Friday Five — June 2, 2017

Red Hat held its Red Hat Summit 2017 in Boston recently and took advantage of the show to clearly lay out its hybrid cloud vision. Red Hat landed three key positions: First, the preferred platform for hybrid cloud is Linux based, spanning from on-premises servers to Linux containers to multiple cloud platforms, including OpenStack and hyper-scale cloud providers such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. Second, hybrid cloud and cloud technologies are about applications, not infrastructure. It's clear that the cloud operating paradigm is application-centric and it's great to see Red Hat promote that paradigm. As Red Hat noted in its keynote, infrastructure exists to run applications and supporting applications and application development is a priority for IT today. Finally, Red Hat is clearly focused on being a supporter of multi-cloud hybrid cloud. This mean becoming an enabler and connector of services across AWS, Azure, OpenStack, and other cloud platforms.

After a wave of new product announcements at the 2017 Red Hat Summit in Boston, the company's President of Product and Technologies, Paul Cormier, spoke with CRNtv about the impact of OpenShift.io. "OpenShift.io is now bringing to our developers a toolchain to really have the ability to code their applications, cloud-ready, from day one," said Cormier. The real key in implementing this technology, a theme woven throughout the fabric of all literature during the event, is the notion of efficiency. Cormier mentioned that a big goal for Red Hat is simply to improve the quality of life in multiple verticals by making it easier for companies to capitalize on using this type of high-level system. "Everybody talked about the cloud. Everyone said that applications would move to the public cloud, but now, people are actually integrating it into their own environment, and that's where the rubber meets the road," said Cormier.

If you talk about software automation with developers and devops, there's a good chance that Chef and Puppet will come up in conversation. In the last 18 months or so another name has joined them: Ansible. Ansible is very similar to Chef and Puppet, yet its Ansible that everyone seems to be talking about. The project was founded in 2013 and bought by Red Hat in 2015. Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's CEO, said recently that Ansible is included in about a third of all Red Hat deals. So what exactly makes Ansible so attractive? One reason it has gained momentum since being acquired by Red Hat may have been the acquisition itself, according to Paul Delory, a research director at Gartner. "We definitely have seen a bump in interest since the acquisition by Red Hat, because it now has more credibility in the enterprise," he says. Part of the reason for this is that there was a perception in the software development and devops community that Ansible's support offering was not as good as that of Puppet or Chef. But under Red Hat's ownership this support gap has been closed, he says. "Support is important to enterprises, and the quality of support available is of critical importance."

The acceptance of open source as an integral part of any IT set up has even been embraced by companies that have made a living off proprietary software, or have in the past referred to open source as a cancer. While this means that IT professionals no longer have to work so hard to get an open source project approved, it does mean that there's a lot more influence in the open source world coming from those companies that are still predominantly proprietary tech driven. Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, recently spoke to CBR about what kind of impact this has on the customer, the communities, and whether it damages the image of open source. "It's a balance, so I think that it can be an issue if it turns out it's not open, but at the same time it makes it easier for customers to convince their boss or general counsel because even IBM or Dell are doing it, it's ok, it's safe," said Whitehurst. While Whitehurst isn't overly worried about proprietary vendors operating in the open source community, he is worried about open source projects that aren't truly open source because they don't have a community around them. "I'm a zealot for open source but I'm not saying it's clearly superior in every context but in an infrastructure context where user participation is valuable it's going to win."

Open source is expected to succeed with cloud technology because, unlike proprietary operating servers (ex. Windows), each individual developer and company can shape innovated and time-saving systems directly effective for their business. As the cloud grows, OpenStack will act as a platform that allows businesses and individuals to build massively scalable cloud technology. Linux has been the fastest growing segment of total server operating system revenues. Because Red Hat owns the majority of the market share of Linux, they were the largest paid provider of Linux [in 2015]. Linux is creating much more market demand than Windows and is still in its growth stage. We believe that the larger open source becomes, the more opportunity that OpenStack has to be the next "Linux-like" software for the cloud transition.