Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

February 2021

What is virtualisation? The basics

Virtualisation plays a huge role in almost all of today’s fastest-growing software-based industries. It is the foundation for most cloud computing, the go-to methodology for cross-platform development, and has made its way all the way to ‘the edge’; the eponymous IoT. This article is the first in a series where we explain what virtualisation is and how it works. Here, we start with the broad strokes.

What is MEC ? The telco edge.

MEC, as ETSI defines it, stands for Multi-access Edge Computing and is sometimes referred to as Mobile edge computing. MEC is a solution that gives content providers and software developers cloud-computing capabilities which are close to the end users. This micro cloud deployed in the edge of mobile operators’ networks has ultra low latency and high bandwidth which enables new types of applications and business use cases.

DFI and Canonical offer risk-free system updates and reduced software lead times for the IoT ecosystem

Feb. 25, 2021 – DFI and Canonical signed the Ubuntu IoT Hardware Certification Partner Program. DFI is the world’s first industrial computer manufacturer to join the program aimed at offering Ubuntu-certified IoT hardware ready for the over-the-air software update. The online update mechanism of and the authorized DFI online application store combines with DFI’s products’ application flexibility, to reduce software and hardware development time to deploy new services.

Building and running FIPS containers on Ubuntu Pro FIPS

Canonical provides customers Ubuntu Pro images AWS Marketplace. Ubuntu Pro for AWS is a premium AMI designed by Canonical to provide additional coverage for production environments running in the cloud. It includes security and compliance services, enabled by default, in a form suitable for small to large-scale Linux enterprise operations — with no contract needed.

The State of Robotics - January 2021

A new start? 2020 came and went, and in the process, it left a mark in history and our lives that won’t be erased. Together, as a community, we all struggled, we all faced new challenges, we all united and did our best to help each other. We are grateful for the effort of our nurses, doctors, carers, scientific, essential workers, and innovators that have led this fight. We also take a moment to remember those that we have lost and those who have been affected the most.

Can AI help redefine the future of finserv?

The last few years has been a time of major disruption in the Finserv sector. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has emerged as an important tool for providers of financial products and services to deliver more personalised and more sophisticated services to customers faster. The financial services sector is at the beginning of an exciting journey with AI – a journey that we believe will spark a revolution and redefine financial services.

How to keep your Linux disk usage nice and tidy and save space

Everyone loves a clean, tidy home (hopefully). This also includes your other home – slash home, the Linux home directory. Disk cleanup and management utilities are extremely popular in Windows, but not so much in Linux. This means that users who want to do a bit of housekeeping in their distro may not necessarily have a quick, convenient way to figure out how to get rid of the extra cruft they have accumulated over the years. Let us walk you through the processing of slimming down your home.

Benefits of containers for enterprises

Within just five years, Kubernetes and containers have redefined how software is deployed. Researchers expect the container market to grow by 30% year over year to become a 5 billion industry by 2022. But what is the reason behind this mass adoption of container technology in the enterprise? Download whitepaper Containers are more resource efficient than virtual machines or other legacy app architectures.

Hybrid cloud - everything you need to know

Hybrid cloud allows businesses to optimise their costs associated with cloud infrastructure maintenance. It also brings many other benefits, such as business continuity, compliance, better scalability and improved agility. According to the Forrester Wave: Hybrid Cloud Management, Q4 2020, hybrid cloud is an essential technology that every modern organisation is looking for and its adoption is only expected to grow in the following years.

Portainer recommends MicroK8s for effortless deployment

Portainer is an open source tool that allows for container deployment and management without the need to write code. In their recent publication, ‘How to deploy Portainer on MicroK8s’, the Portainer team share with the community how easy and fast it is to deploy Portainer on MicroK8s. In fact, the entire process only requires a single command! For a step-by-step walkthrough of the process, take a look at Portainer’s 5 minute video below. Install MicroK8s

AI in telecom: an overview for data scientists

I have seen many junior data scientists and machine learning engineers start a new job or a consulting engagement for a telecom company coming from different industries and thinking that it’s yet another project like many others. What they usually don’t know is that “It’s a trap!”. I spent several years forging telecom data into valuable insights, and looking back, there are a couple of things I would have loved to know at the beginning of my journey.

What is Elasticsearch and how are enterprises using it?

What does Netflix, eBay and Walmart have in common? They all use Elasticsearch. Elasticsearch is a real-time open-source distributed search and analytics engine built on top of Apache Lucene™, a fulltext search-engine library and developed in Java. Elasticsearch started as a scalable version of the Lucene open-source search framework that uses a structure based on documents instead of tables and schemas and comes with extensive REST APIs for storing and searching the data.

Ubuntu Core 20 secures Linux for IoT

2nd February 2021: Canonical’s Ubuntu Core 20, a minimal, containerised version of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for IoT devices and embedded systems, is now generally available. This major version bolsters device security with secure boot, full disk encryption, and secure device recovery. Ubuntu Core builds on the Ubuntu application ecosystem to create ultra-secure smart things. “Every connected device needs guaranteed platform security and an app store” said Mark Shuttleworth.

Private home directories for Ubuntu 21.04

Ubuntu has evolved a lot since its early beginnings as an easier-to-use derivative of Debian that catered primarily to the nascent Linux desktop market. Today Ubuntu is deployed beyond just your laptops at home and in the office. Nowadays you are more likely to find Ubuntu in the cloud, powering some of the world’s best known enterprises and running on various IoT devices out in the field.