Friday Five — March 17, 2017

For the third consecutive report, we're happy to share that Gartner, Inc. has given Red Hat a "Positive" overall rating in its 2017 Vendor Rating report. Gartner creates Vendor Ratings for approximately 30 IT vendors, and Red Hat believes its "Positive" rating reflects on the strength of its open hybrid cloud portfolio and its ability to meet customer's needs as they modernize IT systems with flexible and agile open source solutions. Gartner's Vendor Ratings are structured reports that define Gartner's position on an individual vendor as a whole, not just on its position within a single market. Gartner's evaluation was based on various criteria, such as Red Hat's strategy, products and services, technology, marketing, and corporate viability.

Red Hat Director of Product Strategy Brian Gracely and Dan Kusnetzky from Virtualization & Cloud Review recently had a conversation about the five things Red Hat wants you to know about the latest Kubernetes update. While not earth-shattering, it's clear that Red Hat is doing its best to bring this technology to its customers as commercial products—not computer science projects. It has done quite a bit of work to integrate the newest Kubernetes release into its packages, including OpenShift. Gracely and Kusnetzky also discussed the goals customers have when selecting this technology. Gracely believes that improving availability and reliability are only a few of the reason customers are adopting this technology. Other reasons they've mentioned include increasing application performance and scalability.

What's Red Hat's vision for container adoption, and what has the company learned about the way clients go about setting up container platforms? Director of Product Strategy Brian Gracely recently shared his perspective on these topics with Container Journal. The following were the key points he made about how organizations should approach container adoption: Organizations should embrace open standards in order to ensure flexibility, they should embrace container products that are widely supported in the ecosystem, and they should make sure their container platform can scale. "Companies should look for a platform that puts a premium on standardization, automation and cloud-based technology in order to streamline developer workflows and build apps more quickly and efficiently," Gracely said.

Open-source software (OSS) is becoming more popular, but a lack of knowledge about how these packages work together remains one of the biggest problems with it. Rogue Wave has released its annual Open Source Support Report, which found common OSS issues are a result of development teams not being equipped to support the OSS they are using. Eighty percent of issues come from configuration and infrastructure, not necessarily the open-software package itself. while developers may understand the open-source package they are working with and how to fix an issue within a package, they are still trying to figure out how different packages interact with one another. For organizations to successfully roll out an open-source software initiative, they need to figure out how it will work in a mixed-source world and understand the legal challenges. In order to do so, Rogue Wave says enterprises need training, architectural guidance, package selection help, and performance tuning.

OpenStack is perhaps best known for its complexity. It's not a single open source project but a framework meant to contain several projects with the different pieces able to work together. Different teams are working, each at their own pace, on each subsystem. To some extent, Julio Villarreal-Pelegrino, a principal cloud architect at Red Hat, wants to dispel this perception of OpenStack as big and complex–sometimes perceived as too much so for your company's next IT cloud project. There may be several moving parts, but the OpenStack framework itself, where those parts are plugged in, has been designed for its simplicity of operation, he said. Still, no one should try to implement an OpenStack cloud because it's "trendy" or the way to claim relevance with higher-ups in the organization. The task will take time, concentrated effort and resources.