Friday Five — September 8, 2017

This week at AnsibleFest San Francisco, Red Hat introduced several new Ansible innovations aimed at helping enterprise customers harness the power of automation organization-wide: from IT operations to development to network administration, and in-between. The first is Red Hat Ansible Engine, a new offering designed to bring the enterprise-grade global support that Red Hat is known for to the popular Ansible automation community project. The second is Red Hat Ansible Engine Networking Add-on, including full support for select networking platform modules. The third is Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.2, the latest version of its enterprise Ansible automation management platform.

Customers value choice in their technology implementations, and choice is a key benefit of open source solutions. This is why Red Hat is making a commitment to bringing its portfolio of open technologies to bear on a broad spectrum of datacenter architectures - choice begets innovation, and innovation moves IT forward. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the cornerstone to how we help our customers get more value from their hardware, and the world's leading enterprise Linux platform also provides the launchpad for Red Hat's portfolio of enterprise-grade open technologies. We want our customers to eventually have access to a fully-open, enterprise-ready software stack, regardless of the underlying hardware architecture.

Red Hat and Kryptowire, leading provider of a military-grade mobile application security testing platform used by top-security Federal agencies, announced that the companies have been awarded a contract from the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) to advance mobile application lifecycle security. In May, DHS S&T announced the findings of its "Study on Mobile Device Security". According to that announcement, "threats to the Federal government's use of mobile devices–smartphones and tablet computers running mobile operating systems–exist across all elements of the mobile ecosystem. These threats require a security approach that differs substantially from the protections developed for desktop workstations."

Schiphol is Europe's third largest airport in terms of passenger numbers and cargo volume, and the 100-year-old airport is not taking it easy in its old age. Far from it, Schiphol is embracing digital transformation and employing innovative IT methodologies such as continuous development, hackathons and DevOps. The necessary IT work has been in progress since before the spring 2015, and is ongoing. Schiphol is using open source software to create and use a multi-cloud platform on which containers are being run and open application programming interfaces (APIs) are managed.

Red Hat Open Innovation Labs is an immersive residency for modernizing application development. Developing government applications can take years and cost millions. Security, compliance, & privacy requirements stall progress. Government IT teams are innovating faster and improving quality with DevOps. The approach is to make large-scale changes iteratively, instead of all at once–adjusting direction as you go. Learn more in this e-book for Red Hat Open Innovation Labs for the public sector.