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Alpitour relies on IBM for digital transformation

AlpiTour focuses on innovation and chooses IBM: for the digital transformation will focus on IBM Watson natural language processing services and on the Red Hat OpenShift functionalities for its infrastructure

of Alberto Falchi published on 03 November 2020 , at 18: 19 in the Innovation channel

IBM artificial intelligence

The Alpitour Group , the well-known tour operator, has announced its digital transformation with the aim of offering its customers more effective digital solutions, able to propose personalized experiences. Supporting it in this transition will be IBM, which will make its technologies available, in particular Red Hat OpenShift to quickly build and deploy applications and IBM Watson to give greater value to the customer experience .

IBM’s AI at the service of travelers

IBM will support Alpitour by providing the services of Watson , including Natural Language Understanding and Discovery , to offer a better service to customers: the emails received from Alpitour agencies will be analyzed by IBM’s artificial intelligence to identify key information, classify them and thus offer agency operators all the information necessary to respond quickly and effectively. A system that will allow to automate approximately 80% of Alpitour’s internal processes, allowing c to concentrate on the most important operations.

Considering that the Alpitour manage about 2 million e-mails every year , it was necessary to update the IT architecture , which thanks to the support of IBM has moved from the previous on-premise environment to a hybrid one, integrated with the cloud, in order to better exploit Watson’s services. We chose an open model based on the Kubernetes Red Hat OpenShift platform that allows you to quickly build applications that can run anywhere: on-premise, on private and public clouds from different vendors. The Red Hat environment is based on the Alpitour infrastructure managed by IBM Services at its Italian datacenters and, thanks to it, the applications are able to automatically scale according to the load, avoiding downtime thanks to the ability to automatically detect, and in some cases resolve anomalies without human intervention.

“ The organized tourism sector has been going through a new phase of transformation for some years now, driven by digital technologies but also by the emergence of an increasingly open and dynamic business model along the entire supply chain: this is the concept of company-platform, which stands out for its agility and ability to interconnect with the socio-economic ecosystem in which opera “- declared Francesco Ciuccarelli, CIO and CTO of the Alpitour Group – “ This path has been accelerated by the recent crisis, which has made evident the importance of adaptability, elasticity of infrastructures and applications: in a word, of resilience. The collaboration with IBM aims to build this capability, first by taking over legacy infrastructures and applications, then introducing new enabling technologies, such as Red Hat OpenShift, and finally using AI in various areas of the Alpitour Group, from contact center to sales. B2C “.

“ We manage a huge wealth of information and thanks to the exponential technological advances of recent years, it has arrived time to extract value from this data. We are all strongly committed to pursuing the objective of managing information, going beyond the role of observers “ – he explains – underlines Fabio Olgiati, manager of the AI & Automation competence center of the Alpitour Group – “ The introduction of AI solutions in the e-mail channel will not only bring added value, but will also be the enabling challenge to achieve full mastery of technology, a necessary prerequisite for experimenting with future, new channels “.

heise + | Develop RESTful APIs with Python and Flask

Microservices communicate via standardized APIs. The Python frameworks Flask and Flask-RESTPlus enable developers to easily create REST APIs.

High-quality APIs are more important than ever, because more and more companies are relying on microservices that communicate with each other via interfaces. The interaction of the individual services significantly determines the quality of the entire system. For this purpose, software developers now mainly use the REST (Representational State Transfer) architecture style. This is based on the principles of the World Wide Web and describes the lightweight communication between services in the network.

For the Python programming language, extensive frameworks are available with Flask and Flask-RESTPlus with which the Developing REST APIs is easy. This article uses a sample application for managing board game collections to show how RESTful web services based on Flask-RESTPlus work can also be easily expanded. At its core, it contains basic functions that can be supplemented with extensions for authentication, object-relational mapping, caching or RESTful APIs. Flask makes few specifications here and in the project structure and gives developers a lot of freedom. It is now one of the most popular Python web frameworks and companies such as Pinterest, LinkedIn, Netflix and Red Hat use it.

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RHEL 8.3: Security updates and new admin functions

With the new 8.3 release, Red Hat is updating its Linux distribution for businesses. RHEL now disables Intel’s Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) by default. This is done for security reasons, as the TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA) vulnerability of certain Xeon processors represents a serious security hole.

