Friday Five — July 29, 2016

IT teams–from 50-year-old companies migrating apps off the mainframe to stateless cloud-native DevOps adherents–are investigating infrastructure automation via Ansible... Ansible's simple programming language suits the majority of systems administrators who "really only have shell scripting to work with ... especially on a really gnarly enterprise IT deployment," said Tim Cramer, senior director of engineering at Red Hat Inc. Ansible automation is well-established for tasks such as server and cloud provisioning, and new releases will take the tool deeper into networks and business-critical, complex applications. ... Ansible is part of Red Hat's four-piece systems management tool set for enterprise IT, alongside Satellite, CloudForms and the Red Hat Insights service. ... Ansible automation helps glue together Red Hat's management stack, rather than displacing existing tools, said Justin Nemmers, head of product for Ansible, and it works in concert with configuration management from Chef and Puppet, if needed.

Microsoft has announced an expansion of its partnership with Red Hat that has led to government organizations being able to utilize additional migration options when moving their current Red Hat subscriptions to Microsoft Azure Government. Specifically, customers using Red Hat's Cloud Access tool can now move their [Red Hat] subscriptions between physical or on-premises systems to both Microsoft Azure and Azure Government Cloud platforms, according to a press release from Microsoft. ... For Red Hat customers still hesitant about transitioning to either of Microsoft's governmental cloud solutions, the company would like to remind them that "Microsoft Azure Government fulfills a broad range of platform level compliance standards critical to U.S. federal, Department of Defense (DoD) and state and local requirements."

The latest version of Red Hat's leading in-memory data management technology, which can be used as a distributed cache, NoSQL database, or event broker, introduces enhancements to help organizations generate insights for continuous business optimization through real-time data analytics, contributing to greater agility and competitiveness. ... Cited as a leader in The Forrester Wave^TM: In-Memory Data Grids, Q3 2015, JBoss Data Grid combines high performance with enterprise-class scale and flexibility, offering customers a powerful tool that can deliver data at the moment it is needed for real-time analysis. ... With its speed, scale, and high availability, JBoss Data Grid is an ideal data platform to complement JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat's industry-leading open source Java EE 7 compliant application platform, to help organizations reduce or eliminate data bottlenecks.

Companies with stakes in the container landscape adopt different approaches towards security. ... To protect organizations, Red Hat has partnered with Black Duck so that customers can identify and detect which open source technology is in which version, and then correlate that with their back-end database based on what they know about the technology in that version. ... Scanning is only one part of the picture; the second part is dealing with it. [Lars] Herrmann [general manager at Red Hat] said developers could implement policies such that if there is a container in an environment, on a registry that doesn't meet security criteria, they can automatically trigger workflow and rebuild that container with the latest runtime components to address that security issue.

The best type of innovation can come from a collaboration between different groups and organizations, according to Marcus Blosch, research VP at Gartner. "We call this collaborative approach, which involves the whole business ecosystem, open innovation. It's the idea that a team should leverage the entire business for ideas, complementary capabilities and resources in order to come up with the best solution." In today's business world, complicated problems often require resources and personnel from various departments and companies. ... Gartner suggests 4 approaches to open innovation. In the final open innovation framework, the company will direct a group of individuals to address a specific innovation. This enables the company to collaborate with a diverse group of individuals, but focus the innovation on a particular problem. Red Hat uses this technique to develop software. They've created a community based on open-source communities that enables them to solve software issues.