Linux 4 Eva

An expert on the operating system tells why she thinks the kernel is so important

Last month, the Linux kernel turned 30. If you ’ re someone who ’ s been immersed in the Linux world since Y2K like me, it may feel a bit surreal that so much time has passed since the kernel’ s inception.

As a training architect at A Cloud Guru (ACG), I teach courses about all things Linux and specialize in handson, lab-based learning. Before joining ACG, I worked as a Unix systems engineer at GE and IBM as well as Technical Account Manager and customer advocate for Red Hat. I’ m hugely passionate about Linux because of its importance to my career, just like to the careers of so many other engineers and Linux enthusiasts.

In its 30 years of existence, the Linux kernel has had a massive impact on the modern computing landscape — revolutionizing what’ s possible for operating systems and allowing countless tinkerers to get their hands dirty in the process. Linux has also become the foundation of paradigm shifting innovations over the years due to its everevolving nature.

To commemorate 30 years of Linux, I’ m sharing some of the key reasons why the kernel is so valuable and why it will continue to be a major player in the computing landscape for years to come.

BY CARA NOLTE

My Linux journey

My first exposure to Linux was in college in 1999. I took an introductory Unix Shell Scripting class and Fedora was installed on the lab servers because it was free and easily scalable. I view Linux as my entry-point into customizable operating systems. After learning basic Unix commands on Linux, I ultimately went on to pursue a career supporting multiple commercial Unix ven-

dors.

As Linux made its way into larger Enterprise level companies, I quickly returned to working with Linux distributions. Something I’ ve always loved about Linux is the capacity to fine tune your system to support the applications and distros that work best for your projects. Linux improves the functionality of whatever applications you ’ re running. The Linux kernel has literally changed how the world processes information, which is why I’ m so invested in the software.

Now, it’ s my job to share my knowledge and passion about Linux to other technologists. At ACG, I develop courses to help aspiring Linux experts learn how to optimize their systems. Additionally, I contribute to “Linux this Month,

” an ACG-hosted web series that provides monthly updates from the global Linux community.

The fact that I am able to build a career around teaching Linux and staying up to date with Linux news shows the vast uses and applications of the kernel. What makes Linux so unique and evergreen is its open-source nature - Linux innovations are only limited by the creativity of the technologists who use and adapt it.

Cara Nolte is a Training Architect at A Cloud Guru, A Pluralsight Company. She is a distinguished engineer with nearly 15 years experience with leading tech companies including Red Hat, GE Digital, IBM and more.

The open-source effect

When Linux first arrived, it was mostly a hobby for enthusiastic engineers and Computer Science students who could contribute by developing code. The steep learning curve associated with fitting Linux to your machine was a barrier for more novice programmers.

Over time, this has changed considerably. Online forums, workshops, and classes have made Linux more accessible to the average internet user. The free sharing of ideas has come to epitomize the open-source community, and for software engineers, Linux is at the heart of this community. This democratization of Linux has had incredibly positive impacts on the computing world.

Now, Linux is everywhere. Enterprise level companies use Linux distributions to process the biggest production workloads in the world. It has replaced proprietary commercial Unix operating systems in very large compa-

nies with better stability and less down time. Because Linux systems can be as small or as large as you want, it's also now being used in our homes for smart and mobile devices as well.

The open-source nature of Linux is incredibly beneficial for these enterprise level companies. Linux distributors leverage the contributions of the entire open-source community. This wide range of contributors produces a more stable product with more features, but also ensures that the OS keeps growing and solving real world problems that are beneficial to a wide range of users.

Linux runs the cloud

Potentially the most impactful outcome of the kernel is the infrastructure of modern cloud computing. Linux ’ s scalability has paved the way for supercomputers and server farms to function efficiently while requiring relatively light-weight computing resources. In fact, Linux supports about 90% of the public cloud workload. Without Linux, the cloud as we know it would not exist. This is, in part, because Linux has become so ubiquitous — it’ s use cases are nearly limitless. Because it has been time-tested, many engineers and IT professionals have a strong grasp on Linux fundamentals, making it an attractive choice for enterprise companies dealing in the cloud.

