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Cloud service providers: How to keep your options open Seth Kenlon Mon, 05/09/2022 - 03:00 Register or Login to like Register or Login to like

For Linux users, there's a new kind of computer on the market, and it's known as the cloud.

As with the PC sitting on your desk, the laptop in your backpack, and the virtual private server you rent from your favorite web hosting service, you have your choice in vendors for cloud computing. The brand names are different than the hardware brands you've known over the years, but the concept is the same.

To run Linux, you need a computer. To run Linux on the cloud, you need a cloud service provider. And just like the hardware and firmware that ships with your computer, there's a spectrum for how open source your computing stack can be.

As a user of open source, I prefer my computing stack to be as open as possible. After a careful survey of the cloud computing market, I've developed a three-tier view of cloud service providers. Using this system as your guide, you can make intelligent choices about what cloud provider you choose.

Open stack

A cloud that's fully open is a cloud built on open source technology from the ground up. So much cloud technology is open source, and has been from the beginning, that an open stack isn't all that difficult to accomplish, at least on the technical level. However, there are cloud providers reinventing the wheel in a proprietary way, which makes it easy to stumble into a cloud provider that's mixed a lot of closed source components in with the usual open source tooling.

If you're looking for a truly open cloud, look for a cloud provider providing OpenStack as its foundation. OpenStack provides the software infrastructure for clouds, including Software-Defined Networking (SDN) through Neutron, object storage through Swift, identity and key management, image services, and much more. Keeping with my hardware computer analogy, OpenStack is the "kernel" that powers the cloud.

I don't mean that literally, of course, but if your cloud provider runs OpenStack, that's reasonably as far down in the stack as you can go. From a user perspective, OpenStack is the reason your cloud exists and has a filesystem, network, and so on.

Explore the open source cloud Free online course: Developing cloud-native applications with microservices eBook: Modernize your IT with managed cloud services Try for 60 days: Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated Free online course: Containers, Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift What is Kubernetes? Understanding edge computing Latest articles for IT architects

Sitting on top of OpenStack, there may be a web UI such as Horizon or Skyline, and there may be extra components such as OpenShift or OKD (not an acronym, but formerly known as OpenShift Origin). All of these are open source, and they help you run containers, which are minimalist Linux images with applications embedded within them.

Because OpenShift and OKD don't require OpenStack, that's the next tier of my cloud-based world view.

[ Download the guide: Containers and Pods 101 ]

Open platform

You don't always have a choice in which stack your cloud is running. Instead of OpenStack, your cloud might be running Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or something similar.

Those are the "binary blobs" of the cloud world. You have no insight into how or why they work; all you know is that your cloud exists and has a filesystem, a networking stack, and so on.

Just as with desktop computing, you can have an "operating system" running on the box you've been given. Again, I'm not speaking literally, and there's a strong argument that OpenStack itself is essentially an operating system for the cloud. Still, it's usually OpenShift that a cloud user interacts with directly.

OpenShift is an open source "desktop" or workspace in which you can manage containers and pods with Podman and Kubernetes. It lets you run applications on the cloud much as you might launch an app on your laptop.

[ Keep these commands handy: Podman cheat sheet ]

Open standards

Last but not least, there are those situations when you have no choice in cloud service providers. You're put on a platform with a proprietary "kernel," a proprietary "operating system," and all that's left for you to influence is what you run inside that environment.

All is not lost.

When you're dealing with open source, you have the ability to construct your own scaffolding. You can choose what components you use inside your containers. You can and should design your working environment around open source tools, because if you do get to change service providers, you can take everything you've built with you.

This might mean implementing something already built into the (non-open) platform you're stuck on. For instance, your cloud provider might entice you with an API management system or continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline that's included in their platform "for free," but you know better. When a non-open application is offered as "free," it usually bears a cost in some other form. One cost is that once you start building on top of it, you'll be all the more hesitant to migrate away because you know that you'll have to leave behind everything you built.

Instead of using the closed "features" of your cloud provider, reimplement those services as open source for your own use. Run Jenkins and APIMan in containers. Find the problems your cloud provider claims to solve with proprietary code, then use an open source solution to ensure that, when you leave for an open provider, you can migrate the system you've built.

[ Take the free online course: Deploying containerized applications ]

Open source computing

For too many people, cloud computing is a place where open source is incidental. In reality, open source is as important on the cloud as it is on your personal computer and the servers powering the internet.

Look for open source cloud services.

When you're stuck with something that doesn't provide source code, be the one using open source in your cloud.

No matter what level of openness your cloud service operates on, you have choices for your own environment.

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Flickr user: theaucitron (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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How open source leads the way for sustainable technology Hannah Smith Sun, 05/08/2022 - 03:00 Register or Login to like Register or Login to like

There's a palpable change in the air regarding sustainability and environmental issues. Concern for the condition of the planet and efforts to do something about it have gone mainstream. To take one example, look at climate-based venture capitalism. The Climate Tech Venture Capital (CTVC) Climate Capital List has more than doubled in the past two years. The amount of capital pouring in demonstrates a desire and a willingness to solve hard climate challenges.

It's great that people want to take action, and I'm here for it! But I also see a real risk: As people rush to take action or jump on the bandwagon, they may unwittingly participate in greenwashing.

