The goal of continuous delivery (CD) is to produce high-quality software rapidly. While the emergence of microservices and cloud-native technology has brought huge benefits in scalability, it has added a layer of complexity to this approach. Security is another big challenge. In this discussion with Tracy Miranda, Executive Director of the Continuous Delivery Foundation, we talked about some of the pain points the organizations face when bolstering their CD practices and how the Foundation is helping to address them.

Swapnil Bhartiya: How would you define continuous delivery? Also, what about the CI part of it because when we talk about it, we always say CI/CD?

Tracy Miranda: We define continuous delivery as a software engineering approach in which teams work in short cycles and they ensure that the code is always released at any point in time. Now, traditionally, people tend to speak a lot about continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). Continuous integration is when developers regularly commit at least once a day to a mainline and keep that main line up to date. But I see continuous delivery as really this umbrella of all the practices you need to keep that software ready to be released at any time. That includes continuous integration, security features, testing and so on. It’s a general set of practices.

Swapnil Bhartiya: CI/CD is a solved problem and there are many open-source projects around it. What role is the Foundation playing in this space?

Tracy Miranda: We know a lot about continuous delivery today and we appreciate that it is really important because it makes such a difference to every business today — not just software companies, but also banks and the healthcare industry. However, the adoption of continuous delivery practices is super low. Many people think they’re doing it, but maybe they’re doing some continuous integration and they haven’t quite figured out how to get through automation.

To top it off, what makes things even more complicated is we’ve seen the rise of microservices and cloud-native technology. While these give us huge benefits in terms of scalability and easy to work on separate parts of the application, they have also increased challenges, like a proliferation of environments and teams having to contend with all these different parts that make up an application.

The Continuous Delivery Foundation is there to help support teams and organizations in the adoption of these practices both from the sense of taking advantage of open source projects in the space and democratizing the best practices. We have a very recent working group that’s spun up to help anyone in this space get better at delivering software.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Security is becoming a serious concern and no longer an after-thought. In most cases, we see that companies were compromised not because of some zero-day, but because they didn’t apply the patch to a known vulnerability. When you have billions of deployments of your applications, it becomes challenging. Talk about the role CD plays in improving security.

Tracy Miranda: Security is a top concern. I think there are lots of different elements to this. On one hand, we talk a lot about shift-left of security. We need to make sure the security professionals and the folks focused on security are tightly involved with the rest of the team. So, there are no silos. People don’t regard security as someone else’s problem. Security starts with the developers.

As an industry, I think it’s really important that we work together to solve industry-level problems such as applying patches that are already available. It’s more or less an outreach problem. We need to be better at telling people to keep their systems updated. We need to cut through the noise of all the different messaging they’re hearing. I think that’s another example where something like the Continuous Delivery Foundation can make a difference in addressing these broad industry problems.

Swapnil Bhartiya: You also mentioned microservices as a challenge for companies. What is being done around solving the problem of continuous delivery for microservices?

Tracy Miranda: That’s a great question. We definitely have the big split of folks who are used to delivering a monolith and they have their existing setup, all geared towards supporting that. Then, there is an increasing number of folks who are trying to take advantage of microservices and all its implications. One of the hot topics that’s emerged for us is configuration management. How we think about this is earlier, the scope of your application was very well defined. With microservices, the definition of an application changes — it’s a set of microservices. How do we talk about which version of each microservice goes into a specific app? If we are continuously pushing code and integrating that, how are those different versions changing relative to each other? How are we testing that all together? So, we’ve definitely think configuration management is a really hot topic and people are looking at tooling in the space. I think we have a couple of interesting projects that might be coming in the pipeline to CDF that will specifically help to drive visibility into this space and give people better tooling to manage all the dependencies around microservices.

Swapnil Bhartiya: There are so many projects and open-source tools for CD, which may also lead to a problem of interoperability.  How big is it a concern for the Foundation and what are you doing to increase interoperability within these tools?

Tracy Miranda: Interoperability is one of those problems where if you’re just working in your own organization, sometimes, it’s not really a problem until it’s time to adopt a new tool or add something into your workflow. If we step back and look at the industry as a whole and take a look across the whole landscape, at the moment, it’s hugely fragmented. There’s a lot of tools doing similar things. It’s very difficult for people to move from different CI tools or different pipeline orchestration tools without having to go through a lot of pain to figure out how to do that. Providers have to implement plugins for different systems. It’s a waste of time and it slows down innovation when we could be moving up the stack.

I think where we are today, there’s a greater appreciation from end users who are saying “We want to simplify this. We want to find better ways for tools to interoperate.” At CDF, one of the very first special interest groups we had was an interoperability working group. This is a set of like-minded folks who got together and said, “As an industry, we should be better and we can be better. We need to figure that out.” It’s a really good group of folks that build the projects like Jenkins X, Tekton, and Spinnaker. We’ve also got a lot of end-user members represented like Ericsson and eBay to make sure that as the problems are being solved, they apply to real-world use cases.

It’s an open group and people are welcome to join these conversations. At the moment, there is a discussion on standardizing interfaces or metadata. Why can’t we have a standardized way to express all the metadata around a release or all the metadata around a set of testing results? I am really excited about what this group is doing and look forward to if they can really achieve this very difficult goal and bring some consolidation around the tooling.

Swapnil Bhartiya: One last question before we wrap this up: how is COVID-19 affecting continuous delivery?

Tracy Miranda: It has definitely increased. We have seen some surveys that show that the adoption of continuous delivery is increasing. The pandemic has emphasized the need to be more resilient and to adapt quickly. Most organizations are going to evolve to be very distributed. Continuous delivery practices enable all those things. The companies who are already doing these practices have a significant advantage in times like these. I think one of the benefits we have as a Foundation is that open source has always been about collaboration at scale and in a distributed way. So, we’re hoping we can take all those lessons and marry open-source practices to continuous delivery practices and make it easier for everybody to adopt them. It shouldn’t be something elite that only a few companies could do. It should be something that’s possible and achievable for every company and every organization out there.

The post Continuous Delivery in the Age of Microservices and COVID-19 appeared first on Linux.com.