Cloud-based softwares and products are increasingly becoming the norm in the engineering world. Unsurprisingly, major cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are all supported by Linux as well. Linux is unique because it is a shape-shifter that can conform to the needs of any given engineering environment, and it's incredibly stable because of the army of contributors that fortify weak points in the software.

Linux forever

The Linux

“ concept” is just as important as the Linux product. The concept allows a free and open source operating system to be refined, reinforced, and replicated across an endless web of contributors. Thirty years is a long time for a software to be relevant, especially with the ever-shortening tech product cycles. Because it was designed with the intention to be changed and updated by an opensource community, Linux has no foreseeable expiration date. Had Linux not achieved the prominence it has today, we would see more commercial Unix vendors attempting to solve some of the problems that Linux addresses, but none would address them all. Additionally, customers would have to choose which OS to invest in based on which addresses some of their use cases, but none would be as beneficial as the Linux OS. Linux is always growing and will become even more popular within the next few years. As more people become familiar with Linux and learn to use it, I see major potential for growth in the mobile computing space, within personal computers, and across small and large companies. In fact, we are already seeing it filter into home gaming systems and Raspberry Pi projects. With Linux, the sky's the limit! z Linux Foundation announces new certifications in open source development

The Linux Foundation announced that it created three new training courses on the edX platform, which cover Linux, Git, and other open-source software development tools.

The courses can be taken individually or combined to earn a Professional Certificate in Open Source Software Development, Linux and Git.

Open Source Software Development: Linux for Developers

(LFD107x) covers concepts that are crucial in developing open-source software, as well as how to work productively in a Linux environment. Students will learn about Linux systems, including key concepts like installation, desktop environments, text editors, important commands and utilities, command shells and scripts, filesystems, and compiling software.

The second course, Linux Tools for Software Development (LFD108x) goes over the tools that one would use on everyday work in Linux development. It is intended for developers that are experienced with working on any operating system that want to learn the basics of opensource development.

The final course, Git for Distributed Software Development (LFD109x), offers an introduction to Git and it will prepare participants to use Git to create new repositories or to clone existing ones, commit new changes, review revision histories, and more.

To earn the professional certificate, participants must enroll in the program, complete all three courses, and pay a verified certificate fee of $149 per course. z —JakubLewkowicz

Microsoft adds features, integrations to make Azure

BY JAKUB LEWKOWICZ

Microsoft Azure has been showing faster growth than any other cloud provider over the last few years, and its vast ecosystem of partnerships and integrations continually make it an appealing platform for existing and prospective customers.

The platform currently stands as the second largest cloud offering in the world with 21% market share, following AWS’ s 39% as of Q3 2021, according to Statista. It has a faster growth rate than it’ s larger competitor at 59% for Azure and 32% for AWS.

It offers many features in the data and analytics space, ranging from Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions for data and big data management and analytics, to multiple AI and machine learning offerings, to specialized Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions such as Azure Purview,which is a unified data governance solution that helps users manage and govern their onpremises, multi-cloud, and SaaS data.

However, from a PaaS perspective of the cloud, Microsoft Azure is the leader.

“So from a whole cloud point of view, from just moving compute and workloads, Amazon is still the market share leader. But when we look at this from (the standpoint of) developing and running applications, Microsoft is the leader with a little bit more than 25% of market share, followed by AWS at 15%, ” said Lara Greden, research director for IDC’ s PaaS practice.

Azure ’ s expansion is a combination of both people who are already customers as well as more small and medium-sized businesses that are poised to become larger, especially those that are poised to utilize Kubernetes and cloudnative architectures.

“I think Microsoft Azure really has the kind of leadership to tell people to come here to create the new applications to be a digital-first, ” Greden said.

The cloud in general has reached an inflection point as 75% of companies already have some combination of rehost, replatform, and refactor into the

the second-largest cloud provider in the world

cloud, said Sambit Ghosh, senior vice president of the Microsoft practice at Datavail. Two-thirds of those are most likely lift-and-shift.

