Building a Modern Day Infrastructure Around Open Source (A redhat.com Success Story)

Matt Hicks and Chris Alfonso

While recent attention has focused on new web technologies under the Web 2.0 umbrella, one of the most important changes that has occurred in the online arena are customer expectations. Customers are no longer satisfied with the websites of old - an island of static content and antiquated applications just don't make the grade. Customers expect sites to be dynamic, adapt to their needs and always be available. Building an infrastructure to support this is a challenging task. No single technology or process magically makes this happen, but instead the players in this new competitive world must undergo a complete transformation that cuts across process, technology, and practices. Just over a year ago, redhat.com started undergoing this very transformation and would like to share its story. This presentation will cover the process of transforming the redhat.com infrastructure and the benefits of using an open source technology stack in the process. We used open source technology for the database, LDAP, build system, web container, development framework, UI components, and development tooling and have been able to benefit from the unique advantages of each component. Our choice of open source has allowed us to quickly develop and deploy an agile, standards-based, mission critical infrastructure at an extremely low price point. Now we would like to share our research, experiences, and results with the community that made it all possible.