The 2020 Open Source Jobs Report just came out so we took the opportunity to speak with Clyde Seepersad, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Training and Certification at the Linux Foundation, about the significance of the report and the insights it provides on the current open source landscape. He touched on the effects of COVID-19 on hiring trends, the open source skills that are in high demand, and how the Foundation is helping organizations meet this demand through high-quality intensive training. Bottom line, he says “We still don’t have enough open source talent. The urgency of finding new ways to bring talent into the market continues to be something that should be front and center for all of us.”

Swapnil Bhartiya: What is the importance of this report? Not only for the open source ecosystem, but companies outside of the open source ecosystem, because today almost everybody’s leveraging open source in one capacity or another.

Clyde Seepersad: One of the things that we didn’t realize several years ago is that there is a lot of data around general employment reports and a few around IT and technology in general, but there was really this gap when it comes to what’s happening on open source talent, and we kept hearing anecdotally that people can’t hire or can’t find enough talent.

And so what we wanted to do was put a really clear spotlight on what’s going on specifically when it comes to the talent pool around open source, to be able to share with the market a sort of non-anecdotal state of the world, but also to be able to inform our own strategy and our own mission, which is to try to ensure not just that there is fantastic code coming out of open source projects, but also that there is enough talent to implement and use it as tool.

Swapnil Bhartiya: What are some of the key highlights of this report?

Clyde Seepersad: A couple of things. One is the rise of DevOps skills. I think everybody knows cloud is hot. It’s been that way for a while, but the companion piece to that around DevOps and the importance of understanding CI/CD pipelines and also the cultural difference of working in that sort of continuous delivery. The rise of that, I think, is something that maybe most people are not quite as aware of.

The second thing I would highlight is that there were a lot of questions about what’s happening to tech hiring in response to the COVID pandemic. We have some answers for that, that says that although hiring slowed down, it did not slow down nearly as much as people might have worried at the outset. In fact, it’s now accelerating.

The top-level thing, which is continuing to be the case, is we still don’t have enough open-source talent. The urgency of finding new ways to bring talent into the market continues to be something that should be front and center for all of us.

Swapnil Bhartiya: So if we look at this report, what are the skills that are kind of not only most in demand, but also hardest to find? That is like a chicken-and-egg solution, right?

Clyde Seepersad: Yeah. Obviously, it’s the cloud skills, right? A lot of the smaller companies, more conservative companies, they kind of make us push them to be much more active on the cloud. What that’s done is raise the stakes in terms of people who are familiar with cloud-native development, cloud-native architecture, Kubernetes orchestration, and then what does CI/CD pipelines look like in a cloud world because obviously, there’s some changes there when you’re running that sort of infrastructure. So those interwoven skillsets, right?

Of course, sitting underneath all of that is what operating system does the cloud run on? I think we all know now that the vast, fast 98% of instances are running on Linux. So you have this tiered approach where understanding from basic Linux competence is a baseline and then you’re building on top of that, looking for cloud-native development, cloud-native orchestration, and then what the CI/CD pipelines look like to bring that to life.

Swapnil Bhartiya: So when we look at this shortage of talent and, at the same time, the demand for talent, in addition to just coming out with this report, do you have any kind of advice or suggestion to the hiring managers? What can they do to attract top developers or talent to their organizations because there is heavy demand and everybody wants them?

Clyde Seepersad: Right. Well, some of the things actually have happened in response to the pandemic, right? One of the trends we saw last year was people wanting the flexibility to be able to work from home. Of course, now we all work from home so that helps. But what came out in the report that was really interesting is that more and more talent managers are realizing that you don’t just have to go externally for talent, that you can, in fact, upskill people who are currently in your organization.

The data suggests that a lot more people are waking up and realizing that trolling LinkedIn for your next hire is a zero-sum game because other people are doing the same. They’re starting to invest more in training, especially online training. They’re starting to invest more in certifications for their employees. And just in general, they’re starting to be much more proactive in looking at investing into their talent pool and finding ways to provide new opportunities for development. Of course, that also comes with new job opportunities for the existing employee base.

Swapnil Bhartiya: I just want to talk a little bit more about COVID-19. A couple of things are happening with COVID-19: a lot of companies that are scaling down. They’re cutting budgets and everything. At the same time, since people are able to work remotely, you don’t have to relocate yourself or you don’t have to find talent in the same area. You have access to almost everybody wherever they are. So how has COVID-19 affected the hiring process itself in terms of while they do have to scale down to some extent, the beauty is, I should not say that, the world that we are living in is all powered by cloud and technology. All the purchases that I was making even in my Indian grocery, they now have a website. I can just go and place an order. It was not the case earlier. So, cloud actually enabled companies to stay in business. That also means that you do need developers and all those talents to keep those businesses running. At the same time, you have the advantage of not having to relocate. So talk a bit about it.

Clyde Seepersad: Yeah, that’s true. I don’t think that’s tied together, right? So as people have been forced to use the cloud more, I had the same experience you did. My local Chinese restaurant suddenly developed a website and they have an ordering business that they did not previously have. Every business is now an e-commerce business is true, right? So there’s this broader footprint.

On the flip side of it, you also have people who are now having to work from home, where they maybe didn’t use to, either for practical or maybe cultural reasons within the company. That also then intersects with the sort of cultural change and the cultural norms of CI/CD and DevOps, right? This idea that you have to be in person together versus this idea that you have a well-documented pipeline and everybody can contribute to that pipeline and do their commits and do their code, that whole tooling ecosystem of cloud native and DevOps has actually made it, made it easier—and I would argue, possible—to do what’s happened and what we’ve seen over the past several months, which is people being productive, working from home, working with people they haven’t worked with before, onboarding new team members, and being able to get them provisioned with the right access and up skill on the right systems. It’s all really come together. In my view, we have been lucky that we’ve got the technology infrastructure that we have today because I don’t know that we would have been able to stay as productive and focused in a sudden shift to remote work if we were trying to do this even five years ago,

Swapnil Bhartiya: I’m a good example of that because I have been working from home ever since I moved out of India. What I realized was that I work when I feel that I’m most productive instead of hey, I have to clock in at 9:00 AM and I have to clock out at 5:00 PM. I have to sit there and do something. It doesn’t matter how I feel. And then sometimes, there are personal issues. Somebody is sick in the family and your mind is there, but you have to come to the office. I think remote working offers the best balance between work and life. Of course, it is actually more challenging because you may end up working all the time, but still, it offers a better balance. Earlier you were talking about how you don’t have to go out to hire people; you can also internally train people. So when we look at organizations and they look at all these new cloud-native technologies and they want to retain or prepare their own workforce, what resources are available there, especially from the Linux Foundation so that they can better equip their own workforce when there is already a shortage of a lot of talent?

