Friday Five — December 18, 2015

The 2016 Red Hat Summit call for papers is open until January 11, 2016 at 11:59 p.m. ET. Visit the Summit website to get started, plus check out the submission guide for session type descriptions, abstract writing help, and more. We are looking for the best solutions-focused sessions. Attendees range from C-level executives and IT managers to engineers and developers, so we're looking for both high-level business and IT strategy sessions and technical deep dives. Red Hat Summit will be June 28-July 1, 2016 in San Francisco.

For the second straight year, Red Hat Storage has received the prestigious Brand Leader award for Scale-out Object Storage Software by IT Brand Pulse. The 2015 winners were selected by IT professionals in an independent, non-vendor-sponsored survey of IT Brand Pulse's million members and 100+ online IT groups. Red Hat Ceph Storage led a competitive field of fifteen vendor choices to sweep top rankings in all six categories: market, price, performance, reliability, service and support, and innovation.

Red Hat has unveiled its enterprise IT container app platform, including the Docker container and Kubernetes orchestration techologies increasingly requested by development teams. OpenShift Dedicated joins Red Hat's exsiting OpenShift Enterprise and OpenShift Online platforms, that allow containers to be used by organisations with on-premise hardware or certified cloud provider or by individual teams opting to use public cloud services hosted on AWS. This new addition means entire organisations can deploy, manage and support their OpenShift instances on AWS, giving them more control over the building and isolation of their applications in comparison to bare metal management.

With all of the hue and cry over the better jobs and better wages that can come from IT certification, it sometimes feels as though a person's quality of life is dependent on their ability to pass a test or exam... The continued presence of multiple-choice questions on both academically and professionally meaningful exams, however, really is questionable. And in IT certification circles, one organization that stands apart as a valiant fighter against the enduring multiple-choice exam epidemic, is Linux-powered tech titan Red Hat. Instead of measuring those who embrace its certifications by a multiple-choice standard, Red Hat has been a technology trailblazer for decades in staking out a different, performance-based approach... Rather than simply studying for a test, Red Hat certificants are learning how to do actual tasks that might be asked of them in a real-world IT workplace. This lends itself to an ongoing high employment rate for the hundreds of thousands of Red Hat certification holders.

"Containers can offer developers faster and easier deployment due to their minimal footprint. In addition, emphasis on the immutability of containers can lead to reduced error complexity. With OpenShift and Red Hat JBoss Middleware, as well as Atomic Enterprise Platform, Red Hat has embraced containers in a big way. I'm pleased to announce that, hot on the tail of OpenShift Enterprise 3.1, we're rolling out three new Red Hat JBoss Middleware services on OpenShift based on JBoss Fuse, JBoss BRMS, and JBoss Data Grid... These services are delivered as Docker container images on OpenShift, making it easier for developers to extend and complement these services in a container-based, microservices architecture." –Mike Piech, vice president and general manager, Middleware, Red Hat