Visit Red Hat Summit's Community Central

In case you haven’t heard, Red Hat Summit is doing a new format for 2021, with two online events scheduled in April and June, followed by a global tour of small-scale, in-person events, if the global health circumstances allow.

Having an online event does not mean there won’t be opportunities for attendees to meet with many of our open source communities and teams that make an impact on the open source ecosystem. 

For several years, one of Red Hat Summit’s most-visited pavilions on the exhibition floor has been Community Central, a gathering of booths and stages where upstream open source communities are the highlight. Like Summit, Community Central is going virtual too, with hours to accommodate our global audience. You can find Community Central starting on April 27 from 1:00 p.m.-3:30 p.m. EDT, and during these more regionally convenient hours on April 28:

• 1:30 p.m.-4:00 p.m. SGT (APAC). 

• 1:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m. CEST (EMEA).

• 10:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. EDT (NA/LATAM).  

Here’s a quick overview of the communities and topics that will be a part of Community Central this year!

Open source knowledge building

The Open Organization is a community-driven project, leading a global conversation about the ways open principles change how people work, manage, and lead. The project writes articles, makes books, shares videos, and facilitates events that help others understand how embracing open practices can improve their organizations. 

The Open Source Way is a community of practice for anyone interested in open source community management. It focuses not just on what community management is and how to do it but also explores why we consider certain practices best. The project recently published an updated version 2.0 of The Open Source Way, its guidebook of best practices, created with a fully open collaboration process.

PatternFly is an open source design system that provides resources for building consistent, accessible, and scalable web applications. On PatternFly, you’ll find style guides, design patterns, and a React component library to build it all. They’re building better product experiences together, so please stop by.

Kubernetes, OKD, containers, and cloud native

Cloud-native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. Ideally, a cloud-native application is a collection of small independent, and loosely coupled microservices, deployed in Linux containers, and connected through application programming interfaces (APIS) or a mesh network for message routing. All of which meets users’ flexible needs.

Kubernetes is an open source system for automating deployment scaling, and management of containerized applications. Kubernetes is the base on which we build OpenShift Container Platform OpenShift Kubernetes Engine, OpenShift Dedicated, Red Hat OpenShift Online, and OpenShift.io.

OKD is a distribution of Kubernetes optimized for continuous application development and multi-tenant deployment. OKD adds developer and operations-centric tools on top of Kubernetes to enable rapid application development, easy deployment and scaling, and long-term, life-cycle maintenance for small and large teams. OKD extends Kubernetes with security and other integrated concepts.

Middleware and cloud applications

Hybrid clouds enable organizations to combine on-premise, private cloud, and public cloud resources. While such a solution provides many benefits, it also presents a unique challenge: enabling these resources to communicate with each other. Skupper, a layer-7 service interconnect, addresses this problem as an elegant Red Hat middleware solution.

In a Skupper network, each namespace contains a Skupper instance. When these Skupper instances connect, they continually share information about the services that each instance exposes. This means that each Skupper instance is always aware of every service that has been exposed to the Skuppel network, regardless of the namespace in which each service resides.

Networking and security

In terms of supply-chain management, sigstore is a provenance store that is immutable and read-only. Sigstore's immutability provides guarantees that any data entered into sigstore cannot be tampered or amended after entry. This makes sigstore conducive for the transparency of software supply chains.

As Kubernetes grows, teams are finding they must deploy and manage multiple clusters to facilitate features like geo-redundancy, scale, and fault isolation for their applications. With Submariner, applications and services can span multiple cloud providers, data centers, and regions.

The Enarx community minimizes the impact of interference from those with hypervisor, root, or kernel access on workflows by making attestation based deployment of confidential workloads to third party servers practical.

Keylime is a TPM-based highly scalable remote boot attestation and runtime integrity measurement solution designed to identify when your software compute resources have undergone tampering. Keylime enables monitoring of remote nodes using a hardware-based cryptographic root of trust.

Management: Ansible, Pulp, and Foreman

With Red Hat automation and management solutions, you can tame disparate environments and free your teams to deliver new capabilities and innovation for the business.

Leading this effort is Ansible, where open source and collaboration are at the heart of the Ansible Community. Ansible Core, Ansible Galaxy, and AWX are created with contributions from an active community and built for the people who use it every day. Experience the power of automation with Ansible to work better and faster together.

Foreman is a complete life-cycle management tool for physical and virtual servers. With Foreman, you can easily automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy applications, and proactively manage servers, on-premise or in the cloud.

Pulp fetches, uploads, organizes, and distributes software packages, such as Python or RPMs. Pulp downloads remote packages immediately or as-needed, or it uploads custom packages. Use Pulp to publish the repository of packages for a variety of use cases.

Red Hat Legal

The Red Hat Legal department includes a team of attorneys who provide legal counsel to Red Hat on open source legal matters. This same legal team is also deeply committed to community outreach, training, and advocacy. 

Learn about the team's work in developing new solutions for open source compliance with container technology, advocating for the free and unencumbered use of software interfaces with the United States Supreme Court. 

Red Hat attorneys will be available to answer your questions about these programs. And new for this year, our booth will also include IBM attorneys to present and answer questions about their open hardware and open data initiatives. 

Fedora and CentOS Stream

The Fedora Project is a vibrant community project that produces a complete Linux-based operating system every six months that is ready for cloud instances, server platforms, and workstation environments. 

The Fedora Linux distribution incorporates modern technologies built by free software developers around the world and provides a platform for groups to build specific solutions that serve their community's needs. Innovation built in Fedora becomes the base for many Red Hat open source projects, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS Stream, and Fedora Silverblue.

The CentOS Project is responsible for the production of CentOS Stream, a rolling preview of the next minor release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and a clear path for the community to participate in the development of Red Hat Enterprise Linux through Special Interest Groups. CentOS Stream is a leading community platform for many open source technologies from projects such as OpenStack for cloud, OKD for container management,  and Ansible for configuration management. 

Be a part of the conversation

The emphasis of Community Central is about the open source communities where our projects are created, and the teams that help make those projects thrive. By visiting our virtual booth space, visitors will be able to engage in far more collaboration and gain more insights into the Red Hat ecosystem, so we look forward to meeting you online!