Friday Five — July 14, 2017

This week, Red Hat introduced the next generation of Red Hat OpenShift Online, the industry's first open source, container-native, multi-tenant cloud platform. OpenShift Online enables developers to build cloud-native apps on a cloud-based container platform without having to worry about the inherent complexity of provisioning, managing and scaling applications as demands change. With operations and management provided by Red Hat in the public cloud, developers can focus on writing the code for their business, prototyping new features, or working on their next big idea—all in a self-service environment.

The Fedora Project, a Red Hat sponsored and community-driven open source collaboration, today announced the general availability of Fedora 26, the latest version of the fully-open source Fedora operating system. Fedora 26 provides a set of base packages that form the foundation for three distinct editions – Fedora 26 Atomic Host, Fedora 26 Server and Fedora 26 Workstation. The underlying packages powering these editions have seen numerous improvements, bug fixes and performance tweaks in Fedora 26 to provide an enhanced user experience across Fedora's use cases.

However organizations choose to interpret the meaning behind digital transformation, there is at least one thing that appears consistent: it's got business decision makers thinking about their integration middleware. A survey report titled "The Great Middleware Transition" put out in cooperation between Aberdeen Group and the cloud-based integration provider Liaison Technologies shows that a vast majority of organizations plan to make a change when it comes to their middleware. The report found that 76% of those surveyed plan to fully or partially replace their integration middleware platforms, looking to move to the cloud. As organizations think about changing their middleware technology, they should also think about how that middleware ultimately fits into their application infrastructure. Specifically, organizations should think about how to keep middleware from becoming an application performance bottleneck. They should also think critically about who should be in charge of that middleware if an organization chooses to manage it themselves.

Many organizations are interested in containers because they enable users to easily package an application, and all its dependencies, into a single image that can be moved from development, to testing and production without changing. The technology makes it easy to ensure consistency across environments. However, whether organizations are considering transitioning their current legacy infrastructure to containerized applications, or building containerized applications for the first time, one of the biggest questions that comes up is whether the technology is secure. While container technology may be new to many organizations, the philosophy behind securing them should be very familiar: You need to think about security throughout the layers of the solution stack before you deploy and run your container. You also need to think about security throughout the application and container life cycle. Continue on to learn about the 10 key elements of container security and how to deliver continuous and comprehensive security for containers.

Going way back, pretty much all software was effectively open source. That's because it was the preserve of a small number of scientists and engineers who shared and adapted each other's code (or punch cards) to suit their particular area of research. Later, when computing left the lab for the business, commercial powerhouses such as IBM, DEC and Hewlett-Packard sought to lock in their IP by making software proprietary and charging a hefty license fee for its use. The precedent was set and up until five years ago, generally speaking, that was the way things went. Proprietary software ruled the roost and even in the enlightened environs of the INQUIRER office mention of open source was invariably accompanied by jibes about sandals and stripy tanktops, basement-dwelling geeks and hairy hippies. But now the hippies are wearing suits, open source is the default choice of business and even the arch nemesis Microsoft has declared its undying love for collaborative coding. But how did we get to here from there? Join The INQUIRER as we take a trip along the open source timeline, stopping off at points of interest on the way, and consulting a few folks whose lives or careers were changed by open source software.