Monat: Januar 2020

Introducing Multi-Cloud Object Gateway for OpenShift

The Multi-Cloud Object Gateway is a new data federation service introduced in OpenShift Container Storage 4.2. The technology is based on the NooBaa project, which was acquired by Red Hat in November 2018, and open sourced recently. More information can be found here https://github.com/noobaa/noobaa-operator.
The Multi-Cloud Object Gateway has an object interface with an S3 compatible API. The service is deployed automatically as part of OpenShift Container Storage 4.2 and provides the same functionality regardless of its hosting environment.
Simplicity, Single experience anywhere
In its default deployment, the Multi-Cloud Object Gateway provides a local object service backed by using local storage or cloud-native storage, if hosted in the cloud.
Every data bucket on the Multi-Cloud Object Gateway is backed, by default, by using local storage or cloud-native storage, if hosted in the cloud. No additional configuration is required.
The Multi-Cloud Object Gateway’s object service API is always an S3 API, which means a single experience on-premise and in the cloud, for any cloud provider. This translates to a zero learning curve when moving to, or adding a new cloud vendor. That translates into greater agility for your teams.
Elasticity
The administrator can add multiple backing stores and apply mirroring policies to create hybrid data buckets and multi-cloud data buckets, using cloud-native storage providers and/or on-prem storage providers. Each bucket can have its own data placement policy and can be changed over time, to support the changing needs of applications and environments.

Integrated Monitoring and Management
The Multi-Cloud Object Gateway leverages the power of Kubernetes Operators to automate complex workflows, i.e. deployment, bootstrapping, configuration, provisioning, scaling, upgrading, monitoring and resource management. It is integrated into the OpenShift storage dashboard to provide an instant view of the current object usage, alerts and resource allocations.

If object services are impacted, the Multi-Cloud Object Gateway Operator will actively perform healing and recovery as needed to ensure data is resilient and available to users. There is no need for the Administrator to enable healing operations, set up jobs to rebalance or redistribute the data, or even upgrade the storage services. For administrators concerned with automatic upgrades, the OpenShift Container Storage Operator can be configured to be manually upgraded to meet organizational maintenance policies or considerations, as well.
Object Provisioning Made Easy
OpenShift Container Storage supports persistent volume claims for block and file-based storage. In addition, it introduces the Object Bucket Claims (OBC) and Object Buckets (OB) concept, which takes inspiration from Persistent Volume Claims (PVC) and Persistent Volumes (PV).
A generic, dynamic bucket provisioning API, similar to Persistent Volumes and Persistent Volume Claims is introduced, so that users familiar with the PVC/PV model can handle bucket provisioning with a similar pattern.
Applications that require an object bucket will create an Object Bucket Claim (OBC) and refer to the object storage class name.
Example:
The object bucket claim creates an object bucket and an account with new credentials.
You can use oc to create the Object Bucket Claim:
$ oc get objectbucket
NAME STORAGE-CLASS CLAIM-NAMESPACE CLAIM-NAME RECLAIM-POLICY PHASE AGE
obc-test-obc-test openshift-storage.noobaa.io obc-test Delete Bound 80s

Use oc to confirm the Object Bucket and accompanying Object Bucket Claim is created:
$ oc get objectbucket
NAME STORAGE-CLASS CLAIM-NAMESPACE CLAIM-NAME RECLAIM-POLICY PHASE AGE
obc-test-obc-test openshift-storage.noobaa.io obc-test Delete Bound 80s

After creating the Object Bucket Claim, the following Kubernetes resources would be created:
An Object Bucket which contains the bucket endpoint information, a reference to the Object Bucket Claim and a reference to the storage class.
A ConfigMap in the same namespace as the Object Bucket Claim, which contains connection information such as the endpoint host, port and bucket name, to be used by applications in order to consume the object service
A Secret in the same namespace as the OBC, which contains the access key and secret key needed to access the bucket.
This information can be used with environment variables. The following YAML is an example of a job using Object Bucket Claim and reading the information from the config map and secret into the environment variables:
apiVersion: objectbucket.io/v1alpha1
kind: ObjectBucketClaim
metadata:
name: “obc-test”
spec:
generateBucketName: “obc-test-noobaa”
storageClassName: openshift-storage.noobaa.io
—
apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
name: obc-test
spec:
template:
spec:
restartPolicy: OnFailure
containers:
– image: quay.io/etamir/training:latest
name: obc-test
env:
– name: BUCKET_NAME
valueFrom:
configMapKeyRef:
name: obc-test
key: BUCKET_NAME
– name: BUCKET_HOST
valueFrom:
configMapKeyRef:
name: obc-test
key: BUCKET_HOST
– name: BUCKET_PORT
valueFrom:
configMapKeyRef:
name: obc-test
key: BUCKET_PORT
– name: AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
valueFrom:
secretKeyRef:
name: obc-test
key: AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
– name: AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
valueFrom:
secretKeyRef:
name: obc-test
key: AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
– name: AWS_DEFAULT_REGION
value: “us-east-1″
volumeMounts:
– name: training-persistent-storage
mountPath: /data
volumes:
– name: training-persistent-storage
emptyDir: {}

Security First
The Multi-Cloud Object Gateway provides multiple solutions for security concerns out of the box. 