The Wikipedia definition of greenwashing calls it "a form of marketing spin in which green PR and green marketing are deceptively used to persuade the public that an organization's products, aims, and policies are environmentally friendly." In my view, greenwashing happens both intentionally and accidentally. There are a lot of good people out there who want to make a difference but don't yet know much about complex environmental systems or the depth of issues around sustainability.

It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking a simple purchase like offsetting travel or datacenter emissions by planting trees will make something greener. While these efforts are welcome, and planting trees is a viable solution to improving sustainability, they are only a good first step—a scratch on the surface of what needs to happen to make a real difference.

So what can a person, or a community, do to make digital technology genuinely more sustainable?

Sustainability has different meanings to different people. The shortest definition that I like is from the 1987 Bruntland Report, which summarizes it as "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs." Sustainability at its core is prioritizing long-term thinking.

More great content Free online course: RHEL technical overview Learn advanced Linux commands Download cheat sheets Find an open source alternative Explore open source resources Sustainability is more than environmental preservation

There are three key interconnected pillars in the definition of sustainability:

1. Environmental
2. Economic / governance
3. Social

Conversations about sustainability are increasingly dominated by the climate crisis—for good reason. The need to reduce the amount of carbon emissions emitted by the richer countries in the world becomes increasingly urgent as we continue to pass irreversible ecological tipping points. But true sustainability is a much more comprehensive set of considerations, as demonstrated by the three pillars.

Carbon emissions are most certainly a part of sustainability. Many people consider emissions only an environmental issue: Just take more carbon out of the air, and everything will be ok. But social issues are just as much a part of sustainability. Who is affected by these carbon emissions? Who stands to bear the greatest impact from changes to our climate? Who has lost their land due to rising sea levels or a reliable water source due to changing weather patterns? That's why you might have heard the phrase "climate justice is social justice."

Thinking only about decarbonization as sustainability can give you carbon tunnel vision. I often think that climate change is a symptom of society getting sustainability wrong on a wider scale. Instead, it is critical to address the root causes that brought about climate change in the first place. Tackling these will make it possible to fix the problems in the long term, while a short-term fix may only push the issue onto another vulnerable community.

The root causes are complex. But if I follow them back to their source, I see that the root causes are driven by dominant Western values and the systems designed to perpetuate those values. And what are those values? For the most part, they are short-term growth and the extraction of profit above all else.

That is why conversations about sustainability that don't include social issues or how economies are designed won't reach true solutions. After all, societies, and the people in positions of power, determine what their own values are—or aren't.

What can you or I do?

Many in the tech sector are currently grappling with these issues and want to know how to take meaningful action. One common approach is looking at how to optimize the tech they build so that it uses electricity more effectively. Sixty percent of the world's electricity is still generated by burning fossil fuels, despite the increasing capacity for renewable energy generation. Logically, using less electricity means generating fewer carbon emissions.

And yes, that is a meaningful action that anyone can take right now, today. Optimizing the assets sent when someone loads a page to send less data will use less energy. So will optimizing servers to run at different times of the day, for example when there are more renewables online, or deleting old stores of redundant information, such as analytics data or logs.

But consider Jevon's paradox: Making something more efficient often leads to using more of it, not less. When it is easier and more accessible for people to use something, they end up consuming more. In some ways, that is good. Better performing tech is a good thing that helps increase inclusion and accessibility, and that's good for society. But long-term solutions for climate change and sustainability require deeper, more uncomfortable conversations around the relationship between society and technology. What and who is all this technology serving? What behaviors and practices is it accelerating?

It's common to view advancing technology as progress, and some people repeat the mantra that technology will save the world from climate change. A few bright folks will do the hard work, so no one else has to change their ways. The problem is that many communities and ecosystems are already suffering.

For example, the accelerating quest for more data is causing some communities in Chile to have insufficient water to grow their crops. Instead, datacenters are using it. Seventy percent of the pollution caused by mobile phones comes from their manufacture. The raw resources such as lithium and cobalt to make and power mobile devices are usually extracted from a community that has little power to stop the destruction of their land and that certainly does not partake in the profit made. Still, the practice of upgrading your phone every two years has become commonplace.

Open source leading the way for sustainability

It's time to view the use of digital technology as a precious resource with consequences to both the planet and (often already disadvantaged) communities.

The open source community is already a leading light in helping people to realize there is another way: the open source way. There are huge parallels between the open source way and what our wider society needs to do to achieve a more sustainable future. Being more open and inclusive is a key part of that.

We also need a mindset shift at all levels of society that views digital technology as having growth limits and not as the abundantly cheap and free thing we see today. We need to wisely prioritize its application in society to the things that matter. And above all else, we need to visualize and eradicate the harms from its creation and continued use and share the wealth that is does create equitably with everyone in society, whether they are users of digital tech or not. These things aren’t going to happen overnight, but they are things we can come together to push towards so that we all enjoy the benefits of digital technology for the long-term, sustainably.

This article is based on a longer presentation. To see the talk in full or view the slides, see the post "How can we make digital technology more sustainable."

There are huge parallels between the open source way and what our wider society needs to do to achieve a more sustainable future.

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opensource.com

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