Clyde Seepersad: Yeah, it’s a good question, Swapnil. From a practical perspective, the portfolio that we have provided, which is very heavily focused on self-paced e-learning that you take online, but at the same time, very skills-based, very lab-intensive online training, because ultimately, what do you care about as a colleague or as a hiring manager? It’s not whether they check the box and they have a certificate saying they completed a course. What you care about is the skills, right? Did they actually develop those skills? So, we’ve got a pretty big portfolio of very hands-on, self-paced e-learning programs to help people develop the skills. And then we’ve continued to build our portfolio of performance-based certification exams. So this is not your grandad’s pick an answer out of a lineup, right? These are live systems with variable questions, and you have to demonstrate your skills under the pressure of time, under the pressure of being proctored by an independent person. I think it’s that one-two punch of really focusing on skills.

I joke with people all the time. We get feedback sometimes that our courses aren’t don’t have enough video. And I say, “Well, true, because we’re not trying to entertain you. We’re trying to develop skills and the way you develop skills is not by staring at a screen and listening to a video. The way you develop skills is by doing a lab.” So we’ve got a very lab-centric mindset in terms of the training side of it and that carries on into the certification side of it, where it’s all about performance. Show that you can do the work, take the time to develop the skills because that’s what your colleagues are going to be looking for. That’s what your employers are going to be looking for. That’s what’s going to benefit you personally, as an individual — to be able to have that broader skill set and to be able to do that in a remote way and not have to rely on a senior trainer coming onto site and working with you. I think that’s going to be the new normal.

Swapnil Bhartiya: The advantage of this crisis is that people are realizing that they don’t have to move. Actually, they can move to the ideal pace they wanted to live. It could be a big ranch, it could be a beach, and they can work for companies who are operating in Silicon Valley, which also means you can also cross national boundaries. The whole idea of hope is open source is the best and the brightest people from around the globe. So how do you enable these people? People come from different cultural backgrounds, different education backgrounds, and different languages. Do you also help them irrespective of where they’re coming from, whether it’s internationalizing or supporting different languages so people can get training?

Clyde Seepersad: Yeah. Our LS training, we do that. Obviously, the online format helps because it’s truly available 24/7 globally, nights and weekends. So that really has expanded the footprint of what we’re able to do and who we are able to reach. We’ve also done some translations, particularly for the certification exams to make those available in languages that we know folks may not otherwise be comfortable with, for Japan and China, for instance.

What we’re trying to do is mirror what we’re seeing in the workforce. The shift towards more remote work has actually opened up the pipeline. When you think about hiring and talent management, if you think about somebody who is in the US or in Western Europe, your pool is not as limited. You really can reach out to this global pool of talent in non-traditional markets. We’ve seen sectors get hot. Obviously, India has a lot of workshops today. There’s a ton of stuff happening in Eastern Europe now, but it really is global, right? We’ve got folks on our team in South America being super productive in this new remote way of working. I think that’s becoming more and more typical. Because of the rise of cloud native, because of the rise of Cloud Native, because of the rise of this sort of collaborative DevOps mindset, we are able to collaborate across regions, across countries, across time zones, much more effectively than they ever have before.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Awesome. Clyde, thank you so much for talking to me today about not only this report, but also how to help hiring managers not only get more talent, but also not retrain their own employees. I look forward to talking to you again. Thank you.

Clyde Seepersad: Hey, it’s always a pleasure to be with you, Swap. Thank you.

The post DevOps Replaces Developers As Most Sought After Skill Set appeared first on Linux.com.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you tell us a bit about what is the primary goal of Training and Certification at the Linux Foundation?

Clyde Seepersad: If you look at the history of open source, the first wave of folks was very DIY. They would jump in, they would read the docs, and they would get on IRC channels. That was a sort of true way in which you get into open source — by figuring it out yourself. But of course, that’s never been true for software in general. People always get trained on commercial products. Companies have whole market enablement arms.

One of the things that we identified a few years ago is that there was this gap between amazing quality open source products that were changing how computing gets done, and the talent development side of things. How do we create on-ramps for talent in an age of open source where you don’t necessarily have the same quarter market commercial organizations, making sure that people get trained and up-to-speed technically on the software products? And so that’s a piece where we’re really trying to fill — that entry-level talent gap.

Swapnil Bhartiya: I have seen that there is no shortage of all these training but mostly, they are specific to a vendor and its product. So, when it comes to vendor-neutral technologies, core technologies, that is where there is a huge void. I think that’s the void LF is trying to fill?

Clyde Seepersad: Correct. It’s for the core technologies. And we always say you need a starting point that’s most useful to most people and that is a vendor-neutral understanding of the core technologies. We really try to focus on entry-level talent because we recognize that the commercial ecosystems are really valuable. When you get up into the intermediate and advanced layers, by definition, you’re working with specific tool sets and it’s appropriate for you to move into that more specific type of training. But when you’re getting started, you really need that broadest possible foundation because you don’t know if you’re going to be working in an Azure shop. You don’t know if you’re going to be in a GCP shop. You don’t know which district you’re going to be using. And so the broader the footprint that we can give people to start with, the better. That’s kind of where we focus —entry level, vendor-neutral— so people are best prepared for the maximum number of career opportunities.

Swapnil Bhartiya: The way we learned was we just learned everything ourselves: find it on the Internet, read a lot of books, download stuff, get series. But in today’s world where everybody’s connected, what kind of demand is there for this very basic entry level, for respecting the open source space?

