NetApp seals up object storage garden wall with gap-filling products

OpenInfra Berlin OpenInfra still has ideas to share, including an intriguing funding model for open source projects the Foundation discussed at its in-person event last week in Berlin.

The "Directed Funding" initiative – a significant change to how some projects might be funded in the future – is about allowing organizations to fund a specific project rather than seeing their cash spread across projects for which they have no interest.

Jonathan Bryce, CEO and executive director of the OpenInfra Foundation, told The Register this wasn't a case of following a trend in the open-source world that he described as "this kind of pay to play-type scenario."

Chinese web giant Tencent has revealed it’s completed a massive migration of its own apps to its own cloud.

The company started thinking about this in 2018 after realising that its many services had each built their own technology silos.

Plenty of those services – among them WeChat, social network, qq.com, games like Honour of Kings and YouTube-like Tencent Video – have tens or hundreds of millions of users. Each service appears to have built infrastructure to cope with peak traffic requirements, leaving plenty of unused capacity across Tencent’s operations.

Enterprise security teams being overrun by the rising numbers of vulnerabilities uncovered each day could vastly reduce their patching workload by changing how they prioritize the flaws, according to recent research from vulnerability startup Rezilion.

Most enterprises look to the ratings given to flaws in the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) framework, which range from 0 to 10 (with 10 being the highest) and are ranked as low and medium to high and critical, depending on the characteristics of the vulnerability.

Companies will start their remediation efforts with the vulnerabilities deemed "critical" and work their way down, said Yotam Perkal, director of vulnerability research with Rezilion.

Version 3.16.0 of Alpine Linux is out – one of the most significant of the many lightweight distros.

Version 3.16.0 is worth a look, especially if you want to broaden your skills.

Alpine is interesting because it's not just another me-too distro. It bucks a lot of the trends in modern Linux, and while it's not the easiest to set up, it's a great deal easier to get it working than it was a few releases ago.

China’s approved GitHub clone, Gitee, has warned users that it will make all existing repositories private pending a mysterious review of their content.

Gitee offers Git and Apache Subversion as a service. But while GitHub has occasionally been banned in China, Gitee was anointed as China’s designated open source development hub in 2020, after the nation’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology conducted a bidding process.

The Reg keeps an eye on Gitee and sees a steady stream of blog posts about product and service updates, plus news of open source software in China. The service is sufficiently committed to the cause of open source to have signed up to mirror Linux Foundation code and is thought to have around eight million users.

The day has come. At long last Dockershim is dead.

The removal was one of several notable changes that came with today's Kubernetes 1.24 release. The shift on Dockershim has broad albeit well-documented implications for those running Kubernetes in production, James Laverack, lead solutions engineer for the release, told The Register.

The news shouldn't, however, come as a surprise, he noted. Dockershim was deprecated with Kubernetes 1.20 in late 2020.

In a slightly curious blog post, Ubuntu recently dismissed the idea that OpenStack was no longer relevant and had been "abandoned" – making it the second outfit in the past six months to state how confident it remains in the IaaS platform.

The post, titled "OpenStack is dead?" echoed a similar statement from Docker Enterprise owners Mirantis, stating that users now "probably think that OpenStack has been supplanted by Kubernetes" – and talking about the growth in OpenStack adoption.

When multiple companies strenuously deny something, it tends to cause more suspicion than it allays. As The Reg pointed out when OpenStack turned 10, several big players have killed off their OpenStack products. Cisco invested heavily in it in 2014, only to then ax it a couple of years later.

OpenStack's 25th release brings the usual crop of new features to the open-source cloud platform, including support for DPUs, better integration with Prometheus and Kubernetes, and a handy un-delete feature for file system shares.

Available today, Yoga marks 12 years of development of the OpenStack framework, and while it may not have lived up to the early hype, the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF) was keen to talk up its success.

OpenStack now accounts for about 25 million CPU cores in production, OIF claims, up from the 15 million reported just last year. There have also been more than 100 new clouds added, with OpenStack used at more than 180 public cloud datacenters and in nine out of 10 telcos, according to the Open Infrastructure Foundation.

Docker hasn't just got back in the fight thanks to its latest round of funding: it's earned double-unicorn status, too. 

The long-suffering containerization company today announced a $105 million Series C funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures bringing its total funding to $163 million, and a company valuation of $2.1 billion. Bain's Enrique Salem, former CEO of Symantec, will join Docker's board as part of the deal. 

Docker's days seemed numbered until this turnaround, which comes on the tail of earlier good news that the biz saw 4x year-over-year ARR growth last year. In 2019, Docker was in dire enough straits to sell off its enterprise division, replace CEO Rob Bearden, and refocus itself as a developer platform. As recent as mid-2021, the outfit was still having trouble finding its footing and a successful business model. 

StarlingX, an open-source platform for edge computing based on OpenStack, has hit release 6.0 with a Linux Kernel upgrade plus security and deployment enhancements to make it easier to manage systems.

The StarlingX project offers a complete software stack for edge and IoT deployments, with support for code running in containers or virtual machines. It was started by Intel and Wind River, but is now an independent project supported by the Open Infrastructure Foundation, with code available under the Apache 2 licence.

Companies using StarlingX in production systems include T-Systems, Verizon and Vodafone, with the code freely available to download from the StarlingX website.