The Friday Five is a weekly Red Hat® blog post with 5 of the week's top news items and ideas from or about Red Hat and the technology industry. Consider it your weekly digest of things that caught
our eye.


IN THE NEWS:

CRN - Red Hat's New Boston Location Provides Partners, Customers A More Hands-On Experience

Red Hat's new office in Boston's Fort Point neighborhood will offer the company's partners and customers a place for collaboration with its staff, local tech businesses, and local university programs as well, according to Paul Cormier, Red Hat's president of products and technologies. "The concept we had here was really for it to be a three-fold place. We have an executive briefing center for the entire company, so we're bringing in executives to meet with us from all over the world. We want them to meet with us and collaborate with us on how we can help solve their problems with our products," said Cormier. Cormier referred to Red Hat as the "bridge" from the open source community to the commercial world, saying that this concept has been part of the company's foundation. "I think as open source, and Linux continue to grow in popularity in the commercial world, the location gives us the opportunity to showcase that. Maybe if there are people in corners of the world who haven't heard of it yet, it's a way to welcome them into the family," said Cormier.


RECOMMENDED READING:

CIO - What are containers and why do you need them?

Containers are a solution to the problem of how to get software to run reliably when moved from one computing environment to another. This could be from a developer's laptop to a test environment, from a staging environment into production, and perhaps from a physical machine in a data center to a virtual machine in a private or public cloud. Problems arise when the supporting software environment is not identical. How do containers solve this problem? Put simply, a container consists of an entire runtime environment: an application, plus all its dependencies, libraries and other binaries, and configuration files needed to run it, bundled into one package. By containerizing the application platform and its dependencies, differences in OS distributions and underlying infrastructure are abstracted away.


GOOD READ:

Digital News Asia - The new engine for disruptive technologies, by Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, senior vice president and general manager, Red Hat Asia Pacific

Governments and policymakers in the Asia-Pacific region are making a critical and positive impact on bettering the technology innovation ecosystem. Singapore, as an example, is cultivating a conducive technology start-up ecosystem, and opening up some 9,000 government data sets for the tech community to explore and test new ideas. Apart from governments, we are also seeing more and more organisations opening themselves to innovate through collaboration, an increasing number of developers, engineers, programmers participating in the open community, the combined force of which is setting Asia up for success in the race to digital innovation and transformation in the coming years. Based on a research conducted by Forrester Consulting on open source, we
[Red Hat] discovered that large organisations and their technology partners are showing increasing demand for agile, and customer-obsessed technology. Instead of proprietary solutions, they have been turning to open source to create modern applications, while trimming enterprise software costs. More crucially, business leaders are leveraging open source to foster a collaborative culture, as well as to drive strategic and often mission-critical capabilities.


IN THE NEWS:

Integration developer news - With Ansible Automation, Red Hat Insights Can Resolve Critical Infrastructure Outages Security Risks

As existing workloads evolve and deployments grow in size and complexity, risk management is a key challenge for enterprise IT. So, Red Hat Insights cloud-based service is adding capabilities designed to automatically remediate outages or other issues that can impact infrastructure security, performance, and stability. The Red Hat Insights SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) provides continuous, in-depth analysis of an organization's Red Hat-based infrastructure — across physical, virtual, off-prem cloud and even container deployments. In specific, Red Hat Insights can now be integrated with Ansible 'playbooks' to bring faster problem-solving to Red Hat infrastructure. The marriage of Red Hat Insights with Red Hat Ansible offers strong benefits to both IT and business users, according to Joe Fitzgerald, vice president of Red Hat's management solutions. With this feature update,
Red Hat is bringing together automation, scale and predictive analytics to identifying and resolving issues that can impact apps performance, data access, ability to scale to a huge user base and many more baseline requirements of a digital business, he said.


IN THE NEWS:

SD Times - Industry Spotlight: Citizen developers are a necessity

Software development team roles are changing as the pace of business continues to accelerate. Agile development, continuous integration and continuous delivery continue to become more important. At the same time, there are more low-code and no-code platforms that enable less technical "citizen developers" to build, update and enhance line of business applications. "We need citizen developers because lines of business need to keep pace with rapidly changing market conditions and regulatory requirements," said Prakash Aradhya, product management director at Red Hat. "With all of those changes, line of business professionals want more control of their applications so they can make the changes necessary, update those quickly and get to market faster." Toward that end, more IT departments are creating infrastructures that help abstract the technical complexity of software development so citizen developers can create, maintain and manage line of business applications with drag-and-drop simplicity.



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Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver high-performing Linux, cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies.

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