Servers: Red Hat, Rancher, SUSE, and the Linux Foundation

Rakuten Mobile Network is using Red Hat's open source technologies in launching its new mobile network, which is planned to be launched in October. The fully virtualised cloud-native network will allow Rakuten Mobile Network to more agilely respond to customer needs and provide differentiated offerings from legacy mobile vendors, as well as better prepare the carrier to meet the forthcoming demands of 5G technologies.

Red Hat will kick off its new fiscal year in ASEAN with an eye on Unix-to-Linux migrations in emerging markets.

In an exclusive interview with Computer Weekly, Damien Wong, Red Hat’s vice-president and general manager for Asian growth and emerging markets, said enterprises in less mature markets still maintain a sizeable Unix footprint, offering Red Hat an opportunity to help them “do more with less”.

Later this year, Red Hat is expected to announce the final release of the eighth version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which supports containers natively and is well suited to run mission-critical applications on commodity hardware, said Wong.

Red Hat’s latest flagship operating system (OS) is currently in beta, and offers a slew of new features, including application streams that make it possible to update user software packages without needing to make major updates to the underlying OS.

Rancher Labs, creator of the Rancher Kubernetes management system and the RancherOS container-centric Linux distribution, has announced a new Kubernetes distro built to be slender and simple.

K3s, as it’s called—a play on “K8s,” a common abbreviation for Kubernetes—is aimed mainly at the edge computing and standalone device markets, but can also support scenarios such as a self-contained Kubernetes-powered app distribution. The x86-64, ARM64, and ARMv7 platform architectures are all supported.

MWC19 For Red Hat, it may sometimes be easier to list what the company doesn't do rather than what it does. The overall umbrella of 'making open source technologies for the enterprise' can range from containers, to cloud, to 5G. But ultimately, as the company has noted at MWC Barcelona this week, it's all developing into a hybrid universe - and it's a space where their customers and partners feel increasingly comfortable.

All this information and software available at the click of a button, and even better? It’s free! Who doesn’t love free? It has been estimated that open source software collectively saves businesses around $60 billion a year. These days, for much of the paid for proprietary software solutions, you will find an open source version.

Companies and governments are adopting open source software at rates that would’ve been unthinkable 20 years ago, and a whole new generation of programmers are developing software in plain sight and making it freely available for anyone to use.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the addition of 29 Silver members and 5 Associate members. Linux Foundation members help support development of shared technology resources, while accelerating their own innovation through open source leadership and participation in some of the world’s most successful open source projects including Hyperledger, Kubernetes, Linux, Node.js and ONAP. Linux Foundation member contributions help provide the infrastructure and resources that enable the world’s largest open collaboration communities.