Friday Five — January 22, 2016

Red Hat has been named a leader in two Forrester research reports ranking private cloud software suites and hybrid cloud management solutions. "The Forrester Wave^TM: Private Cloud Software Suites, Q1 2016" and "The Forrester Wave^TM: Hybrid Cloud Management Solutions, Q1 2016" reports assessed vendors in terms of their current offerings, market presence, and strategy, and Red Hat was placed as a leader in both reports. "Red Hat...leads the evaluation with its powerful portal, top governance capabilities, and a strategy built around integration, open source, and interoperability. Rather than trying to build a custom approach for completing functions around operations, governance, or automation, Red Hat provides a very composable package by leveraging a mix of market standards and open source in addition to its own development," the first report noted.

Some predict 2016 will be the year of the cloud. While that may be up for debate, what's not is that there are a whole slew of cloud computing-related conferences on tap for the year... Red Hat Summit is the go-to conference for all things related to Red Hat, and many other open source technologies. It has a strong cloud component, particularly focused on the company's OpenShift PaaS and OpenStack IaaS products. The Summit volleys between the east and west coasts each year.

As cloud services grow in popularity, the lure of platforms for building applications can be considered as one of the main factors that contribute to that growth. The ability to quickly develop applications that can directly influence your business, how you engage with your customers and a myriad of other benefits, all mean that a good and easy to use platform is a must. To help you identify some of the best offerings out there, CBR has compiled a list in no particular order of what you should be looking to use... Red Hat OpenShift - For the open source conscious application developer there is Red Hat's OpenShift PaaS offering that is designed for a high level of customisation. OpenShift offers OpenShift Online, which is a cloud-based hosting service, and Enterprise which is a private PaaS that runs in your data centre. One of the key benefits of using this is that it can automate system administration tasks such as configuration and virtual server provisioning. It offers horizontal, vertical and auto scaling along with programming languages that include Java, JS.Node, Perl, Php, Python and Ruby.

A few months ago, for our own internal use, we started a project to calculate what it costs to run an OpenStack-based private cloud. More specifically, the total cost of ownership (TCO) over the years of its useful life. We found the exercise to be complex and time consuming, as we had to gather all of the inputs, decide on assumptions, vet the model and inputs, etc. So, in addition to results, we're offering up a few lessons we learned along the way, and hopefully can save you a scar or three when you want to create your own TCO model. Ultimately, we wanted answers to three layers of cost: What is the most cost effective method for acquiring and running OpenStack? How does OpenStack compare financially to non-OpenStack alternatives? How should we prioritize technical improvements to provide financial improvements?

Red Hat's JBoss may be responsible for as much as one-fifth of the world's active enterprise middleware deployments... Red Hat opened up the public beta process for the new version 7 of its Enterprise Applications Platform (EAP). It brings JBoss in line with the company's OpenShift PaaS platform, deploying Java applications under a new orchestration scheme that utilizes Docker, and that's perfectly compatible with Google's Kubernetes... "Our entire portfolio of middleware products, I would say, are the first broad Java portfolio to be fully Dockerized," said Sharples [Red Hat's senior director for product management]. "All of our products are supported in OpenShift, and to be able to do that, we have to Dockerize everything."