opportunities in subscription training services in the past, but according to Ken Goetz, VP of worldwide training services at Red Hat, up to 70 percent of sales of its Learning-as-a-Service training subscription offering comes through channel partners, and the opportunity is only growing when it comes to DevOps... According to the exec, there is "huge" opportunity for the channel with Red Hat technologies by positioning training as a subscription... DevOps is a particulary good area for partners to get into as it is highly demanded in today's job market, he said. "People and companies are looking for people with DevOps skills... DevOps has multiple different products, which means you're going to have to learn different things to be successful at it," Goetz continued. "The great thing about a learning subscription is you get access to everything and the latest and greatest of it..." Goetz's comments were made in relation to the addition of five training and certification offerings around IT professional DevOps skills to Learning Subscription.

On April 7, 2014, CVE-2014-0160, better known as Heartbleed, was publicly disclosed by the OpenSSL project, affecting millions of users and devices around the world. Today, two years to the day it was first reported, the vulnerability remains a risk, and the trend of branded vulnerabilities it created continues to have an impact... Among the many vendors that Heartbleed affected is Linux vendor Red Hat. Josh Bressers, security strategist at Red Hat, commented that all versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS and Fedora made available very quickly a fix for Heartbleed. Additionally, he noted that Red Hat has various automated checks that can help ensure a Red Hat customer isn't vulnerable to Heartbleed or any other fixed issue. "If there are systems still vulnerable to Heartbleed out there, I would not expect them to be Red Hat systems," Bressers told eWEEK. Among the many issues the Heartbleed incident highlighted was a need for more collaboration, resources and attention to securing open-source code. One of the key responses to Heartbleed came from the Linux Foundation in the form of the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), a group dedicated to improving open-source code security. During the last two years, CII has had an impact on helping improve security at the OpenSSL project to help prevent another Heartbleed-type incident.

The rise of Linux containers, those shiny, self-contained virtual boxes of application goodness, has brought to light one of the technology's inherent challenges: It's really, really hard to tell exactly what's inside, let alone from where it came... The answer to this conundrum could come from an unlikely place: seaports, and more specifically, shipping containers. Much like Linux containers, shipping containers suffer from security and verification concerns... The shipping industry has risen to meet these problems with innovative security scanners, trusted manifests and other techniques that can be mirrored, if not applied in whole, to the world of Linux container security. For both cargo and Linux containers, security isn't someone else's problem, security is everyone's problem.

Talend, a global leader in Big Data integration software, announced its participation as founding partner of France's first Open Source School, an institution dedicated to higher education training and continuing education for open source solutions. With campuses in six different cities, the Open Source School is designed to help ease the current skills shortage in high-growth markets such as Big Data, the cloud, and Internet of Things and, more broadly, support the growing interest in Open Source technologies. Other market leaders including Acquia, Open Wide, OW2 and Red Hat are also founding partners of the Open Source School. Representatives from Talend and other founding member companies will meet periodically with the Open Source School to define the curriculum and training for the teachers that will serve as classroom instructors. A good example of the benefits of public/private partnerships, students of the Open Source School will also have the opportunity to internship with the founding member companies, providing them with 'real-world,' hands-on experience to augment their classroom studies.

An increasingly common buzzword in cloud computing is microservices. Like a lot of things associated with cloud technologies, a precise definition is difficult to find ndash;and it can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, depending on the context... Microservices is an architectural approach for a software system. Meaning, it defines how individual services fit together and how those services are constructed (like, general constraints or best practices). What sets microservices apart from other architectural approaches is that it treats each service as a discrete and independent part of the architecture. That means that services themselves (within that system) have very clear definitions... A microservice architecture has a lot of advantages, especially by increasing the delivery cadence, potentially increasing both security and quality. It can provide more flexibility in languages across stacks. It can also introduce more operational agility, such as the ability to scale or move services independently... A microservice architecture is a tool. The requirements of the software, the abilities and culture of your IT team, and the availability of related services are all considerations in whether a microservice architecture would be an effective tool for a specific situation.