Friday Five — July 21, 2017

Red Hat expanded its reach into the realm of managed services with the launch of Red Hat OpenShift Online, an instance of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform delivered as a cloud service managed by Red Hat. Sathish Balakrishnan, director of OpenShift Online, says that as organizations start to transform into digital businesses that employ cloud-native applications, many of them are preferring to divert more of their resources into developing applications rather than managing the underlying infrastructure on which those applications are built and deployed. To facilitate that shift, Red Hat has expanded its number of managed services offerings to provide options for deploying applications on-premises and in the cloud. Balakrishnan says Red Hat expects to see a lot of hybrid managed services scenarios. Some customers may opt to have
Red Hat manage OpenShift Container Platform on-premises, while making use of an unmanaged version in the cloud to develop applications. Conversely, other organizations may opt to extend an on-premises instance of OpenShift Container Platform by having Red Hat manage an instance in the cloud that they use to distribute applications across a broad geographic area. Each customer is going to prefer a different combination of managed and unmanaged services.

In 2017, global IT spending will hit about $3.5 trillion, a 2.4 percent rise over 2016, fueled partly by new purchases of replacement smartphones and PCs as part of business and consumer technology refreshes, according to the latest worldwide IT spending forecast from research firm, Gartner. Other changes continue in corporate IT spending, such as the demand of many CEOs to gain revenue growth for their companies through improvements in IT which support or enable new business, said John-David Lovelock, an analyst with Gartner. "That shows why the spending today is where it is," he added. "IT is no longer about just running the internals of the business and driving out costs where they can. It has shifted to enabling new business and fulfilling on the CEO's desire for top-line revenue growth. So spending changes from data centers to artificial intelligence, augmented reality and other new technologies that will drive business." The latest Gartner estimates show this evolution, he said, with more spending on software, services consulting, open source and more to make it all happen. "That changes the stack of what you spend money on. Not so much devices but a lot of services and software."

Two years ago, the emerging world of application containers was at a crossroads with rival efforts threatening to potentially bifurcate the technology paradigm. To solve that challenge, the Open Container Initiative (OCI) was formed, and today after two years of effort the OCI is officially releasing the 1.0 milestone of the OCI container runtime and image specification standards. Although end user mays not read the OCI specs from end to end, they can rely on the guarantees about filesystem layout, interoperability and execution environment that the two specs, when brought together, provide. Vincent Batts, principal software engineer at Red Hat, agrees that while the runtime and image specs are low level, they provide an important level of interoperability. He also noted that the lack of a container standard has been a barrier inside the Linux container ecosystem, primarily in limiting integration and overall technology choice.

If one thing is certain in IT, it's never too late to cash in on the cloud. As the cloud becomes more critical to IT and the business at large, demand for cloud skills will only grow. But proving you have the right skills and knowledge in a competitive job market can be difficult. If you're looking for an extra edge in landing a new job or promotion, cloud certification can be a great option. Here's our round-up of the most sought after cloud computing certifications you should consider. ... Red Hat's certification for System Administrators in Red Hat OpenStack measures professionals' ability to design, build, deploy and manage private clouds based on the Red Hat OpenStack Platform. IT pros with this certification can install and configure Red Hat OpenStack, manage users and projects, and manage storage using Swift and Cinder.

This year has seen no slowdown in momentum for the open source technologies movement. Open-source innovations are continuing to drive forward the larger tech industry as a whole, as developers and enterprises embrace open ways of approaching application development, IT infrastructure automation and other business-critical functions. Red Hat recently introduced what it's calling the first open source hyperconverged infrastructure software stack. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure combines four of the company's technologies into an integrated offering targeting cloud deployments. The components are Red Hat Virtualization, the company's hypervisor based on open-source KVM technology; Gluster storage, Red Hat's scale-out file system based on the GlusterFS project; the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL, operating system; and Red Hat's IT automation platform, Ansible. The Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure software stack targets customers looking to simplify their data center infrastructures, the company said.