Clyde Seepersad: Yeah. I’ll give you a good example, Swapnil. Just this past week, we actually announced the 1,000,000th enrollment in our free Intro to Linux course on edX, which kind of blows my mind. We were able to get out on the internet and find one million people from 222 different countries who wanted to learn the fundamentals of Linux, what it is and what it can do. I think that really shines a good light on just how broad the basis is and I think more importantly, how global the basis is, right? There’s a lot of data on-ramps into a technology career if you’re in North America or if you’re in Western Europe, as they are more mature ecosystems with different entry points. When you look globally, there are a lot fewer of those. So that part of our mission is, “Hey, this is not an isolated technical challenge for the US or for France or Germany. This is a global technical challenge.” And we’re seeing that demand.

The second highest number of enrollments for free Linux courses is from India and that there’s a broad, deep move to this. The example I’ve taken to giving recently is with the pandemic of 2020, my favorite local Chinese restaurant, which is a small mom-and-pop operation, shut down. When they came back online, they came back online with a website and an online ordering system. And I asked, “How did you guys get that set up?” And she said, “Oh, we had to go hire somebody. We had to go figure out how to make a mom-and-pop strip model Chinese food business into a web-enabled business.” It gives an example of the breadth that also is increasingly true: every business is now a technology business.

Swapnil Bhartiya: One more thing that people do not give credit or recognize is that despite these tough times, open source technologies, the way they have democratized, because building your own stack is so hard and so expensive. At the same time, if you want to start a business, having your own data centers so cloud and open source, you gave an example. As is the case with my Indian store because of this social distancing, or we did not want to go out, now they never did that, but suddenly everything was available online, you can just go online, place the order and get it delivered to your home. What enabled them to move quickly was all these democratization that has happened here. And at the same time, there is enough talent pool that you guys help create who can actually handle that kind of work. Because of that, suddenly, there is a surge. When we do look at all these technologies, we hear buzzwords like Kubernetes and all those things, they are intimidating. For somebody who is kind of new who wants to get into that, but they have no experience in any of these technologies, or any of these industries, how should they get started?

Clyde Seepersad: That’s a great point, Swapnil. Actually, that exact challenge is why we recently announced the creation of a new entry-level exam for what we call “IT associates”. It’s one of these recognitions that for those of us in tech, getting started seems like a fairly obvious thing, right? You learn the basic operating system, you get familiar with the cloud technologies, and you start thinking about the problems of stability and scale insecurity. If you’re on the outside looking in and you have never learned this stuff, you don’t know anybody in your community or your family who does it. It is a very tall ask to say, “Hey, go start by getting certified in Linux” or “Go start by getting the Azure certification or an AWS certification.” It’s just too much to ask for folks. You need some intermediate step to help people build confidence that this is something that they can do, even if they don’t have a support system and a network and a set of role models around them.

So, we developed this program to see if we can create a pre-professional certification exam that demonstrates that somebody has understood the fundamental concepts in terms of the new cloud infrastructure, the microservice infrastructure, the cloud native infrastructure without forcing them to get to the finish line of “Hey, I’m a competent cloud administrator,” right? It’s too much to ask folks to get in one go. It’s too much in terms of the time, it’s too much in terms of the level of effort without giving them some midpoint to see, “Okay, I feel confident that I can do this. I have the aptitude. I’ve been able to demonstrate that I can learn some of the basics.” And that really is the audience that we’re targeting. These are folks who are coming from the outside, new to IT, who understand the potential and they can see themselves doing it, but we have to give them somewhere to hang their hat to see, “Okay, it’s going to be fine. It’s a lot to learn, but I’ve shown that I can do it. I’ve shown competence. I’ve shown the aptitude. And potentially, I’ve shown enough to start getting a look from a potential employer or for a potential internship, but it’s some entry rung on the ladder.” That’s really what we’re going after: the recognition of it can be a daunting task to try to get somebody all the way up to technical competence. A pre-professional stepping stone could really help make IT seem like a more realistic career option for a lot of folks. 

Swapnil Bhartiya: If you look at open source, we all know a lot of core developer maintainers, they have no formal training. Somebody was a doctor and suddenly became a maintainer of a major open source project. But when we look at this whole “serving the enterprise space”, why do we need formal training when you can just go online and learn everything on your own?

Clyde Seepersad: That’s true. It reminds me of the last time I went to the doctor and he had a cartoon printed out on the wall that said that “Your Google search is not as good as my medical degree.” This is not a technology problem. The explosion of information on the Internet has made it possible to access a lot of knowledge and a lot of information. What it doesn’t do is make it easy and structured. So there are always going to be folks, just like they have been historically, who can go between the documentation and the discussion boards and the YouTube videos. They can figure it out for themselves. And our perspective is that’s great. Those people probably don’t need our help, but they’re probably in the single digits if you think of the percentages of people. 

Most folks need more structure. They need more guidance. They need labs that they can get through to have a solution that if they get stuck, they could go say, “Oh, that’s it, I forgot to open that port.” It’s not that training brings any dramatic new content to the table. What it does is it creates a structured path to help people go through a structured set of exercises and the availability of help if you get stuck. We have discussion boards and different forums for providing that help. It’s not that you couldn’t do it by scouring the web. It’s that the vast majority of people who take an already daunting topic and make it just impossible, right? We’ve got to put the breadcrumbs now to help people find it. That’s where we focus. We’re saying this information exists, but it doesn’t exist in a way that most people can digest it and can wrap their head around and stay committed to a path of getting from here to there. The training program, that’s what it does. It helps people find the path to get to where they want to go without having to invent the path by themselves.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Right. Also, the reason you need this structured training is you’re going to serve a particular industry, you are not just learning something. There’s a big difference in learning about something versus serving a specific industry. There are a lot of challenges. There are a lot of sets of procedures. So yes, it does play a very big role. You can learn everything yourself, but you should go through that specific training to prepare yourself for the job. Now, if you look at Linux Foundation, you guys do a lot of work in this training space. Can you kind of just give a few examples of the work that you’re doing to kind of help that talent gap? Linux Foundation also comes up with the report every year where we see there is such a huge gap between supply and demand of talent.