If desired However, users activate TSX manually; it can also be switched off in the BIOS setup of most systems. TSX – formerly known as Transactional Memory – is primarily intended to accelerate databases. TAA has been known since 2018 and Intel drew severe criticism with its late security updates that do not fully fix them.

New for the System Roles Red Hat is also expanding its System Roles, which can be used to specify and automate configurations. Among other things, the support of kernel parameters, log settings as well as SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver is new. In addition, the administrator can now use the system roles to make security configurations for Identity Management, Certificate Management and Network-Bound Disk Encryption (NBDE).

There is also an update for Tuned that improves the performance of the RHEL -System with preconfigured profiles optimized for the respective server architecture. Also on board are new SCAP profiles (Secure Content Automation Protocol) for the Center for Internet Security (CIS) and HIPAA, which is a US law for the protection of health information. With the SCAP profiles, companies are supposed to increase the security of their systems with the help of best practices and technical standards.

Furthermore, the application streams receive an update, which is now support including Node.js 14 and Ruby 2.7. The tool separates frameworks for developers, databases and container tools from core components of the operating system. There are also many updates for packages, readers can find details on this in the announcement of the release. The predecessor 8.2 saw the light of day in April 2020, while RHEL 8 2019 appeared and receives support for ten years.

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EU Commissioner Hahn: The open source strategy is a sign of digital change

What is the strategy of Europe and the German government with regard to the challenges of digitization and digital sovereignty in public authorities? This question was addressed today by EU Commissioner Johannes Hahn and Pia Karger, Head of the Digital Society Department; Information technology in the Ministry of the Interior, at the event “Necessity or Luxury? Digital Sovereignty in Germany and Europe” as part of the German Presidency of the Council of the European Union.

There is no getting around open-source software, explains the Johannes Hahn, EU Commissioner for Budget and Administration in the von der Leyen Commission since December 2019, joined the keynote in Bremen. Above all, the past eight months with Corona have shown the value of digitization, but also that “major investments by the EU are necessary here in order to bring digitization to the wider area.”

Especially the public administration must “do everything possible to achieve digital sovereignty in Europe.” This also includes the software, and European users must “do everything to maintain control over the processes.” Hahn mentions the German Corona app as a positive example and agrees to praise open source software: Open source is independent and strengthens trust. Only the openness of the source enables the common use and the bundling of the efforts of individual authorities. Not least because of this, the EU Commission wants to strengthen open source software and promote a work culture that relies on free software. “Reuse and share, open source wherever possible, sensible and strategically important”. For Hahn, the OSS strategy is a sign of digital change in the EU and the Commission.

A center for digital sovereignty That sounds similar what can be heard in the following panel discussion from the Federal Ministry of the Interior. Among other things, Pia Karger is responsible for IT control, service consolidation as part of the federal IT consolidation and IT procurement and is convinced: the focus is clearly on digital, sovereign administration, she would like us to do ten Years ago, no longer “… discussing software licenses and business models, but being able to present digitally superior solutions that interlink smoothly”. They are already working on a center for digital sovereignty, “In many European countries there are already centers for open source software in administration” We should also have that, although Karger open source software is the most important digital component Sovereignty sees. You are still at the beginning, but discussions are ongoing and concrete ideas are being developed.

When asked what such a center could or should do, Karger replied that one would like to bundle and develop competencies , and to coordinate these with the administration, to publish them and thus to create reliable framework conditions. It should also represent digital sovereignty and open source software as a value in itself. “We are sometimes still at the beginning”. And last but not least, one would like to gain more weight together as a public administration, to represent a common market.

Build up competence, share, develop standards The other participants on the podium also agreed. Prof. Dr. Maria Wimmer heads the administrative informatics / e-government research group at the University of Koblenz-Landau, researching and teaching in the areas of e-government, e-democracy and e-participation, among other things. “We still have to build up a lot of expertise,” she says, and a uniform line within the EU is a challenge that can only be achieved through good governance of the digital solutions, in which the actors work together to develop standards as building blocks.

Peter Ganten, managing director of the Bremen Linux distributor Univention and chairman of the board of the Open Source Business Alliance, agrees and calls on the public sector to develop competence here, “Open source companies like us need competent contractors”. Ganten wants to clear up a misunderstanding: “There is simply no contrast between ‘Do it yourself with open source or buy something ready-made with proprietary software’. Open source is a functioning business model that has produced companies like Red Hat that are designed for 34 Billions were sold, d

Web development: Mozilla's WebAssembly team for the desktop is moving to Fastly

The development of the system interface of WebAssembly (Wasm), which has been an official W3C standard since the end 2019, is no longer operated by Mozilla. In future, the browser manufacturer will limit itself to maintaining the browser variant of the bytecode format including the associated runtime environment for execution in web browsers.

