Friday Five — July 22, 2016

Red Hat is the newest organization to take a stab at the persistent storage challenge for containers. Last month, the open source giant announced a new Gluster-based storage option for OpenShift, the company's open source platform for running containerized apps. Gluster and OpenShift are two key parts of the Red Hat technology stack. Gluster provides open source distributed storage, while OpenShift offers an integrated, one-stop platform for deploying and managing containers using Docker and Kubernetes... [Red Hat's solution] will allow containers to access a persistent distributed storage system through Gluster. That means the data will have a permanent place to live even as the containers using it spin up and down. In addition, access to the data won't require containers to access local storage on the host.

Red Hat Group CFO Frank Calderoni says the firm is investing more in Asia, where business has grown 25 percent in just the past quarter, and also speaks on the value of Red Hat in cloud technologies and the company's subscription model. Watch the full interview.

Red Hat has given its Ansible Tower a good scrubbing down before smoothing the UI (user interface) to better penetrate big money corporate accounts. Tower is Red Hat's paid for version of the open source Ansible automation platform, effectively a GUI (graphical user interface) and services package around the core product... Red Hat's head of Ansible engineering, Tim Cramer said that to date, Tower had been "designed by engineers, for engineers. It's crucial we don't have people being confused when they start using tower. Hence, 3.0 has a more streamlined interface when it comes to complex deployments." ... Cramer said the key issue with the latest upgrade was to make Ansible a more palatable platform for enterprises. The product had originally gained traction in smaller organisations, or where techies could take out a credit-card subscription under the radar. Larger rollouts and deployments were more likely to need higher level approvals, and Ansible is "trying to make sure it's easy for the guys to do that."

IT leaders already know that technology skills gaps will impact their ability to compete in the digital age. Yet, what's often missing from news articles and conference keynotes is what to do about it. A report from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, sponsored by The Enterprisers Project, aims to fill this void. The research, "IT Talent Crisis: Proven Advice from CIOs and HR Leaders," offers real, actionable insights from more than a dozen business leaders and experts who are collaborating to find new solutions for attracting, motivating, and retaining IT talent. Notably, the experts featured are not those from technology giants who can compete for the best talent on salary alone. Rather, the CIOs interviewed represent a range of fields including government, nonprofit, manufacturing, and education. Each of these CIOs have had to get creative to find new approaches to today's most common talent struggles. as enterprises look to gain insight as to how to effectively manage their containers across these four points. Red Hat also has the distinct advantage of having 14 years working with Linux. "We're coming at it from an infrastructure perspective. Infrastructure is driven by Linux and open source development," Cormier said.

Open-source software is one of those overnight successes that's been a decade and more in the making. It's a far cry from the early aughts when Red Hat and JBoss blazed a trail that still has doubters. Arguably, there's still the issue of whether Red Hat, a publicly-traded, open source company, is a Unicorn from a different twist. Nonetheless, today, when we get acquainted to a new startup, one of the first questions that we pop is whether they're open source... A good barometer of the progress of open source can be found by comparing notes from Black Duck Software's annual Future of Open Source surveys that date back over a decade. The 2015 survey indicated a doubling of use of open source to run business IT environments since 2010. This year's survey pointed out that the preponderance of open source was in operating systems, database platforms, and development tools, and that in the next two to three years, the hot spots for open source will be cloud, database, and big data.