Clyde Seepersad: Correct. And we’re actually going to publish our newest version, the 2020 version of that report, the Open Source Jobs Report shortly. I’ll give you sort of a sneak preview. Even with the pandemic going on, more than 50% of the respondents said that they’re going to be hiring entry-level talent. And it’s really because there’s only so many times you can go to LinkedIn and try to poach somebody, right? Companies have realized that it’s a zero-sum game. You’re going to have to build and grow talent in-house, especially if you’re taking legacy loads and try to make them cloud-native and move them into the cloud, right? Getting brand-new people is not necessarily going to be the best way to make that happen. As LF, what we were doing is trying to say, “You need a portfolio of solutions to try to help fill that gap in the market.”

So, we do things like the Intro to Linux course I was talking about, which is available for free on the web. Anybody can go sign up for it and you don’t have to pay a dime. We have new exams like this entry-level certification exam. We’ve got instructor training for folks who want that. We’ve got affordable e-learning options for folks who want that. We recently put together some bootcamp tech programs to train people, to have that extra layer of instructor support. We recognize that there is no one silver bullet. It’s a portfolio of different actions to try to figure out different people who are in different places. How do we create solutions for them to find a path to get to where they want to go with the right level of intensity, the right level of support, and importantly, the right level of availability, and the right affordability. Because that, in reality, is a barrier for a lot of folks. Not everybody can drop $10,000 on a coding bootcamp. 

Swapnil Bhartiya: That also made me think that how do you also help individuals meet their own educational goals. As you said, sometimes, you need so many resources there?

Clyde Seepersad: Yeah. The structured training programs help because it helps folks see that there is a sequence in which they can learn and grow. It’s also helpful for them to just get into the discussion boards that we provide and be able to engage, not just with the instructors, but with the other people in the programs, to figure out “These are the challenges we’re all facing, I’m not alone in this. Other people are stuck in similar places.” Just like we were talking about with the new certified IT associate, folks see that they’re not alone and helping them get help and making it easy for them to access that help is an important part of making it accessible. I mean, ultimately, what we want is to create a pathway where people can succeed, where the barriers to entry come down. 

A lot of that is around building the community, the affordability, the accessibility, and coming from a place where we are fortunate in the Foundation that we’re a nonprofit. Folks get that we’re not trying to appease shareholders. We really are a mission-driven organization and I think that also helps give people the confidence that the agenda here really is to expand the talent pool. It really is to try to help folks. I think the mantra for my team has been, “Great code alone can’t change the world.” You still need people in there implementing systems, implementing solutions, providing support. So, the open source revolution does need a talent revolution to help sustain it.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Now, we did touch upon this point at different points, but do you need to have some specific qualification or you should be in a specific location or you should be of certain age to join these training programs?

Clyde Seepersad: No. We really do make this, as my training director likes to joke about it, we try to go down to what is the file level, right? If you look at our Intro to Linux course, for instance, it really starts by saying, “What’s an OS? What’s a file? How do you install it?” And the beauty of doing this stuff as self-paced learning is it allows people to skip ahead. Usually, you would look at the outline and you can figure out, “Oh, okay, Chapter 7 is where my journey needs to start.” So, it allows people to opt into a training program and find their level, but it also allows people who truly are new to this to find an accessible path in.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Awesome. Clyde, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about this training and certification. And I look forward to talking to you again. Thank you.

Clyde Seepersad: Same here. I really appreciate you having me, Swapnil.

The post Role of Training and Certification at the Linux Foundation appeared first on Linux.com.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Today, we have with us Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking, IoT and Edge, at the Linux Foundation. Arpit, what were some of the highlights of this event? Some big announcements that you can talk about?

Arpit Joshipura: This was a global event with more than 80 sessions and was attended by attendees from over 75 countries. The sessions were very diverse. A lot of the sessions were end-user driven, operator driven as well as from our vendors and partners. If you take LF Networking and LFH as two umbrellas that are leading the Networking and Edge implementations here, we had a very significant announcement. I would probably group them into 5 main things:

Number one, we released a white paper at the Linux Foundation level where we had a bunch of vertical industries transformed using open source. These are over 100-year-old industries like telecom, automotive, finance, energy, healthcare, etc. So, that’s kind of one big announcement where vertical industries have taken advantage of open source.

The second announcement was easy enough: Google Cloud joins Linux Foundation Networking as a partner. That announcement comes on the basis of the telecom market and the cloud market converging together and building on each other.

The third major announcement was a project under LF Networking. If you remember, two years ago, a project collaboration with GSMA was started. It was called CNTT, which really defined and narrowed the scope of interoperability and compliance. And we have OPNFV under LFN. What we announced at Open Networking and Edge summit is the two projects are going to come together. This would be fantastic to a global community of operators who are simplifying the deployment and interoperability of implementation of NFVI manual VNFs and CNFs.

The next announcement was around a research study that we released on open source code that was created by Linux Foundation Networking, using LFN analytics and COCOMO estimation. We’re talking $7.2 billion worth of IP investment, right? This is the power of shared technology.

And finally, we released a survey on the Edge community asking them, “Why are you contributing to open source?” And the answer was fascinating. It was all-around innovation, speed to deployment, market creation. Yes, cost was important, but not initially.

So those were the 5 big highlights of the show from an LFN and LFH perspective.

Swapnil Bhartiya: There are two things that I’m interested in. One is the consolidation that you talk about, and the second is survey. The fact is that everybody is using open source. There is no doubt about it. But the problem that is happening is since everybody’s using it, there seems to be some gap between the awareness of how to be a good open source citizen as well. What have you seen in the telco space?

Arpit Joshipura: First of all, 5 years ago, they were all using black box and proprietary technologies. Then, we launched a project called OpenDaylight. And of course, OpenDaylight announced its 13th release today, but that’s kind of on their 6-year anniversary from being proprietary to today in one of the more active projects called ONAP. The telcos are 4 of the Top 10 contributors of source code and open source, right? Who would have imagined that an AT&T, Verizon, Amdocs, DT, Vodafone, and a China mobile and a China telecom, you name it are all actively contributing code? So that’s a paradigm shift in terms of not only consuming it, but also contributing towards it.