Fastly leads Wasmtime and Lucet teams together The specialists previously employed by Mozilla for the desktop variant and the system interface are now switching to Fastly, a provider of cloud computing services. The background is the mass layoffs announced in August at Mozilla, which (in contrast to the Rust project) affect this team.

The Bytecode Alliance celebrates its one-year existence now announced the change of the former Mozilla team, which specializes in Wasm outside the web, in a blog post and mentions that the developers of Lucet and Wasmtime at Fastly will form a team together in the future. This part of the announcement should come as little surprise, as Fastly had already announced in March 2020 that Lucet and Wasmtime are working together on a stronger compiler.

Development of the Wasm ecosystem beyond the browser continued Mozilla, Fastly and Red Hat founded an open source community called the Bytecode Alliance a year ago with the aim of to promote the development of WebAssembly into an independent ecosystem outside of the browser and to set new, cross-platform standards.

The association is currently responsible for eight projects for the execution of WebAssembly outside the browser – including Lucet and WebAssembly Micro Runtime and Runtimes Wasmtime. The aim of the projects maintained by this association is to create secure applications, since a large part of the code of modular apps is made available by individuals via package administrations such as npm, PyPI and crates.io. WebAssembly and especially its desktop version should make the use of these resources more secure. Under the hood, it’s about nanoprocesses that are secured in a sandbox

Linux distribution Fedora: Version 33 makes BTRFS the standard file system

Fedora 33 appears with a bang: The developers of the Linux distribution have switched from EXT4 to BTRFS decided as the standard file system of the Linux distribution. The installer “Anaconda” offered this file system as an option in earlier versions, but now new installations set up BTRFS on the system partition by default with automatic partitioning.

In addition to two other major changes, namely the switch to systemd-resolved and the decision to use Nano instead of Vim as editor, Fedora brings 33 but also many updates as expected with.

Tempting advantages with “residual risk” The suggestion that BTRFS with Elevating Fedora 33 to the standard, despite its scope, came late in the development stage, namely only three months before the first targeted Release date. The publication only on the second of the two previously mentioned release dates had another reason: The beta did not want to start under Secure Boot and required an additional week for error corrections.

When asked whether BTRFS is now “done” or not, the developers of the file system remain ambivalent in their status information on BTRFS. From the Fedora developers’ point of view, the arguments for BTRFS, namely transparent compression for directories and the easy expandability of storage space, outweighed the doubts about the maturity of the file system.

The BTRFS partition scheme in Fedora 33: The BTRFS system partition created by the installer is supplemented by a boot partition that has remained with EXT4.

(Image: Screenshot)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Cent OS, for which Fedora is often regarded as the “preliminary stage”, will probably not follow suit in terms of BTRFS: The systems favor XFS, which was already the case when Fedora chose EXT4 as the default filesystem.

Controversial changes … Another notable change in Fedora 33, which should not please everyone, is the change in name resolution for network connections to systemd-resolved from the conventional resolution via nss-dns, as documented in the Fedora Wiki. The Fedora developers cite a cross-program DNS cache and the cooperation with VPNs as advantages of systemd-resolved. A disadvantage that the change brings with it and which caused displeasure on Fedora’s mailing list, however, is that DNSSEC from Fedora 33 is no longer available.

Another change, namely the replacement of the preinstalled editor Vim by Nano, will probably not only meet with approval from Fedora users.

… and expected continuity In the overall package, Fedora 33 should provide a lot of discussion material, because the changes are far-reaching comparable to the switch to Systemd in Fedora 14 and the switch to Wayland as the standard for Gnome four years ago . Apart from that, Fedora Workstation delivers a familiar picture on the desktop: Gnome has been updated to version 3. 38, the KDE spin delivers KDE Plasma 5. with pre-installed Wayland option on the login page.

The kernel has arrived at version 5.8. 15 and, as usual with Fedora, will soon be an update see on 5.9. For the swap area, Fedora now relies on zRAM, which creates a compressed swap in the main memory and is supposed to use main memory more efficiently. All other, smaller innovations are listed in the Fedora release notes 33.

