The Friday Five is a weekly Red Hat® blog post with 5 of the week's top news items and ideas from or about Red Hat and the technology industry. Consider it your weekly digest of things that caught our eye.


IN THE NEWS:
Light Reading - Competition will be kicking itself over Red Hat deal, says Nokia cloud expert
"It was a very, very smart move on our part. Our competition is probably privately kicking itself it didn't think of it before we did." So said Fran Heeran, Nokia's general manager of core networks, cloud and network services, when Light Reading caught up with him to talk about the Finnish supplier's tie-up with Red Hat, announced last week.


GOOD READ:
ITPro - Red Hat adds four years of extended support for RHEL 7
Linux vendor Red Hat has announced up to four years of extended support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, further prolonging the usability for customers that are unable to upgrade. This extended support ensures customers receive additional support for security and bug fixes and includes maintenance for Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions and Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability and Resilient Storage add-ons.


LEARN MORE:
Accelerating your network automation journey with Ansible network validated content
Network infrastructures growth in scale and complexity pose the need for modern enterprise automation solutions such as Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, to cover multi-domain and multi-vendor architectures including standalone and SDN (Software Defined Network) solutions. Read on to learn what considerations you should take to ensure a successful network automation journey.


CHECK IT OUT:
GovInsider - When ChatGPT arrives to code
Automation is being used everywhere. But can it write good code? Kelvin Loh, Senior Manager, Solutions Architect, ASEAN, Red Hat, shares how Red Hat is developing a generative AI/ML model that will help developers leapfrog automation code and bridge the IT skills gap with reliable and consistent code for automated tasks.


ON THE BLOG:
Red Hat bringing open hybrid cloud to Red Hat IT provides key learnings for others
Here at Red Hat, we do things because they are the right things to do for our business, our future and our customers. But it never hurts to be acknowledged for them and to spread the word that what works at Red Hat can work for our current and future customers, too. Jim Palermo dives deeper on some of the reasons why CNBC has recognized Red Hat for bringing open hybrid cloud to Red Hat IT as part of its annual review of award-winning initiatives.
About the author
Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies.
Red Hat helps customers integrate new and existing IT applications, develop cloud-native applications, standardize on our industry-leading operating system, and automate, secure, and manage complex environments. Award-winning support, training, and consulting services make Red Hat a trusted adviser to the Fortune 500. As a strategic partner to cloud providers, system integrators, application vendors, customers, and open source communities, Red Hat can help organizations prepare for the digital future.
More like this
Friday Five — February 6, 2026 | Red Hat
AI insights with actionable automation accelerate the journey to autonomous networks
Data Security And AI | Compiler
Data Security 101 | Compiler
Browse by channel
Automation
The latest on IT automation for tech, teams, and environments
Artificial intelligence
Updates on the platforms that free customers to run AI workloads anywhere
Open hybrid cloud
Explore how we build a more flexible future with hybrid cloud
Security
The latest on how we reduce risks across environments and technologies
Edge computing
Updates on the platforms that simplify operations at the edge
Infrastructure
The latest on the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform
Applications
Inside our solutions to the toughest application challenges
Virtualization
The future of enterprise virtualization for your workloads on-premise or across clouds