Practical Technology

The most popular open-source cloud program, OpenStack, may also be the hardest to use. Just ask anyone trying to find good OpenStack architects and engineers. With its latest release OpenStack 11, Kilo, the level of expertise needed to master OpenStack is getting lower.

OpenStack Kilo: Turning it up to 11. More>

Debian is arguably the most important Linux distribution. From it springs such popular Linux distributions as Mint and Ubuntu. Outside Linux’s inner circles, it’s not that well known because it’s purely a community operating system. There is no company behind it, as there is with Red Hat and CentOS, Fedora, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux [...]

Don’t look now but Ubuntu has become the Linux for clouds. On the AmazonElastic Compute Cloud (EC2), for example, Ubuntu is the most popular operating system by an almost two to one margin. 64 percent of production OpenStack users have also chosen Ubuntu to stay on top. Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, is adding even more [...]

I’ve used almost every desktop on the planet, but Ubuntu 15.04 with the Unity 7 interface may be the easiest. Heck if my now 82-year-old mother-in-law can be an Ubuntu user, you can be one too!

Six Clicks for Linux beginners: Ubuntu 15.04, Vivid Vervet. More>

NGNIX‘s slogan should borrow Avis’s iconic tagline, “When you’re number two, you try harder.” While Apache is far more popular, 50.7 percent to NGINX’s 14.4 percent – by Netcraft’s web server count — NGINX is trying hard with its latest update, NGINX Plus Release 6 (R6), to challenge Apache for the top spot.

NGINX releases [...]

Several days after HP seemed to announce that it was going to stop offering public cloud services, the company is now stating that it will continue to offer its OpenStack-powered Helion public cloud.

HP: We’re not leaving the public cloud. More>

As expected, container technology, especially Docker, has become hotter than ever in clouds. What you might not have expected was for Microsoft to adopt Docker for Azure. Well, surprise! They have.

First, a little background. Clouds are built on virtual machine (VM) hypervisors such as Hyper-V, KVM, and Xen. While you can run multiple VMs [...]

Enough is enough. Apple’s iOS 8 mobile operating system came out in mid-September. Since then, the company has delivered seven — count ’em, seven — patch releases, and iOS 8 still doesn’t work that well. Argh!

iOS 8.3 should be out real soon now, we’re told. I’d like to think it will fix all of [...]

If you think all you need to do to solve all your IT problems is to add a cloud, think again.

Cargo cults sounds like an urban legend, but they’re not. There really were South Pacific tribes that believed if they simply made fake airplanes, real airplanes would appear bearing radios, TVs, trucks and everything else [...]

At first glance, you might not think that the latest set of OpenSSL security patches are that important. Sure, there’s a dozen of them and two are serious, but are they really that bad? Yes, actually they’re not just bad, they’re awful.

You need to apply the OpenSSL patches today, not tomorrow. More>

I’ve been talking a lot about DevOps and Agile recently. I believe DevOps will define how we do development and administer the cloud for years to come. I’m not the only one. Research firm Gartner agrees.

In a recent report, Gartner analysts Janessa Rivera and Rob van der Meulen stated that, “Although DevOps emphasizes people [...]