Friday Five — July 1, 2016

Today Red Hat announced a slew of new pricing structures and support levels for its OpenShift containers-as-a-service offering. The options are designed to entice prospective container users–in organizations big and small–into building private and hybrid clouds with OpenShift... At the entry-level tier is Red Hat OpenShift Container Local, available at no cost but only for use on individual, non-production machines. Red Hat says Local is designed to appeal to the developer who wants to get started on a local machine–e.g., their own development notebook–without having to set up and manage an instance in a cloud... Further up the ladder is Red Hat OpenShift Container Lab, which is cheaper than the cost of the full OpenShift platform and is intended for use in "non-production server environments for development and testing." This version is aimed at those who are creating a private cloud with OpenShift but are daunted by the idea of making too great a commitment early in the process, and also want some support from Red Hat if the need arises. Red Hat is quick to emphasize that these versions are based on the exact same bits as the full-blown Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. According to Red Hat, any workload created with Local or Lab can be transitioned as-is to the full product without having to do more than upgrade the licensing.

"Lots of people talk about 'transformation' in the abstract... Change is difficult, especially when you're working within a large organization. But if you're bold and push against the walls, the walls may just fall. And that's exactly what happened with me. At Target, we created the Rapid Accelerated Development (RAD) team. This team builds digital proofs of concept for the business by testing and learning–and we do it very quickly... Find the doers, join forces, and collaborate. You can't use an org chart to find the doers. Often, the best makers and creators aren't at the top of the org chart–they're off in the corner. The doers are the people who want to work with you. Once you find these people, join forces, give them an open space to work, and help them collaborate... But I want to tell you how we're doing it at Target. In the end, transformation–or solving problems–isn't about one person. It's not about me or any of the other founders or executives. It's about setting up the right environment and then getting out of the way. It's about the business and technologists collaborating, trying new approaches, failing fast, and loving what they do." —Elwin Loomis, senior director, Store of the Future, Target

Red Hat announced the winners of the 10th annual Red Hat Innovation Awards, recognizing customers and partners for their outstanding and innovative use of Red Hat solutions. This year's winners - Acuity Systems, Amadeus, Atos, BSE, Genfare, and Paddy Power Betfair - were honored during Red Hat Summit, the industry's premier open source technology event, in San Francisco, and the overall 2016 Red Hat Innovator of the Year was voted on by attendees and the online community, with Amadeus announced as the winner. Read more about each winner and see all Red Hat Innovation Awards winners from the past decade.

Red Hat on Monday rolled out a major new release to its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform that's designed to offer better support for containers and cloud-native applications. It's been 10 years since Red Hat acquired JBoss, but much has changed in the technology world since then. Now, JBoss EAP 7 is optimized for cloud environments, Red Hat says... The new release is lightweight and features a small footprint, Red Hat says, making it well-suited for building either traditional or more modular, microservices-style applications. When deployed with Red Hat's OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS), JBoss EAP 7 helps businesses take advantage of containers, load balancing, elastic scaling, and health monitoring. Users can deploy to a container directly from the IDE, for example. By eliminating the need for overlapping features, it could contribute to a more architecturally efficient DevOps environment.

See how 2 patients are turning open health data into a movement. The Open Patient, Red Hat's latest short film, premiered at the 2016 Red Hat Summit and tells the story of two brain cancer patients who, by accessing and sharing their medical data, are turning their crises into a movement. Through their advocacy for open healthcare data standards–along with the innovative work of the OpenNotes organization–millions of patients can take control of their healthcare.