“At this point Azure has definitely been creating and enhancing their cloud-native services in a more accelerated fashion in the last several years, ” Ghosh said.

Ghosh noticed that many customers are running applications in Oracle and are looking to move that into Azure Cloud.

Now, Azure has opened up support for Linux and open-source technology to meet that need. Azure now offers full support for common Linux distributions, including Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Oracle Linux and CoreOS. The endorsed Linux distributions are created and published by Linux partners for use in Azure environments.

Platform experience important

In addition to pushing cloud-native, Microsoft Azure offers a plethora of features and integrations to entice people into their platform and to advance the way that people can meet their business goals more efficiently if they ’ re on the platform already.

Part of this comes from meeting developers where they already are, whether they ’ re collaborating on Microsoft Teams — which doubled in usage from April 2020 to 2021 and now has 145 million worldwide users, according to Statista — or by building on the skill sets that many developers already have.

“Microsoft has the leadership ability there, because so many developers have skills in .NET. And then the integrations can be created in .NET with their integration suite. Now, you don ’t just have to have a central team doing it, ” IDC’ s Greden said. “Integrations with legacy systems continue to be the key enabler in today ’ s economy and for the foreseeable future. ”

Microsoft is helping companies with integrations by dispersing that key scaling capability among all of their devel-

< continued from page 9 opers, rather than having integrations managed by a central integration team.

“They ’ re providing that flexibility to customers to meet them in their journey, which I think is definitely a smart move in driving adoption onto the cloud, rather than switching platforms, ” Datavail’ s Ghosh said.

Azure includes features like Azure Cosmos DB, which integrates with Azure services and allows users to choose from multiple database APIs including MongoDB, Cassandra API, and many others.

It also offers plugins for companies that want to run Red Hat or JBoss Enterprise or some other Java apps through the Azure Marketplace.

More people can get their hands on integrations because Azure helps citizen developers utilize integrations through its Power Apps, Microsoft’ s low-code offering.

Microsoft recognized the importance an elastic cost model has in alleviating one of the major concerns of moving the cloud: cost. Power Apps are now available in a pay-as-you go model as of Microsoft’ s announcement at its Ignite event in November 2021.

“[The pay-as-you-go model] basically allows you to take more risks and create more apps, because you ’ re going to pay the right amount, ” Greden said. “Let’ s say you have 1,000 users use it once a month; you ’ re not going to pay the same as somebody who ’ s having 1,000 users using it every day. ”

Microsoft added many new capabilities to Power Apps such as built-in commenting where users can write and share Office-like comments directly inside the authoring canvases of Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, and Power Automate.

Data insights can now be used to discover inefficiencies in workflows and business processes with Process Advisor in Microsoft Power Automate.

AI a heavy emphasis

Azure is putting a heavy emphasis on strengthening its low-code capabilities through AI and its ownership of GitHub, according to Greden.

“[Azure] is able to take all the data in GitHub and feed that through AI models to be able to do AI pair programming and we ’ re just at the cusp of what that will enable companies to do, ” Greden said. “This is key to Microsoft’ s strategy because it enables more people to develop with better quality because quality is still a really big issue when it comes to applications. ”

All of the main AI capabilities that companies seek out have now been bundled into one kind of offering: Azure Applied AI Service, announced at Microsoft’ s 2021 Build event. The

How these two companies rated their Azure journey

Incorporation Insight — The main Azure feature that helped Incorporation Insight, a company that helps customers incorporate businesses, to find success is Azure Stack’s ability to store sensitive data and automatically optimize and process it with Azure Cloud, according to Michael Knight, the company’s co-founder.

“We opted for Microsoft Azure particularly for its generous features that will enable us to address anticipated data distribution complexities due to the ever changing digital usage of consumers, ” Knight said. “Being able to host DevOps public or private cloud interfaces also gives us greater flexibility as a scaling business. ”

Knight also said that his company chose Azure because of its budget-friendly subscription model that charges based on consumption and helps save money on IT. Other top features that he found included Azure’s cybersecurity guarantees and multiple compliance provisions.

