1. Containers
Enhancements made to its container portfolio was one of the big developments at the Red Hat Summit, highlighting how important the company believes this area to be.
Some of the developments in the area saw the addition of container scanning to allow security partners to plug into Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform, and Gluster storage to make it easier for developers to provision and manage persistent storage for stateful applications running in Linux containers by offering container native persistent storage for Linux containers.
2. Analytics
On the analytics front the company advanced its portfolio of services with updates to Insights, its SaaS analytics platform.
Insights will now offer full container workload analysis, updates OpenStack cloud capabilities, and an Actions Insight Planner to add customisation to task assignments.
The majority of these updates are keyed towards internal analytics in order to make sure things like the OpenStack based private cloud infrastructure is working as it should be.
The company also added container workload analysis in order to provide greater visibility so that businesses can more safely adopt containers.
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On the analytics front, Cisco’s CTO, engineering, David Ward said that the company is working on open sourcing a platform for data analytics.
3. Cloud
Red Hat has placed itself firmly in the market of hybrid cloud, and to achieve this it needs to be able to connect to other clouds.
With that in mind, the company revealed the latest version of its hybrid cloud management platform, CloudForms 4.1. The latest version is capable of supporting Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and now Google Cloud Platform.
Basically this is a flexibility play saying to customers that if they want to adopt a hybrid cloud approach then Red Hat a wide reaching range of connections to the largest public clouds in the market.
4. Open source call to arms
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst took to the stage on the first day of the conference to issue a call for more participation in open source, for businesses to not only be consumers of open source technology but to participate by giving back to the community.
Drawing on historical examples of how inventors gave back to the broader community by not patenting their inventions, Whitehurst said: "Driving innovation means giving up control," said Whitehurst, followed by "innovation rarely comes from the boardroom or executive suite, it comes much closer to the customer."
Essentially he is calling for a cultural change from both businesses and vendors in their approach to technology.
5. Culture change
The call for cultural change was one that echoed through most of the conference as both Red Hat and other vendors such as Cisco all called for businesses to change their culture in order to keep up with the pace of innovation.
Paul Cormier, President, products and technologies, Red Hat said: "Cloud could never have happened without open source and Linux at the heart, the problem is too big for just one company to solve."
He went on to say that culture is one of the strongest points of what makes open source work, with the message that businesses and vendors alike need to change their cultures in order to be fit for the future.
6. IoT
Lots of nods were made to the Internet of Things during the conference as a huge opportunity, but little was revealed about any strategy around it till the final day of the conference when Red Hat and Eurotech launched an end-to-end, fully open source IoT cloud platform.
The project called Eclipse Kapua will feature an intelligent gateway that the companies say will help to address the problem of scalability, performance, latency, reliability and security that is inherent to complex IoT implementations.
The intelligent gateway will computing to the network edge and remove the need to move masses of data back to a central datacentre.
7. JBoss
JBoss, the enterprise application platform had a new version released, JBoss 7, to general availability.
The company introduced JBoss Core Services Collection to boost the product with a set of technologies that provide customers with common application components such as HTTP load balancing, proxying, management and monitoring capabilities for applications and services, and Web single sign-on.
The JBoss offering was also boosted by CloudBees revealing that its Jenkins Platform now supports integrations with JBoss and OpenShift across the software delivery pipeline. The idea is to enable developers to build, test, and deploy applications using OpenShift and run on JBoss.
8. Partnerships
Red Hat is keen on partnerships as one of the core components of its open source strategy. No major revelations were made around this area but the conference certainly had a lot of presentations from large vendors that it works with.
The list includes the likes of Accenture, SAP, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Dell, HPE, and more.
With partnerships in mind, it was revealed that Red Hat, Codenvy, and Microsoft had adopted a language server protocol project that represents a collaborative effort to provide a common way to integrate programming languages across code editors and integrated development environments.
The idea is to extend developer flexibility and productivity by providing a variety of tools with different programming languages.
9. Security
Security always seems to be top of mind when it comes to new innovations and the problems that they may cause.
When the IoT was mentioned during keynotes there was often an element of warning that it would create significant security problems.
As Red Hat dedicated a lot of the conference to containers, it was inevitable that some kind of container security announcement would be made, and it was.
The company revealed container scanning, a way to help make containers more enterprise ready by adding a scanning interface that enables security partners to plug into the company’s OpenShift Container Platform.
An early name added is Black Duck Software which is now fully integrated and supported as a container scanner.
10. Marriage
Although the other announcements made during the conference are probably more important to Red Hat as a business, this is something that speaks of the spirit of the company and open source community.
During the second day afternoon general session the company did what is quite probably a world first for tech conferences, they held a wedding ceremony.
With Paul Cormier acting as the ordained official and Jim Whitehurst the ring-bearer, Red Hat presided over the marriage of a couple in what was a touching and romantic ceremony. It was also an extremely strange setting, but Red Hat is all about bringing people together in partnership.
