Friday Five — July 15, 2016

The fast changing world of technology has placed added pressure on businesses to go through digital transformations, to adopt new technologies and discard the old in order to continue to exist - but this isn't enough. In addition to changing technologies there is a growing call from tech vendors to businesses demanding a change of culture, without which businesses will remain playing a constant game of catch up and never truly lead. Never more so has this message been more apparent than at the recent Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, during which, Jim Whitehurst CEO, Red Hat called for businesses to stop just using open source technologies, but to participate by giving back. Whitehurst told CBR: "As we march forward in open source I think it is really important to hammer home that it is not about consuming cool stuff that other people did, it's about truly getting involved." ... Whitehurst said that often CIOs say that they cannot hire the best talent unless they are allowed to contribute to open source projects... While potentially opening themselves up to the brightest talent might be quite an enticing proposition for some businesses, a much more exciting prospect is to gain competitive advantage.

We are thrilled to announce yet another milestone on the cloud journey with the availability of Cisco's Metapod 4.0, now powered by Red Hat OpenStack Platform... Cisco's Metapod being re-based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform for its 4.0 version demonstrates Cisco's commitment to delivering innovation to customers. By standardizing Cisco's Metapod managed service offering for OpenStack on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Cisco is now able to apply resources to innovate and build even more capabilities to enhance customer experience, ease of use, and integrate feature requests into an accelerated solution roadmap... Metapod's fully managed offering is designed to address a market that wants a more simple to deploy and easier to maintain OpenStack, or OpenStack-as-a-Service, which both Cisco and Red Hat consider to be an important opportunity for the OpenStack market.

As a large public online betting company, Paddy Power Betfair handles more than 3.5 billion application program interface requests every day–a number similar to Netflix, eBay, Facebook, or Twitter. Because of the large number of transactions, the company must innovate and keep its customers engaged with a reliable flow of new products. If it doesn't, it risks losing market share. With Red Hat solutions, Paddy Power Betfair has automated its complete development pipeline. Developers can now move code and new features to production more easily while avoiding operational bottlenecks. As a result, Paddy Power Betfair has reduced the timeline for new product deployment from days or weeks down to just hours or minutes.

Many have asked if containers are here to stay. For Paul Cormier, Red Hat's executive vice president of engineering this is a simple question to answer: "Containers will be an everywhere concept. Containers are not a new technology. It's been around, even in the Unix days. Now that people are trying to move around in a hybrid cloud environment, containers are absolutely the vehicles to do that." ... Describing the transformation from virtual machines to containers, Cormier highlighted that the process of retooling to a virtual world saw a marked shift in how to orchestrate containers at four levels: Infrastructure, compute, networking, and management. With this retooling has come a paradigm shift, Cormier noted, 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.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a heavy user of open source software. Tom Soderstrom, JPL's IT CTO, explained how open source has changed the usage of software within the organization, "In olden days we had commercial software that commercial vendors wrote and sold to us. They were in control of all the updates and changes." Then came along open source that changed every thing. "In open source you yourself can go in and modify the code. You can add features and improve things. In addition to this ability to modify the code, you can also get support from commercial vendors like Red Hat." ... Open source is so widespread within JPL that it is directly affecting NASA's space exploration missions. Curiosity is NASA's spacecraft on Mars... The instruments onboard the rover are sensitive and can operate within a certain temperature range, and as a result the teams back on Earth have a very limited time to drive the rover based on conditions favorable for driving. Curiosity sends a lot of data back to Earth that can help with drive time. Contrary to earlier times, JPL now copies that data to the cloud and then uses open source analytic tools like Elastic Stack to run elasticsearch on that data. People who are in charge of driving Curiosity "have billions of data points that they can interact with and see what the safe margins are. By doing that we can get a lot more drive time on Mars, without making any hardware changes."