Friday Five — May 10, 2019

This week, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, the operating system designed to span the breadth of deployments across enterprise IT.

At Red Hat Summit, Red Hat introduced Red Hat OpenShift 4, the next generation of its trusted enterprise Kubernetes platform, reengineered to address the complex realities of container orchestration in production systems.

According to an IDC study, commissioned by Red Hat, software and applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux from bare-metal to multiple public clouds are expected to contribute to more than $10 trillion worth of global business revenues in 2019, powering roughly 5% of the worldwide economy as a cross-industry technology foundation.

Announced this week, KEDA, a new open-source collaboration between Red Hat and Microsoft, helps developers deploy serverless, event-driven containers.

With any operating system, there is a tension between leaving something that is stable and that works alone and adding new features to keep it relevant. Red Hat has faced that challenge for more than a decade with its Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, by far the most popular commercially supported Linux in the world, and the much-anticipated RHEL 8, which went into beta last year and became general available this week at the company's Red Hat Summit user conference in Boston, is another testament to the balancing act that Red Hat has been pulling off for more than two decades in the enterprise.