Swapnil Bhartiya: And since you mentioned ONAP, if I’m not wrong, I think AT&T released its own work as E-com. And then the projects within the Foundation were merged to create ONAP. And then you mentioned actually NTD. So, what I want to understand from you is how many projects are there that you see within the Foundation? The problem is that Linux Foundation and all those other foundations are open servers. It’s a very good place for those products to come in. It’s obvious that there will be some projects that will overlap. So what is the situation right now? Where do you see some overlap happening and, at the same time, are there still gaps that you need to fill?

Arpit Joshipura: So that’s a question of the philosophies of a foundation, right? I’ll start off with the most loose situation, which is GitHub. Millions and millions of projects on GitHub. Any PhD student can throw his code on GitHub and say that’s open source and at the end of the day, if there’s no community around it, that project is dead. Okay. That’s the most extreme scenario. Then, there are foundations like CNCF who have a process of accepting projects that could have competing solutions. May the best project win.

From an LF Networking and LFH perspective, the process is a little bit more restrictive: there is a formal project life cycle document and a process available on the Wiki that looks at the complementary nature of the project, that looks at the ecosystem, that looks at how it will enable and foster innovation. Then based on that, the governing board and the neutral governance that we have set up under the Linux Foundation, they would approve it.

Overall, it depends on the philosophy for LFN and LFH. We have 8 projects each in the umbrella, and most of these projects are quite complementary when it comes to solving different use cases in different parts of the network.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Awesome. Now, I want to talk about 5G a bit. I did not hear any announcements, but can you talk a bit about what is the word going on to help the further deployment of 5G technologies?

Arpit Joshipura: Yeah. I’m happy and sad to say that 5G is old news, right? The reality is all of the infrastructure work on 5G already was released earlier this year. So ONAP Frankfurt release, for example, has a blueprint on 5G slicing, right? All the work has been done, lots of blueprint and Akraino using 5G and mech. So, that work is done. The cities are getting lit up by the carriers. You see announcements from global carriers on 5G deployments. I think there are 2 missing pieces of work remaining for 5G.

One is obviously the O-RAN support, right? The O-RAN software community, which we host at the Linux Foundation also is coming up with a second release. And, all the support for 5G is in there.

The second part of 5G is really the compliance and verification testing. A lot of work is going into CMTT and OPN and feed. Remember that merge project we talked about where 5G is in context of not just OpenStack, but also Kubernetes? So the cloud-native aspects of 5G are all being worked on this year. I think we’ll see a lot more cloud-native 5G deployments next year primarily because projects like ONAP or cloud native integrate with projects like ONAP and Anthos or Azure stack and things like that.

Swapnil Bhartiya: What are some of the biggest challenges that the telco industry is facing? I mean, technically, no externalization and all those things were there, but foundations have solved the problem. Some rough ideas are still there that you’re trying to resolve for them.

Arpit Joshipura: Yeah. I think the recent pandemic caused a significant change in the telcos’ thinking, right? Fortunately, because they had already started on a virtualization and open-source route, you heard from Android, and you heard from Deutsche Telekom, and you heard from Achronix, all of the operators were able to handle the change in the network traffic, change in the network, traffic direction, SLS workloads, etc., right? All because of the softwarization as we call it on the network.

Given the pandemic, I think the first challenge for them was, can the network hold up? And the answer is, yes. Right? All the work-from-home and all these video recordings, we have to hang out with the web, that was number one.

Number two is it’s good to hold up the network, but did I end up spending millions and millions of dollars for operational expenditures? And the answer to that is no, especially for the telcos who have embraced an open-source ecosystem, right? So people who have deployed projects like SDN or ONAP or automation and orchestration or closed-loop controls, they automatically configure and reconfigure based on workloads and services and traffic, right? And that does not require manual labor, right? Tremendous amounts of costs were saved from an opex perspective, right?

For operators who are still in the old mindset have significantly increased their opex, and what that has caused is a real strain on their budget sheets.

So those were the 2 big things that we felt were challenges, but have been solved. Going forward, now it’s just a quick rollout/build-out of 5G, expanding 5G to Edge, and then partnering with the public cloud providers, at least, here in the US to bring the cloud-native solutions to market.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Awesome. Now, Arpit, if I’m not wrong, LF Edge is I think, going to celebrate its second anniversary in January. What do you feel the product has achieved so far? What are its accomplishments? And what are some challenges that the project still has to tackle?

Arpit Joshipura: Let me start off with the most important accomplishment as a community and that is terminology. We have a project called State of the Edge and we just issued a white paper, which outlines terminology, terms and definitions of what Edge is because, historically, people use terms like thin edge, thick edge, cloud edge, far edge, near edge and blah, blah, blah. They’re all relative terms. Okay. It’s an edge in relation to who I am.

Instead of that, the paper now defines absolute terms. If I give you a quick example, there are really 2 kinds of edges. There’s a device edge, and then there is a service provider edge. A device edge is really controlled by the operator, by the end user, I should say. Service provider edge is really shared as a service and the last mile typically separates them.

Now, if you double click on each of these categories, then you have several incarnations of an edge. You can have an extremely constrained edge, microcontrollers, etc., mostly manufacturing, IIoT type. You could have a smart device edge like gateways, etc. Or you could have an on-prem silver type device edge. Either way, an end user controls that edge versus the other edge. Whether it’s on the radio-based stations or in a smart central office, the operator controls it. So that’s kind of the first accomplishment, right? Standardizing on terminology.

The second big Edge accomplishment is around 2 projects: Akraino and EdgeX Foundry. These are stage 3 mature projects. They have come out with significant [results]. Akraino, for example, has come out with 20 plus blueprints. These are blueprints that actually can be deployed today, right? Just to refresh, a blueprint is a declarative configuration that has everything from end to end to solve a particular use case. So things like connected classrooms, AR/VR, connected cars, right? Network cloud, smart factories, smart cities, etc. So all these are available today.

EdgeX is the IoT framework for an industrial setup, and that’s kind of the most downloaded. Those 2 projects, along with Fledge, EVE, Baetyl, Home Edge, Open Horizon, security advanced onboarding, NSoT, right? Very, very strong growth over 200% growth in terms of contributions. Huge growth in membership, huge growth in new projects and the community overall. We’re seeing that Edge is really picking up great. Remember, I told you Edge is 4 times the size of the cloud. So, everybody is in it.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Now, the second part of the question was also some of the challenges that are still there. You talked about accomplishment. What are the problems that you see that you still think that the project has to solve for the industry and the community?

