Friday Five — March 3, 2017

Red Hat announced the general availability of Ansible Tower 3.1, the latest version of its enterprise-grade, agentless automation platform. Ansible Tower by Red Hat helps enterprises cut through the complexities of modern IT environments with powerful automation capabilities that can improve productivity and reduce downtime. New additions to the latest version of the platform enable enterprises to better scale DevOps automation and offer the ability to link multiple Playbooks into longer, more complex jobs, enhancing productivity across the business.

We are excited to share that Ansible Container was selected by Black Duck Software as the 2016 Open Source Rookie of the Year for containers, awarded each year to the most exciting and impactful new open source projects. Launched in June 2016 as part of the Ansible project, Ansible Container is a community-driven, open source technology that allows developers and IT operations teams to re-use existing Ansible Roles in order to facilitate the creation, delivery and management of containerized workloads, all as part of an existing integrated workstream. Since Ansible is at the heart of Ansible Container, users can make container build processes more predictable and repeatable, creating a pathway towards holistic enterprise container management.

MyRepublic, an internet service provider headquartered in Singapore, has deployed Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage, and Red Hat CloudForms to create a modern cloud as part of their open hybrid cloud initiative. The new, more scalable cloud platform, replaces a fragmented legacy IT infrastructure which was impeding growth and offers MyRepublic increased availability and flexibility in addition to substantial reductions in hardware costs. Red Hat Consulting also supported the initial planning and implementation stages, making it possible to complete the deployment in only two weeks. To date, MyRepublic reports that it has achieved a double-digit percentage decrease on TCO year-on-year and that it has improved ROI with the ability to more easily reallocate unused resources.

Altice, a multinational supplier of cable, fibre telecoms, content and media services with more than 50 million customers worldwide, will lean on suppliers Cisco and Red Hat to streamline its operations by virtualising its global mobile network. The collaboration will be led by Altice's French subsidiary SFR – formerly part-owned by Vodafone – which is transforming its mobile packet core infrastructure with a network functions virtualisation (NFV) platform based on Red Hat's OpenStack platform and Cisco's network, virtualisation and datacentre compute systems. This platform has already helped SFR to realise a number of benefits, including shorter deployment time and agility to offer new services, capital savings through greater automation, and improved internal workflows.

While Amazon Web Services (AWS) is clearly the poster child for the benefits that public cloud can bring, Amazon also suffers whenever there is an outage. This incident is an indictment, not of AWS or Amazon.com, but of business and IT decision makers. Too often the decision to move IT services to the public cloud is driven by either cost or the thought that "We need to get to the cloud to be competitive." But not understanding the value that your IT can deliver today shortchanges the business. Not every workload can be in a public cloud. Sometimes it is about data sensitivity, sometimes user experience, sometimes it is privacy or regulation – but whatever the reason, not everything will leave your data center. Therefore, private cloud makes sense. But in between those pure cloud plays and the legacy or bare metal platforms back in the corporate data center, outages like we see this week remind us that we need a balanced approach because some workloads might not be best served outside of your datacenter. A hybrid IT environment is what most businesses will end up with. There is no "one size fits all" in IT. As business environments have become more complicated, so too, shall IT.