Friday Five — February 12, 2016

OpenShift by Red Hat, the company's cloud application platform offering, has received the Infoworld Technology of the Year award for the second year in a row. The annual awards identify the year's best and most innovative products in the IT landscape, selected by IDG's InfoWorld Test Center editors and reviewers. Winners are drawn from the products tested by InfoWorld during the past year. For the second year in a row, OpenShift was the only cloud application platform offering to receive the award. OpenShift saw significant momentum in 2015. OpenShift Enterprise 3 was introduced, marking the launch of the industry's first open source enterprise-ready web-scale container application platform combining the industry-leading features of Docker format Linux containers, Kubernetes orchestration and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Leading companies around the world now use OpenShift to build internal clouds, power online applications of all sizes and improve operational efficiency, including Swiss grocery LeShop, American credit-scoring agency FICO and Norwegian financial institution VPS.

Join Secure Foundations, Part 2 | A Red Hat virtual event on February 17 at 11 a.m. (ET) [4 p.m. (UTC)], and learn more about innovative, open source technologies to keep your infrastructure secure. In this event, you'll hear from the experts on topics including: container security and scanning, SELinux and access control, identity management and authentication, maintaining system security with OpenSCAP, and proactive risk identification technology.

Rackspace may have put OpenStack on the map, but Thursday it introduced to its private cloud portfolio another vendor's version of the open-source technology. The managed cloud company out of San Antonio is making Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform available to customers and partners deploying private clouds either in Rackspace data centers or on their own premises, according to Bryan Thompson, senior director of product management for Rackspace's OpenStack practice... The two companies have been working together for several months to bring the private cloud option to market as a managed service with a high-availability SLA; the offering comes with a 99.99 percent API uptime guarantee. With the greatest barriers to OpenStack adoption being the complexity of the technology and lack of expertise, Rackspace sees offering a Red Hat-powered cloud as another way to remove an obstacle to OpenStack implementation and further drive adoption, Thompson told CRN.

Cloud computing companies are among the most competitive there are about salaries, performance and sign-on bonuses and a myriad of perks and benefits. They are also attracting senior management teams that have strong leadership skills, many of whom are striving to create excellent company cultures. The most popular request from Forbes readers are for recommendations of the best cloud computing companies to work for, and that's what led to this analysis. Using the 2016 Computer Reseller News list as a baseline to compare the Glassdoor.com scores of the (%) of employees who would recommend this company to a friend and (%) of employees who approve of the CEO, Forbes determined the best cloud computing companies and CEOs to work for this year.

The Red Hat certification program is aimed at system administrators, engineers, architects, enterprise developers and application administrators, as well as cloud and virtualization administrators, who use RHEL in the IT infrastructure. The program aims to ensure candidates are proficient in RHEL by requiring performance-based certification exams. Whereas many certification exams ask multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank questions about specific technologies, Red Hat requires you to perform and complete real-world tasks using Red Hat technologies in order to pass its exams... Once you earn a Red Hat certification, you become a Red Hat Certified Professional. This gives you access to Red Hat Certification Central, which allows you to connect with potential employers, join the Red Hat community, create study groups and collaborate on projects. In addition, you can explore Red Hat's training options and easily schedule individual exam sessions. Discounts on recertification exams are offered as well.