The Red Hat sponsored Fedora open source Linux-based operating system has reached version 20, code-named "Heisenbug".
According to (please excuse, but this was most direct source) Wikipedia -- Heisenbug is a computer programming jargon term for a software bug that seems to disappear or alter its behaviour when one attempts to study it...
... and the term is a pun on the name of Werner Heisenberg, the physicist who first asserted the observer effect of quantum mechanics, which states that the act of observing a system inevitably alters its state.
Fedora 20 celebrates 10 years of the Fedora Project. This release sees ARM now supported as a primary architecture.
According to Red Hat's Fedora team, while x86/x86_64 serves as the "default architecture" for the majority of Fedora users, ARM is rapidly "growing in stature" and already dominates the mobile world.
The clue here also lies in the fact that (given the success of Linux at the server level) ARM has been said to show "great promise" as a cost-effective technology for the server world.
The team also points to Fedora 20's cloud pedigree and talks of so-termed "first-class cloud images"...
So "first-class cloud images" (which have been developed by the Fedora Cloud SIG) are images are well-suited to running as guests in public and private clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenStack.
What a shame, that tells us very little.
Looking deeper, Fedora specifies additional functionality such as VM Snapshot UI virt-manager tool. This feature makes taking VM snapshots much easier, by adding a simple, discoverable UI to virt-manager, and includes adding functionality to libvirt to support deleting and rebasing to external snapshots.
Perhaps this should have been in the sentence above help clarify what a first-class cloud image is?
One perceives Red Hat's version of the first class cloud to also include new features such as WildFly 8 (previously known as JBoss Application Server) which makes it possible to run Java EE 7 applications with "significantly" higher speed.
How does it do that?
Fedora Project Leader Robyn Bergeron explains:
"It [WildFly 8] boasts an optimised boot process that starts services concurrently, preventing unnecessary waits, and taps into the power of multi-core processors. Additionally, WildFly takes an aggressive approach to memory management, and keeps its memory footprint exceptionally small compared to other JVMs."
There is more to learn here, let's see if the first-class image tag sticks first.