Friday Five — April 8, 2016

Visit the Red Hat Summit website to see the full list of breakout sessions for Red Hat's annual technology event. The 2016 session catalog allows everyone to browse all event content, and it also allows registrants to start reserving seats and building their personal agenda. Viewers can search using keywords, or sort the sessions by themes, solutions, and technical difficulty.

Red Hat is offering a no-cost RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] subscription, as part of its Red Hat Developer Program. This is as a self-supported, non-production developer subscription. The RHEL Developer Suite provides programmers with a stable development platform for building enterprise-ready applications... A Red Hat spokesperson told ZDNet, "This is a first for Red Hat, and is a similar approach to what we did with our Middleware portfolio in 2014. This makes it available to developers at no cost. What we've effectively done is given developers an enterprise-ready stack from the start—using RHEL + JBoss from the get-go, this should help accelerate next-generation application development and speed up the delivery of these applications."

Red Hat announced that C.A. Mobile, a leading mobile services provider in Japan, built a flexible infrastructure to support its websites with an OpenStack cloud solution from Red Hat and Dell. OpenStack's infrastructure customization and auto-scaling features led C.A. Mobile to pursue the Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution, powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. Since deployment, C.A. Mobile's internal testing of the new OpenStack-based solution has significantly increased its server delivery speed, reducing original operating system installation and server provisioning time from half a day to 10 minutes.

Next-generation open-source technologies–especially Docker containers and the OpenStack cloud operating system–will be the platforms that propel Red Hat into the future, [Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO] told CRN, and will enable partners to scale their businesses... "What's going to drive us to the next level is open source being the default choice," Whitehurst told CRN. "Our role is to make it consumable for enterprise customers." Innovation now typically happens in the realm of open source, allowing developers to take advantage of large communities and diverse contributors, according to the CEO. "Before it was helping [customers] carve out costs. Now building new architectures is primarily an open-source question."

To deliver mobile internet and cloud-based hosting, Xchanging Malaysia, a subsidiary of YTL Communications, needed to achieve and maintain a high standard of excellence in the emerging cloud landscape. Red Hat Training and Certification programs allow Xchanging Malaysia to prepare its engineers for unique and critical real-world scenarios by providing extensive training and knowledge of selected tools and solutions for different situations. "Continuous learning inspires innovation. Keeping the skills of our IT team up-to-date and providing them with the right training is essential. By equipping the team with high-level technical competency and knowledge of best practices, we are able to innovate and consistently deliver high quality solutions to our customers." –Anurag Sindhwani, Vice President and Head of Technology and Architecture, Xchanging Malaysia Sdn Bhd