CTDev — CTDev, a company that builds custom solutions of various complexity levels in the reinsurance business domain, found that using the Azure DevOps service as a CI/CD managed service provides frees up a lot of value and free-up operation people from managing worker nodes that use nontraditional continuous integration tools like Jenkins.

Viachaslau Matsukevich, a solutions architect at CTDev, said that one can use Azure DevOps as a version control system for storing infrastructure as a code repository. Release management is also greatly implemented here so you can easily track which particular commit was deployed to the end system. Azure DevOps also has great integration with other Azure services.

“Another feature that makes Azure stand out for me is resource groups. It is especially good for (proof of concept) or lab environments where you can clean up everything with a single click and don’t have to worry about some resource leftovers that will cost you money in the future, ” Matsukevich said. “The biggest reason for companies to switch to Azure is their partnership with Microsoft. Also, Microsoft offers great discounts if you already have licenses purchased for MS products like Office or Windows. ” z

Security, governance are challenges for some moving to Azure

When it comes to Azure’s security and governance models, some people are still wary of joining Azure for these reasons, according to Errin O’Connor, founder and chief architect for EPC Group and the author of four Microsoft Press books covering Power BI, SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure.

“When COVID kicked in, people were moving to the cloud like crazy and a lot of people didn’t do it right. So their governance and security model is terrible, ” O’Connor said. “There's just a lack of Azure governance. And there’s typically one or two or five people that know what the hell they're doing in the company with Azure. And they're typically so busy that they don't have time to do much of anything except the task that's at hand, ” O’Connor said. “They're doing all these great things, but are they really thinking of the 12 or 24 month roadmap?”

At first, it’s most important to align the business needs and then to work around that in building out which Azure features to take on, according to O’Connor.

“It's like you have the Honda, the Porsche, and you have the Lamborghini options with Azure. In a lot of cases the Honda's gonna work just fine. But then you have some CIOs or CFOs that are going to want the Lamborghini option. And so how do you match those together so that regardless of what option they take, it's still going to flow together and also work via the security model, ” O’Connor said. “There are all these event grid services, there's web functions, functions, API, app logic…you can name all these different features, but I think they really need to dumb down what their services are and make it so that a person that's been in it for 15 years might know what’s going on. ”

When thinking of moving to the cloud, it’s important to first look at one’s existing tech stack and personal skill sets and make the choice around that, according to Datavail’s Ghosh. Other important considerations when moving to Azure would be to do a careful discovery roadmap and planning of the cloud journey and to look at the cost profile.

“If you’re looking to move to Azure and you do the cloud strategy, the cloud planning, careful thought process and looking at what's the right thing, what is the right provider for your company, I think the cloud journey itself can be much, much less challenging, ” Ghosh said. z

< continued from page 10 service includes Azure Cognitive Search, Azure Form Recognizer, and Azure Immersive Reader, in addition to newer offerings like Azure Bot Service, Azure Metrics Advisor, and Azure Video Analyzer. Azure Bot Service makes it easier to build, test, and publish text, speech, or telephony-based bots through an integrated development experience. Azure Metrics Advisor, now generally available, automatically detects and diagnoses issues to minimize downtime.

“There are a lot of custom applications out there. We see companies running certain (electronic medical records systems) like hospital systems running more specific custom .NET applications that they have written. A lot of colleges have a lot of custom (learning management systems) applications that are running. Banking also has a lot of customization. So within that, AI has been something that companies are more and more interested in, ” said Errin O’Connor, founder and chief architect for EPC Group and the author of four Microsoft Press books covering Power BI, SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure.

Embracing data

O’Connor said that the number one request he is seeing from Azure customers is that they want to move their existing on-premise SQL servers to Azure and then create a data ware-

house.

“Some of the services they ’ re rolling out around Synapse and Purview are around data governance; that’ s all driving and analytics modernization into Azure, ” Datavail’ s Ghosh said.