Arpit Joshipura: The fundamental challenge that remains is we’re still working as a community in different markets. I think the vendor ecosystem is trying to figure out who is the customer and who is the provider, right? Think of it this way: a carrier, for example, AT&T, could be a provider to a manufacturing factory, who actually could consume something from a provider, and then ship it to an end user. So, there’s like a value shift, if you may, in the business world, on who gets the cut, if you may. That’s still a challenge. People are trying to figure out, I think people who are going to be quick to define, solve and implement solutions using open technology will probably turn out to be winners.

People who will just do analysis per analysis will be left behind like any other industry. I think that is kind of fundamentally number one. And number two, I think the speed at which we want to solve things. The pandemic has just accelerated the need for Edge and 5G. I think people are just eager to get gaming with low latency, get manufacturing, predictive maintenance with low latency, home surveillance with low latency, connected cars, autonomous driving, all the classroom use cases. They should have been done next year, but because of the pandemic, it just got accelerated.

The post Telcos Move from Black boxes to Open Source appeared first on Linux.com.

August was a historic month for Linux. The largest open source project on the planet enjoyed its one-millionth code commit. The honor goes to Ricardo Neri, the Linux kernel engineer at Intel. Swapnil Bhartiya, founder, and host at TFiR sat down with Neri on behalf of the Linux Foundation to discuss Neri’s journey and involvement with the Linux kernel community.

A lightly edited transcript of the interview:

Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is Bhartiya, on behalf of the Linux Foundation, and today we have with us Ricardo Neri, Linux Software Engineer at Intel, whose code contribution has become 1 millionth contribution to the Linux kernel.

Ricardo Neri: Hi, thank you. Thank you very much.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Ricardo, tell us a little bit about yourself, your journey. When was the first time you came in contact with open source or Linux in general?

Ricardo Neri: That was, I think in 2008. It was a time when the iPhone came out and at the time I used to work in Symbian, but then because the iPhone came out, Symbian died. So I was transferred to a new team, which was working on audio drivers for Linux and the VS. So, maybe by chance I landed on that team and that’s how I started 12 years ago.

Swapnil Bhartiya: You started contributing to the kernel as part of your organization, but you had personal interactions with the kernel community. How was that interaction?

Ricardo Neri: It was very daunting because I had heard that it was really hard to convince maintainers to take your code. And also, I don’t know, maybe intimidating because the people in the community were very smart and also, they had strong opinions for various things. So yeah, maybe I’d say it was intimidating but exciting at the same time.

Swapnil Bhartiya: How have you seen the community itself evolve over time?

Ricardo Neri: Just building on my previous comment I saw at the time that maintainers, they care deeply about the quality of the code that may be drove them to make harsh comments on code from people. And maybe that was a barrier for new people to start contributing. But I have seen a change in the last years like a new code of conduct and rules are agreed upon for people, maybe if they are hesitant or they are not so sure about the quality of their code, just to take it out there and they will not have such a harsh reply as it used to be in the early years when I joined the open source community. I think that is a change that I have observed. Another change that I have observed is more companies are now embracing Open Source. In the early days, the industry was still dominated by closed source software but now I have seen companies building more and more business models around open source software, where the value of the product is not software, but the things that you do with it.

Swapnil Bhartiya: What is interesting is that the contributions to the kernel are coming from all around the globe. You don’t have to be in a specific place to become part of the project. So, what role do you think Linux has played in democratizing software development where you don’t have to prove yourself before you get involved. You send a patch. If the patch is good, they will take your patch. If it’s not good, they will not take it. They don’t have to look at your resume or CV that, hey, have you done any work before or not? So how much role has Linux played in democratizing software development itself?

Ricardo Neri: Yeah, I think it has played a big role because as you said, you don’t have to have a college degree or a computer science degree to start contributing to it because the currency, as you say, is a quality of code. So I have seen, myself, I am not a computer scientist or a software engineer. My background is electrical engineering. So probably I can be a good example of that. I didn’t need to go to college for five years and study computer science to start contributing. Anyone, with the interest to learn and to do something, can start contributing. I am not the only example. There are other people who have a biology degree and they now have become key contributors to Linux.

You can just go to the Linux kernel mailing list, read all the patches, maybe contribute your own reviews. And maybe you start sending your patch. All you need is essentially a workstation with the compiler and the source code. And you can find a bug or an improvement, and you can just do it. You don’t need anything more on that.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Yeah. I fully agree with you. Have you attended any of these Linux Plumbing or any other conferences and events?

Ricardo Neri: Yes, actually I was just attending the Linux Plumbers Conference a few hours ago. I was in the power management micro-conference. Yes, and in previous years I have also been attending Open Source Summit, which used to be LinuxCon.

Swapnil Bhartiya: When you interact with the kernel community over email, it is a bit daunting and you feel intimidated because you don’t know how they will respond to the patch. But when you go and meet these developers in-person, when you sit down for either breakfast or for beer in the evening, you suddenly find that they are as human as we are. So, when you meet them in person, how does the chemistry, the trust, the relationship changes?

Ricardo Neri: Yeah, that is very true. Because, as you said, if you interact with these people only through the mailing list, you can only see words without any context of it. And as you said, this is prone to misinterpretation on both sides. But as equally as you said, when you meet with them, maybe in a virtual event or in person, you see that they are actually friendly. They do care about the quality of the code, but they are approachable and friendly in my experience. And that is also the experience that I have heard from all of my coworkers, who are also new to this community. They have similar feedback as I do.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Do you have any interesting anecdotes to share from any of these events, which are like, “Hey, I met that person or this person or we just sat down. We were debating for months over the patch. We sat down and suddenly we saw the solution.” Any interesting news story that you have to share?

Ricardo Neri: I noticed just in this Plumbers Conference this year, that discussing things over the mailing list can take time because you need to put your comments in written form and then wait for the answer and so forth. And have several iterations of that process. But if you sit down in a room or in a virtual room, the conversation is more fluid and faster. You can arrive at conclusions or to designs or to agreements that would otherwise take maybe weeks for a month to do in the mailing list. So, yeah, I think I have noticed that.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Let’s talk about your contribution. What was this code contribution that historically became a 1 millionth contribution?

