Friday Five — September 23, 2016

Shares of Red Hat are up 5% and approaching its 52-week highs after the company beat on earnings per share and revenue expectations. The company showed "tremendous growth" in revenue and the stock is reacting favorably, The Street's Jim Cramer, co-manager of the Action Alerts PLUS portfolio, said on CNBC's "Mad Dash" segment. It's clear the migration to the cloud from on-premise data storage is still in the early innings, Cramer said, which is why Red Hat's growth accelerated. ... A lot of investors were betting against Red Hat, arguing its growth had slowed. But management proved that's not the case. There are still a lot of companies out there that have yet to migrate to the cloud and that bodes well for Red Hat and its competitors.

IBM and Red Hat announced enhancements and growth in their long-standing alliance to better help clients embrace hybrid cloud. Through joint engineering and deeper product collaboration, the two companies plan to deliver solutions built on key components of Red Hat's portfolio of open source products, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability offerings. This move will help position IBM Power Systems as a featured component of Red Hat's hybrid cloud strategy spanning platform infrastructure located both on and off premises. ... Through expanded collaboration both in upstream technologies and product development, the companies aim to enable greater compatibility between their respective platforms, bringing Red Hat's offerings to clients who previously worked in distributed environments.

Red Hat introduced QuickStart Cloud Installer as part of Red Hat Cloud Suite, its pre-integrated set of cloud technologies. With the web-based, graphical QuickStart Cloud Installer, users can orchestrate the installation of Red Hat Cloud Suite components from a single interface. As a result, users can access a fully functional private cloud environment with pre-defined default configurations within mere hours as shown by Red Hat testing. Red Hat Cloud Suite offers an integrated hybrid cloud solution with a container application platform, massively scalable infrastructure and unified management tools, all available individually or via a single solution. This combination of technologies provides a modern cloud environment where application delivery teams can focus on development, testing, and deployments using modern cloud and container-based solutions, while maintaining control and visibility. QuickStart Cloud Installer is designed to cut time spent on installation and post configuration (to less than four hours in most deployment scenarios) and require only minimal documentation proficiency from users, helping to further simplify the workflow for deploying fully integrated cloud services and application development platforms.

[Scott] McCarty, whose role as a solutions architect specializing in containers at Red Hat Inc. has him traveling the world to educate and evangelize the value of the portable computing vessels, said containers have greatly sped up the process of developing software, but also introduced tricky licensing and organizational issues for enterprises to contend with. ... Containers also include elements of a complete system that were traditionally split among different IT disciplines, such as systems administration, storage management and network management. Some of these functions are bundled into the container, while others are shared with the underlying kernel. That means the question of who's responsible for what can be fuzzy at best. "Historically, operations controlled the bottom layer [of the processing stack], developers controlled the middle layer and programmers the top layer," McCarty said. "Now you're taking all three layers, cramming them into a file and distributing it everywhere. Do ops teams want to be paged in the middle of the night to fix an exploit in a container that they didn't install? People are afraid to ask who controls what layer."

Red Hat announced Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.3, bringing new developer features and deployment scalability, on a secure enterprise container platform, to improve application delivery across the hybrid cloud. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform supports organizations as they build and maintain both cloud-native and traditional applications, providing a solution they can use across the application lifecycle, from development to production. ... New features include: Enhancements to developer productivity and agility with new automation capabilities to the application development lifecycle; Improved platform scalability, supporting up to 1,000 nodes per computing cluster; and Integrated security policies for container execution, so administrators can control user user access, permissions, quotas and access to pull and run container images all in one place.