Azure Synapse Analytics was launched in 2019 as a service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics. Users can query data on their own terms with either serverless or dedicated options at scale.

The service provides a unified experience to ingest, explore, prepare, transform, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs.

“It’ s a little strange because you have Power BI and then you have Azure Analytics. But Analytics is more for Big Data, ” EPC Group ’ s O’Connor said.

This way, users can easily create a holistic, up-to-date map of their data landscape with automated data discovery, sensitive data classification, and end-to-end data lineage and enable data consumers to find valuable, trustworthy data, according to Microsoft in a post.

“We

ing applications being motivated by companies wanting to leverage data more and more to convert the data into information that they can then leverage to make intelligent decisions, ” Datavail’ s Ghosh said. “But in order to do that, you need to first start automating some of your processes and taking the data from your business and bringing it into a common data store. ”

Hybrid cloud models

Azure is expanding its customizability by embracing hybrid cloud models, and the platform offers ways to accomplish hybrid data integration.

“I think Microsoft has done a good job of making that key and central to their strategy. Like they recognize that hybrid cloud will include other clouds and it will include people's own data centers, ” IDC’ s Greden said. “I think AWS is probably still a little heavy on the single cloud sort of point of view, but the rise of Kubernetes is definitely lending itself to that multiple cloud or data center type of operation. ”

For hybrid data integration, Azure includes Azure Data Factory, which enables users to build, manage and run ETL and ELT processes at any scale using code-free interactive user interfaces. This allows for many capabilities to be automated since they are exposed through APIs.

“They ’ re releasing Azure Kubernetes Service and other container instances on top of their hybrid offerings, which allows you to bring your applications into Azure Cloud but you ’ re not locked into Azure Cloud, ” Datavail’ s Ghosh said.

Going down the path of a hybrid model and containerization, Microsoft announced the public preview of Azure Container Apps at Ignite 2021. It functions as a managed serverless container service for developers who want to run microservices in containers without managing infrastructure.

The service offers full support for Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) and scales dynamically based on HTTP traffic or events powered by Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling (KEDA). z

New Azure features

Azure Synapse Analytics service (December 2020)

Azure Synapse Analytics brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics. It enables users to query data using either serverless or dedicated options at scale.

Azure Applied AI Service (May 2021)

The service brings together Azure Cognitive Services, task-specific AI, and business logic to offer users AI services for common business processes. The Azure Applied AI Services are Azure Video Analyzer, Azure Metrics Advisor, Azure Bot Service, Azure Cognitive Search, Azure Form Recognizer and Azure Immersive Reader.

Azure support for Linux (August 2021)

Azure now supports common Linux distributions and enables users to create their own Linux VMs, deploy and run containers in Kubernetes, or choose from hundreds of pre-configured images and Linux workloads available in Azure Marketplace.

Azure Purview (September 2021)

This enables users to maximize the value of their on-premises, multicloud, and SaaS data with this unified data governance solution. Users can create a unified map of your data assets and their relationships with automated data discovery and sensitive data classification and get insights.

Partial document update in Azure Cosmos DB (November 2021)

Azure Cosmos DB Partial Document Update feature (also known as Patch API) provides a convenient way to modify a document in a container. This provides an API for developers, performance improvements, and multi-region writes.

Azure Container Apps preview (November 2021)

A serverless container service built for microservice applications and autoscaling capabilities without the overhead of managing complex infrastructure. Users can run containers and scale in response to HTTP traffic or a growing list of KEDA-supported scale triggers including Azure Event Hub, Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ Queue, MongoDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

Ultra disks support on AKS (January 2022)

Azure ultra disks offer high throughput, high IOPS, and consistent low latency disk storage for stateful applications. Ultra disks are suited for data-intensive workloads.

Azure IoT Edge tools for Visual Studio extension now supports Visual Studio 2022 (January 2022)

Developers can now code, build, deploy, simulate and debug their IoT Edge solutions in Visual Studio 2022. This includes a new Azure IoT Edge project targeting different platforms, a new IoT Edge module and support of of .NET 6 for the C# module. z