Friday Five — November 27, 2015

Last year OpenShift 2 was my favorite open source PaaS. I said at the time, "OpenShift is outstandingly easy to use, manage, and install"... Since then, OpenShift has undergone a complete rewrite to use Docker containers, instead of "cartridges" and "gears," to deploy applications. In theory, that should make the OpenShift PaaS even simpler to use and give it an even larger pool of languages and applications, thanks to the containers already on Docker Hub... OpenShift Enterprise is the most stable and typically the biggest deal to install. You need to create a master, the infrastructure (the registry, router, and storage), and at least two nodes, and that involves starting with RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] and adding Docker, Kubernetes, and finally OpenShift... On the whole, I'm impressed with OpenShift 3. I can still say with a straight face, "For both developers and operators, OpenShift fulfills the promise of PaaS."

"Earlier this month we announced the acquisition of Ansible, a well-known IT automation tool and very popular open source project. The most attractive aspect of Ansible is its simplicity: simple to deploy and blend into a complex enterprise IT environment; simple to master in terms of writing, reading, and maintaining automation workflows; simple to expand in capabilities, thanks to its modular architecture. Frictionless IT, for Red Hat, is about reducing the extreme complexity that plagues today's enterprise IT. So it really was a great match, and we are very excited about this acquisition... Perhaps the best moment was in Tokyo, during the OpenStack Summit. My team presented a brand new, and accurate, total cost of ownership model for OpenStack. We developed and used it internally to understand how to lower the cost of an OpenStack private cloud, and we discovered that implementing IT automation can save millions of dollars at a certain scale. When the team connected the discovery with the acquisition of Ansible, we got a great reaction around the room." –Alessandro Perilli, general manager of Cloud Management Strategy at Red Hat

Containers promise to help software development organizations save time and money by providing a mechanism for making applications much more portable across development, testing, and deployment environments. The ubiquitous nature of containers also introduces challenges for enterprise adoption, including those around container security. To this point, a Forrester thought leadership study commissioned by Red Hat revealed that 53 percent of IT operations and development decision-makers identified security as their highest concern for adopting containers. Companies looking to adopt containers should look closely at how they plan to secure containers, with focuses on provenance, container contents, isolation, and trust.

See why FICO, CA Technologies, and Cisco chose OpenShift by Red Hat for their PaaS solutions, and what benefits these customers are looking forward to with containers in OpenShift Enterprise 3.

UK's Telegraph Media Group (TMG) has created an integration platform using Red Hat JBoss Fuse that simplifies the launch of compelling new digital content to audiences on desktop, tablet, and smartphone devices, quickly and cost-effectively. This makes it easier for the company to respond rapidly to developing global news, giving readers new insights into unfolding situations in content formats that are easy to consume – encouraging interaction and building engagement with TMG's brands.