Data encryption by default – every write operation chunked into multiple chunks and encrypted with a new key. 
Key management separation from data – all the keys are managed in a centralized location, separated from the encrypted chunks of data, regardless of the data location which can be in the cloud, on prem or a mixture for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. 
Data isolation – every object bucket claim creates a new account, with new credentials permitted to access a new single bucket and create new buckets accessible only to this account, by default. 

 
 
Resources and Feedback
To find out more about OpenShift Container Storage or to take a test drive, visit https://www.openshift.com/products/container-storage/.
If you would like to learn more about what the OpenShift Container Storage team is up to or provide feedback on any of the new 4.2 features, take this brief 3-minute survey.
The post Introducing Multi-Cloud Object Gateway for OpenShift appeared first on Red Hat OpenShift Blog.
Quelle: OpenShift

How a hybrid workforce can save up to 20 hours a month

How productive would your company employees be if they could save two hours a day on regular tasks?
With the growth and evolution of today’s digital economy, companies face the challenge of managing increasingly complex business processes that involve massive amounts of data. This has also led to repetitive work, like requiring employees to manually perform data-intensive tasks when there are technologies available that could help free their time and automate tasks.
According to a WorkMarket report, 53 percent of employees believe they could save up to two hours a day by automating tasks; that equates to roughly 20 hours a month. Working on tasks that could easily be automated is probably not the best use of employees’ time, especially if your business is trying to improve productivity or customer service.
How automation and RPA bots can help improve social welfare
Let’s look at Ana, who is a social worker focused on child welfare and is entrusted with the safety and well-being of children. Like most employees, Ana does whatever it takes to get the job done. Her dilemma is that she spends up to 80 percent of her time executing repetitive, administrative tasks, such as typing handwritten notes and forms into agency systems or manually requesting verifications or background checks from external systems. This leaves only around 20 percent for client-facing activities, which is too low to improve long-term client outcomes.
Can automation make an immediate impact on the well-being of our children and improve the efficiency of the child welfare workers charged with their safety? Simply put, the answer is yes.
Social workers can shift focus back on the important work they do with the help of proven automation technologies. By combining automation capabilities or services, such as automating tasks with robotic process automation (RPA) bots, extracting and classifying data from documents and automating decisions can make a significant and positive impact in the entire social services industry. Watch the below video to see how automation creates more time for child welfare workers to focus on helping vulnerable children by automating repetitive administrative work.
 

 
As you can see from the above video, Ana is able to offload a number of her repetitive, routine and administrative tasks to a bot, freeing her to spend more time and effort towards improving the lives of children. The intent of bots is to augment human worker roles for optimal work-effort outcomes, not replace them.
How hybrid workforce solutions help bring freedom
In the future of work, a hybrid workforce will emerge. In this hybrid workforce, bots will work seamlessly alongside human counterparts to get work done more efficiently and deliver exceptional experiences to both customers and employees. The hybrid workforce of the future will allow human employees to focus on inherent human strengths (for example, strategy, judgment, creativity and empathy).
We’ve been enabling IBM Cloud Pak for Automation, our automation software platform for digital business, to interoperate with more RPA solutions. This interoperability gives clients greater freedom of choice to execute according to their business objectives. Our newest collaboration is with Blue Prism, a market-leading RPA vendor.
While our customers are increasingly seeking RPA capabilities to complement digital transformation efforts, Blue Prism customers are building out capabilities to surround their RPA initiatives — including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, natural language processing, intelligent document processing and business process management.
To enable greater interoperability between automation platforms, IBM and Blue Prism jointly developed API connectors, available on Blue Prism’s Digital Exchange (DX). These API connectors will help customers seamlessly integrate Blue Prism RPA task automation technology with three key IBM Digital Business Automation platform capabilities: Workflow, Data Capture and Decision Management.
This technical collaboration offers clients an automation solution for every style of work. This includes  immediately automating small-scale processes for efficiency and rapid return on investment (ROI), all the way to achieving a larger digital labor outcome through multiple types of automation.
Read the no-hype RPA Buyer’s Guide to learn how you can extend the value of your RPA investment by using an automation platform to establish new ways of working, maximize the expertise of your employees, lower operational costs and improve the experiences for our employees.
 
The post How a hybrid workforce can save up to 20 hours a month appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud