Friday Five — September 2, 2016

Red Hat, Inc. announced it has been named to Forbes' "World's Most Innovative Companies" list. Red Hat was ranked as the 25th most innovative company in the world, marking the company's fourth appearance on the list (2012, 2014, 2015, 2016). ... In its 2016 predictions, Deutsche Bank wrote that "open source keeps eating the world," with "open source rivals for almost every major infrastructure and data management software market." Red Hat is the only open source software company on Forbes' 2016 list. According to Forbes, "[t]he World's Most Innovative Companies list consists of firms that investors feel are most likely to come up with the next big innovation. Companies are ranked by their innovation premium: the difference between their market capitalization and the net present value of cash flows from existing businesses (based on a proprietary algorithm from Credit Suisse HOLT)."

Linux is now a quarter-century old. August 25, 2016 marks 25 years since the day Linus Torvalds posted a message announcing Linux to the world. ... Since then, Linux has taken the world by storm, powering millions of servers, a countless number of embedded devices, and most of the smartphones in the world–by way of Android. [Chris Hoffman from PCWorld] spoke to Matthew Miller, project leader of popular Linux distribution Fedora, to get his thoughts on this momentous occasion. He's been a Linux user since 1995, just four years after Torvalds started his "hobby" project. ... "In many ways, we've actually reached the fabled 'world domination' everyone joked about 20 years ago," says Miller. "Linux is the default operating system for most things... Android puts Linux at the heart of the most common consumer operating system in the world. Open source, to some degree or another, is now the default licensing model." ... Miller doesn't expect to see a landmark "Year of Linux on the Desktop," but he does expect Linux to increase its market share among "people who care about having an actual general-purpose computer."

Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9, its latest open Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform designed to deploy, scale and manage private cloud, public cloud, and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) environments. It's based on the OpenStack community "Mitaka" release, and Red Hat says it offers customers a more secure, production-ready automated cloud platform integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2, Red Hat Ceph Storage 2, and Red Hat CloudForms for hybrid cloud management and monitoring. There are also some updates on Red Hat's OpenStack reach in the market. Red Hat OpenStack Platform is driving private clouds across hundreds of customers worldwide, including BBVA; Cambridge University; FICO; NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Paddy Power Betfair; Santander Bank; and Verizon. The ecosystem of partners includes Cisco, Dell, Intel, Lenovo, Rackspace and more. Red Hat co-engineers and integrates its OpenStack platform with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) virtualization layer from the recently updated Red Hat Virtualization.

Over the past six years, OpenStack has rapidly expanded throughout the global marketplace. As more enterprises utilize the cloud computing platform, there is an increased demand for skilled and certified IT professionals. ... As a third-party qualifying organization, Red Hat offers some of the best OpenStack training and certifications available. Red Hat occupies a significant chunk of the marketplace as a commercial provider of Linux platforms and technologies because their certifications are seen as the gold standard of enterprise Linux. ... There is no faking your way through a Red Hat exam. All exams are hands-on – no essays, no true/false, no multiple choice questions. The exams focus on objective criteria that must be successfully completed. Passing an exam is an assurance to employers that Red Hat certified individuals are not only able to work with the required technology, but that they have already done so. ... Industry research indicates that, presently, 90 percent of fortune 500 companies rely on some form of Red Hat technology, and job postings on popular job sites seeking IT pros with Linux certifications overwhelmingly ask for Red Hat Certified Professionals.

At ContainerCon, which was part of LinuxCon North America held in Toronto this week, there were plenty of talks touting the advantages of containers, along with a few talks about the challenges and cautions associated with using containers, especially when using them in production. Linux containers have been around for a while with technologies like LXC, but they haven't exactly been easy to use. In other words, the early containers were "not for mere mortals" as Vincent Batts from Red Hat mentioned during his talk about container standards. The difference now is that many of the more recent container projects have been heavily focused on making it easy to use containers, and as a result, containers have become very popular. ... With this ease of use and popularity come a number of challenges, especially when it comes to deploying containers into production. In other words, [one event speaker] Quinn says that DevOps plus containers don't make things that work on your laptop magically work in production. You really need to spend some time understanding the ways that containers may fail before you put them in production. Those failures or other issues can happen anywhere in the stack: the containers themselves, the applications running within the containers, security, networking, etc. You really need to look at each of these layers to understand the failures and troubleshoot the issues.