Ricardo Neri: That is related to the work that I do with Intel, in which I am part of the CPU enabling team. Whenever Intel comes up with a new feature in the processor, our team is responsible for taking that new feature and making it consumable by the Linux kernel. In this particular case, this is for a new instruction called SERIALIZE, which essentially serialized execution of the code. It puts a landmark in which all the execution before that instruction gets done, before starting to execute the code after that instruction. And that was solving problems that we had in the past. Because for instance, you can achieve the same goal using an instruction called CPUID or return from interrupt. But those instructions have certain side effects and can also have a performance penalty. So this serialize instruction allows you to divide the execution of code, but without having those side effects that you will need to fix up in the software. So it helps to make the software simpler and you have a performance bonus side of it as well.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Do you contribute code in your capacity as an Intel engineer, or do you also contribute some code in your free time as well?

Ricardo Neri: Right now, I am only contributing coding in the capacity as an Intel engineer.

Swapnil Bhartiya: So, this is the reason I ask this question is that in the early days of open source most of the contribution was coming through people working in their spare time, but today a majority of contributors are getting paid by companies to do that work. Working on Open Source is no longer a part-time hobby. How have you seen this change itself, where you get paid to work on open source?

Ricardo Neri: That’s very true. As I was mentioning earlier that now companies have found ways to build business models around open source software. A good example is Red Hat where the software is free, but they build their business around the software and not regard the software as the product; it’s a vehicle to deliver value to their customers. And the same is true for semiconductors companies such as Intel, which are in the business of selling computer chips. But today, you cannot just only sell the chip. You also need to provide a full solution to the customer. And that, of course, includes the software. And that is also true for other companies that were able to build business models around open source software.

In my early days when I was new to Linux, I had many, many colleagues that were in Linux because they believed in it. They believed in the value of open source software. Then they happen to stumble on a job that they were paid to do the things in which they believed. I remember them giving talks in my university about how to build a Linux scanner, how to configure it for your own needs. And they did it for free. During my university days, I remember having installfests in which you could just take your laptop and people would help you to install Linux. People that had a true belief in open source software and were willing to help you for free.

Swapnil Bhartiya: What role has open source played in, as we were talking earlier, that you don’t have to prove yourself, you don’t have to be in a specific region to get involved? So, talk about what role open source has played in creating a level playing field in giving access to underrepresented minorities and give them not only tools but also a voice.

Ricardo Neri: I think that, yeah, probably it’s similar to what I was saying at the beginning that in the traditional model in which you have to go to college and then spend four years there and not work and have good grades. You need to have certain opportunities in life to be able to do that, to have the luxury of attending college for five years, and gain a degree. But in software, for instance, you don’t need that. All you need is willingness. Just the willingness of learning and contributing to it. So I think that for underrepresented minority groups, statistically, they have a lesser chance of attending college and getting a degree.

I have also seen companies realizing the fact that you don’t actually need to be a computer scientist to start writing software. That has opened doors for people of different backgrounds and very diverse backgrounds in which you don’t have to be part of a certain career path or school path that can land you a job in this industry. You can just start wherever you want.

There are many efforts in the community. The GNOME Foundation has scholarships to help recruit people from underrepresented groups to start contributing and they get mentoring. Because that is an important point. The software is free and anyone can contribute to it. But if you have a mentor, if you have someone that can help you navigate an open source software community that will help you a lot and it will go a long way to get you established in that community. You can start contributing very simple patches. But over time you have that guidance, you can optimize your time and your effort to make the things that will have an impact, and will maybe someday make you a key contributor to the community.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Thank you.

Ricardo Neri: Thank you very much.

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Swapnil Bhartiya: Let’s start with a bit about the Presto Foundation. What is it about? What does it do?

Steven Mih: The Presto Foundation is a project hosted under the Linux Foundation. It was created last year by companies like Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba and Uber. Alluxio is an open source project that is commonly used with Presto, the open source distributed SQL query engine, as well as other projects like Spark and TensorFlow. We support all these different frameworks. And since this was a foundation that was open to all, we decided to join it as one of the companies involved in that foundation.

Swapnil Bhartiya: If you look at the goals of the foundation, what value does Alluxio bring to it?

Steven Mih: The Linux foundation projects are all about open source, it’s helping grow the communities of these projects. With the Presto Foundation being hosted under the Linux Foundation, we work in an open source way to help develop the community and increase the adoption of the Presto project.

Alluxio is often used under Presto, so the value we bring is around accelerating the data to that. We recently developed a preview which now allows users to transform the data into the format that Presto is looking for. So we’re pretty excited about those things and we’ll be talking about that at PrestoCon that’s coming up at the end of March (now cancelled due to Covid-19).

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you also explain how people, companies, developers use Alluxio with Presto and also give examples of some of the major use cases?

Steven Mih: One of the big use cases is that Presto is designed to query anything anywhere. It has connectors to different data sources, which can be in remote places. That’s where Alluxio is co-installed with Presto workers which allows users to make that data to be available and local. The result of that is extremely high performance.

In today’s customer environment, they oftentimes are doing more multi-cloud or hybrid and they have data in different sources. There could be data on prem. They can’t necessarily get to the cloud yet, or vice versa. There may be S3 buckets somewhere that they need access to. Alluxio makes all of that seamless for the Presto users.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you elaborate that a bit?

Steven Mih: You can now have a much local and higher performing system because the data is now cached locally to the Presto clusters. What it means for data in remote places is that the data infrastructure becomes a lot simpler. Without Alluxio with Presto, you’d have to copy that data and make different silos. The copies of that data need to be synchronized; it needs to be maintained. Users end up having a pretty big data wrangling challenge.

We call it the PAS stack, Presto, Alluxio and S3. That stack is becoming much more common now as users can add S3 to it, they can add HDFS to it in remote places and it just operates at a much higher level as if it’s local and very high performance. On top of that, we’ve added even more to this in our developer preview. We’ve added a catalog service as well as transform operations and we are really excited about how that adds to the picture.

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