Friday Five — January 12, 2018

Recent press reports talk about a newly discovered form of security threat that involves attackers exploiting common features of modern microprocessors (aka chips) that power our computers, tablets, smartphones, and other gadgets. These attacks, known as "Meltdown" and "Spectre", are getting a lot of attention. Technology leaders, including Red Hat, are working together to address these exploits and minimize the risk of potential attacks. Watch the three-minute video to better understand these 2 vulnerabilities.

We are pleased to announce the beta availability of Red Hat Virtualization 4.2, the latest version of our Red Hat Virtualization platform. The beta release of Red Hat Virtualization 4.2 includes a number of new and updated features to help organizations streamline and automate operations, improve the virtualization administrator experience, and mitigate risk in the environment.

Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, sat down with HuffPost to discuss his background and what he's learned at Red Hat. "I've learned it's better to give context, not orders. Leaders today need to act more like catalysts than dictators or generals. A leader's job is not about conjuring up brilliant strategies and making people work harder. What they need to do is create the context for your associates so they can do their best work. Everyone wants a sense that their work is making a difference."

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst is very optimistic about the future of containers, as organizations of all sizes move to the new approach for application deployment and delivery. Whitehurst was repeatedly asked by financial analysts during Red Hat's third quarter fiscal 2018 earnings call about the opportunity for containers, and he was consistently bullish. "Virtually every major company that we are working with is building a strategy around containers," Whitehurst said. "It's the best of both worlds, which is why it does continue to be the biggest trend in technology right now, certainly in the infrastructure space."

Radhesh Balakrishnan, global leader for OpenStack at Red Hat, says that "hybrid by default" will become the new operations mantra. "The worlds of containers and OpenStack will blend... Additionally, I predict private cloud efforts will gain further momentum in 2018 driven by application modernization efforts, resulting in "hybrid cloud by default" to become the standard operating procedure for enterprises."