The Red Hat Summit descended on Boston this week with a keen focus on the open source community and empowering the individual.
With Red Hat continuing to thrive in the IT industry, as highlighted by its financial results, the company has been keen to stay true to its roots – developers. These groups are the lifeblood of the company, so while it is essentially an enterprise IT show the Summit has had a distinct focus on the developers and its community.
If you weren’t fortunate enough to attend the show don’t worry, CBR runs through the big announcements and the key talking points.
Planning is dead
Invoking the wise words from boxing legend Mike Tyson that “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” Jim Whitehurst, CEO, Red Hat took to the stage to inform the audience that, “Planning as we know it is dead. Planning in a less well known environment is too ineffective.”
Discussing the pace of innovation and how it has reached such a speed that plans are outdated before they are even complete, the CEO wanted the attendees to recognise that they cannot predict the future when the world is so chaotic.
Read more: Red Hat CEO: “Planning as we know it is dead”
Planning is of course a staple of businesses around the world, but just because planning is an outdated model it doesn’t mean that businesses should just wing it. Instead, businesses should focus more on creating the context for individual action, essentially empowering employees to innovate by giving them the tools and services that they need.
Red Hat & Amazon Web Services
The leading cloud vendor and the leading open source vendor announced this week an extended strategic partnership that will see native integrated access to AWS services appear in the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
This means that Red Hat customers will have direct access to AWS services through the open source company’s platform, this should allow customers to access all the features they want across public and private clouds.
Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO, Red Hat, said: “Container adoption is taking off in the enterprise, and this alliance is designed to accelerate that by giving customers access to AWS services directly within Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
“By bringing together the incredible pace of innovation and breadth of functionality that AWS provides with the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise-grade container platform, we’re enabling customers to bring the combined advantages of these offerings across their hybrid environments with the backing of our joint support.”
OpenShift.io
The free online development environment for building cloud-native, container-based applications, OpenShift.io is an end-to-end application development requirement that is said to not require any installation.
The technology combines the innovations from several open source projects, such as Jenkins and Eclipse Che, and fabric8, and is designed to deliver application development tools and environments that’ll help to maintain relevancy in a digitally transforming marketplace, the company said.
OpenShift.io includes tools for things such as team collaboration, developer workspace management, application coding and testing, runtime stack analysis, and continuous integration and delivery.
Harry Mower, senior director, Developer Programs Red Hat, said: “Regardless of what industry our customers are in, delivering new value through software will be key to their success. These next-generation products and services require next-generation development tools, a need that can be costly, time-consuming and difficult to implement for organizations that didn’t originate in the software world.”
Developers
OpenShift.io is just one example of the developer focused announcements had at the Red Hat Summit 2017. There has also been the Container Health Index, which is designed to provide a view of how mature container images are.
The company also introduced Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes, and of course the announcement with AWS.
These announcements were heavily focused on during the first day keynote, with some getting their own demo.
This style fits Red Hat well. Yes, the company is growing its enterprise customer base, but the conference is yet to turn into one that is dominated by men in suits – which is refreshing.
The format of the show appeals to those that have made the company a success and is something that other successful companies have done with their own shows.
Customers
Red Hat does a good job of recognising those that are big contributors to open source communities, have carried out projects that are impacting towns, cities, education, and the world.
Read more: Red Hat Summit: Developers take the limelight as Red Hat pushes containers & hybrid cloud management
For example, Red Hat named Orhan Bıyıklıoğlu, a system administrator at Turkcell in Istanbul, as the 2017 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year. Orhan was being recognised for using his certifications to introduce Red Hat technologies into Turkcell’s converged technologies solutions, including leading the migration of Turkcell to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
You have other excellent examples of the likes of GovTech, the Open Source Hardware Association and more. I’d highly recommend checking out the projects and open source stories that were documented during the conference.
