Friday Five — April 21, 2017

Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Virtualization 4.1, the latest release of the company's Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)-powered enterprise virtualization platform. A key enhancement to
Red Hat Virtualization 4.1 is deeper integration with Red Hat's broad portfolio of open hybrid cloud technologies. This includes extended support for Red Hat CloudForms and Ansible by Red Hat, allowing for a single management interface across heterogeneous datacenter infrastructure and the automation of role-based administration and operational tasks. Tighter integration with Red Hat OpenStack Platform helps further bridge the gap between traditional and cloud-enabled workloads, and continued alignment with
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 delivers improved support for Windows-based workloads and hot CPU unplug support.

CIOs are not blind to the ultimate public cloud prize, but they get paid to manage their IT as it is, guiding it to where they'd like it to be. Whether for governance, security, or other reasons, they may be forced, for now, to keep apps running in their data centers, yet still want to emulate the benefits of public cloud offerings. In this scenario, [Tim Yeaton, Red Hat CMO says] a tool like OpenStack becomes useful. OpenStack isn't a final destination for most, yet it still can usefully serve as a transitional technology to help enterprises baby step their way toward public cloud computing. It's a way for enterprises to get a degree of scale-out for apps not yet ready for public cloud deployment. That is, after all, the essence of the Red Hat business model: Amalgamate complex, diverse software components and package them as a certified distribution. Red Hat kicked off this model with Linux and has continued with middleware, storage, and more. In the cloud, Red Hat doesn't have the ability to "package" different services like AWS or Google Cloud, but it can provide a cloud abstraction layer through OpenShift that offers developers a consistent app platform across their enterprise despite all the complex infrastructure therein.

The premier open source technology conference, Red Hat Summit, is only days away at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, May 2-4, and many attendees are beginning to fill their Summit calendar. Some of the content we're most excited about this year is from our customers from across the globe. At Red Hat Summit you can hear firsthand how others are using technology to innovate and create modern and agile technology platforms, and how Red Hat enables them to do it. One of the hottest topics in enterprise technology is Linux containers. Between Red Hat Summit keynotes and sessions at both Red Hat Summit and the OpenShift Commons Gathering, we'll have more than 25 customers talking about how they are collaborating with Red Hat and using Red Hat OpenShift, Linux containers and Kubernetes – many in production for mission-critical apps. See more highlights of the over 60 customers who will be featured at Red Hat Summit 2017.

Chris Nicholson lived in a Buddhist monastery. Then he became a journalist in Paris. But his latest venture tops it all: Launching an artificial intelligence (AI) startup. Article 3 of our ongoing series, AI Revolutionaries, follows Chris as he meets his co-founder and starts an open source AI company called Skymind.

Ask a Red Hat salesperson what is her favorite product to sell, and she'll probably tell you OpenShift. Close on its heels, however, is Ansible, the open source automation platform Red Hat acquired in late 2015. Ansible has been on a tear of late, quickly rising to become the hottest devops tool in the market. The question is why. A bigger question, however, is what it means for Red Hat. For a company that thrives deep in the bowels of enterprise infrastructure, Ansible (and OpenShift) represent a march toward a simpler way to deliver IT. The reason Ansible is so popular within Red Hat's field is that it's wildly popular with enterprise IT. How popular? Well, Ansible already finds its way into a third of all Red Hat deals, as Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst indicated on the company's most recent earnings call. Ultimately, the primary driver of Ansible's breakout success is its simplicity. It's easy to write and maintain automation workflows with Ansible, and for a newbie, the plethora of modules make it easy to get started. This marriage of power and simplicity makes Ansible a hit with sys admins and developers alike.