Friday Five — December 4, 2015

Submissions for the Red Hat Innovation Awards close Friday, December 11, 2015. Each year, Red Hat recognizes the technological achievements of individuals, companies, and partners worldwide that demonstrate creative thinking, determined problem solving, and innovative use of Red Hat solutions. 1 winner for each of the 6 submission categories will be selected by a panel of industry-expert judges, and an overall 2016 Red Hat Innovator of the Year will be selected through online voting and announced at the 2016 Red Hat Summit, June 28-July 1 in San Francisco. Winners receive 2 passes to the 2016 Red Hat Summit plus 3 nights of hotel accommodations.

In recent weeks, Red Hat acquired one of the major IT automation platforms and partnered with a public cloud giant, as it tries to position itself as the go-to open source provider of hybrid cloud and DevOps. Red Hat cloud moves since October include a partnership with Microsoft, the acquisition of automation provider Ansible and updates around containers, OpenStack and platform as a service. These moves show how Red Hat plans to compete for market share as more workloads move to cloud and distributed applications. The Ansible acquisition and the deal to make services including Red Hat Enterprise Linux available on Microsoft Azure come at a good time for the open source stalwart, said Jay Lyman, research manager at 451 Research LLC, in New York... The Ansible deal is Red Hat placing its bets on where the industry and enterprise customers are going with faster, agile software release processes and management, Lyman said. It also fits with its push around emerging technologies for DevOps, as Red Hat was an early supporter of container technologies Docker and Kubernetes.

Audio equipment manufacturer Peavey Electronics needed faster performance from its analytics solution, as well as mobile reporting access for remote users. The company upgraded its analytical platform to SAP BusinessObjects and its reporting database to SAP HANA, running on a high performance NEC appliance and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA. Benefits include dramatically faster query response times, expanded reporting capabilities to mobile users, high availability, and increased productivity and employee morale, all at lower capital costs.

Security for applications running in containers vs traditional security practices can seem daunting, but it doesn't need to be so. You can start by applying the same basic security practices you already implement elsewhere today. As Dan Walsh, the eminent container expert, put it: Treat services in containers just like regular services... Being able to trust the origin of a container, as well as having a mechanism to verify its authenticity & contents is probably the biggest recommendation I have as a starting point... Building on provenance, even when you trust your provider, what is inside the container matters. Be sure to validate the code inside the container to ensure it is not malicious and it meets your security practices. The easiest way to handle container provenance is to have a secured, private Docker registry within your environment.

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