Linux is one of the most popular and widely used open-source operating systems in the world today. It provides the key advantage of stability, compatibility, security and customization. Since Linux servers are the backbone of an organization’s IT infrastructure, a sudden change in the CPU usage or memory can adversely affect the performance of applications.
With the economies of many countries heading towards recession, increasing regulations, growing security threats and increasing costs, financial services firms need practical solutions, now more than ever. Many of the financial technology firms (‘fintechs’) and mobile app-based challenger banks have taken advantage of modern application architectures and DevOps practices that are associated with cloud native technologies.
Canonical has been working closely with NVIDIA for many years to fuel innovation and support open source software with the power of accelerated processing. That already allowed us to jointly deliver GPU acceleration into Linux, OpenStack and container workloads on traditional datacenter servers. We continued working together, with Ubuntu forming the base operating system for NVIDIA DGX systems, including the latest NVIDIA DGX A100 system.
In environments with large numbers of client machines, configuration management tools are often used to simplify and standardize the target state of each host in a seamless, automated and consistent manner. Software like CFEngine, Chef, Ansible, and others offer a high degree of granular control over software packaging and system configurations.
On September 14, CVE-2020-14386 was reported as a “high” severity threat. This CVE is a kernel security vulnerability that enables an unprivileged local process to gain root access to the system. CVE-2020-14386 is a result of a bug found in the packet socket facility in the Linux kernel. It allows a bad actor to trigger a memory corruption that can be exploited to hijack data and resources and in the most severe case, completely take over the system.
For decades, compute or server infrastructure has been the backbone of the IT world. Compute has gradually evolved from on-premise hardware to programmable compute in the form of software containers. Technology operators need to constantly monitor the performance of their Windows, Linux, and container infrastructure so that they can optimize their compute environments to match workload demands.
One of the defining features of snaps is their strong security. Snaps are designed to run isolated from the underlying system, with granular control and access to specific resources made possible through a mechanism of interfaces. Think of it as a virtual USB cable – an interface connects a plug with a slot. Security and privacy conscious users will certainly be interested in knowing more about their snaps – what they can do and which resources they need at runtime.