The We have discussed innovations in the above Gnome and Plasma versions in separate reports:

Gnome 3. 38 with improved multi-monitor operation KDE Plasma 5 . 20

1Password: Client of the online password management for Linux

The 1Password project has presented the first beta version of its online password manager for the Linux desktop. The project manages passwords, keys, certificates, credit card data, addresses and other access information for companies, teams, families and individuals on its servers and offers access via different platforms.

System clients for macOS, iOS, Windows, Android, Chrome OS and the Linux console have been available so far, as well as the web client 1Password X for Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Edge. For the new Linux app, the developers promise a high level of integration into the Linux desktop with all the usual comfort and support for biometric login procedures.

The basics: Rust, Ring, React The backend is completely written in Rust and uses the ring crypto library for end-to-end encryption, as well as React for the component-based user interface. The developers want to guarantee tamper-proof, authenticated encryption, brute force protection with PBKDF2, secure vault release and account recovery. The security design can be found in the 1Password whitepaper.

The new Linux app is equipped with a quick search in the accounts including search suggestions. The unlock screen shows all the accounts that have been set up and allows the use of different passwords. The watchtower dashboard also provides suggestions for increasing password security. In addition, individual elements can be released and the releases overlooked in the “Move elements” dialog box. The account data can also be exported.

The main window of 1Password under Ubuntu

(Image: 1Password)

You need an account at 1password.com to use it. The prices depend on the account type. Available are: Individual, Family, Team, Business and Enterprise. The service includes automatic warnings about compromised websites and vulnerable passwords, one-to-one support, a digital wallet and a travel mode with which sensitive data on devices carried at border crossings can be deleted and then restored.

Free of charge for open source projects 1Password will set up free accounts for open source teams. All you need to do is register via the GitHub page 1Password for Open Source Projects.

The binaries of the Linux desktop app are available as apt and RPM packages for Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Snap Store. There is also an AppImage for not yet supported distrib

IBM quarterly figures: only the cloud business is growing

IBM Z mainframes are currently in little demand. Accordingly, IBM has to report another significant drop in sales to the corporate department Systems . In the third quarter it was 16 percent less than a year earlier. Global Financing reports – 17%, Global Technology Services (including Infrastructure Services and Tech Support) -4%, Global Business Services (including Consulting, Application Management and Global Process Services) -5%. The Cloud & Cognitive Services division achieved seven percent more sales.

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This division, which also has the largest margin, includes the open source company Red Hat, which was taken over by IBM in the previous year. Their sales in and of themselves are even 163 percent higher, although a considerable part of the sales comes from intra-group transactions. Across all corporate divisions, IBM’s quarterly sales increased by three percent to 17, 56 Billion US dollars shrunk.

Profits slightly increased There were no particular geographical differences in terms of sales development this time. This emerges from the quarterly figures published on Monday evening. The gross profit increased by about one percent to 8 24 billion dollars, the net profit by about two percent to 1.7 billion dollars. IBM’s cash flow is impressive: Since the beginning of the year, the group has increased the value of its cash reserves and immediately marketable securities from 8.9 billion to 15, Increase 6 billion.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna continues to rely on the cloud, more precisely the hybrid cloud, in which public and private cloud infrastructure are shared. “In the coming months we will continue to develop our strategy and take measures to simplify and improve our business model, invest in important areas and solidify a much more growth-oriented attitude,” the company boss promised in a conference call with financial analysts on Monday evening to accelerated growth

Red Hat brings automation to the Kubernetes cluster with Ansible

The integration of the Ansible Automation Platform with the Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes facilitates the operation of hybrid clouds.

(Image: Gorodenkoff / Shutterstock.com)

Red Hat wants to simplify the management of mixed environments of traditional servers, virtual machines and cloud-native clusters with Kubernetes. With the integration of the Red Hat products Ansible Automation Platform and Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, container environments based on Red Hat’s OpenShift can now also be managed with Ansible. Ansible is a de facto standard for the automation of virtualized and physical data center infrastructures. The Advanced Cluster Management introduced in summer is intended to facilitate the management and scaling of OpenShift clusters in hybrid cloud environments.

New certified Ansible content collections for Red Hat OpenShift were also presented at AnsibleFest , Kubernetes Core and VMware vSphere REST API. Ansible Content Collections are ready-made, certified methods for automating numerous services, applications and devices. They are available through the Ansible Automation Hub.