Leftovers of Red Hat and SUSE Events, Products

In the first part of this series, we looked at the role of containers as a fundamental enabler of fine-grained, microservices architectures that enable rapid, incremental, trial-and-error innovation. In the second part, we described in some detail the continuing importance of "middleware"—whether it's called middleware or something else—for development of enterprise applications in containerized, cloud-native environments. We arrived at the notion that not only must traditional middleware be substantially reimagined and refactored to optimally support cloud-native applications, it can also be substantially more powerful when it is "engineered together" in a way that creates a unified, coherent application environment. Let's unpack this a bit and understand the opportunities, benefits, and requirements.

We talk a lot about hybrid cloud because we believe it’s important to the IT strategy of most enterprises. (We dedicate an entire track to it at Red Hat Summit, happening this week.) But equally significant is the foundation of your hybrid cloud―the operating system (OS).

Clouds are made up of the same interoperable technologies: OSs, virtualization software, management and automation tools, and application programming interfaces (APIs). The quality of those connections depends on the consistency, reliability, and flexibility of your OS.

Ever since IBM announced that it’s going to acquire the open source giant Red Hat, Linux and open source enthusiasts have been voicing their concerns regarding the future of Red Hat? Is it going to become just another IBM subsidiary or is Red Hat going to adopt IBM’s corporate culture?

At the Red Hat Summit in Boston, executives of both companies shared their thoughts and reiterated their commitments to move forward and drive more innovation. When asked if the Linux giant would remain independent, IBM CEO, chairman, and president Ginni Rometty said: “I don’t have a death wish for $34 billion.”

The unveiling of RHEL 8 would normally steal the show at Red Hat Summit, but this year the deal with IBM may overshadow that announcement.

Two days are on the books, just one day left of Red Hat Summit 2019. We’re a bit sad, too, but don’t despair - there’s plenty left to do, see, and learn on Thursday. To cap it all off, we’re looking forward to Thursday night’s Red Hat Summit Party featuring Neon Trees and Fitz & the Tantrums. Let’s see what else is going on Thursday.

longside this week’s product announcements at Red Hat Summit 2019, Red Hat delivers yet another major milestone in building an open hybrid cloud ecosystem with new certification offerings, a new approach to RHEL-based container images, better tools for Red Hat and partners to support customers as well as addressing the need for application portability.

Red Hat’s vision of an open hybrid cloud is: any application, in any environment, on any cloud, portable and operated consistently - from public and private clouds to bare metal and virtual environments in traditional datacenters, the extended datacenter (edge) and end-user devices.

Organizations today are investing in new technologies and practices to transform the way they deliver value to their customers. This has become a critical investment area as we move into an era of disruption, and cloud computing plays a vital role in supporting both the technologies and processes driving the digital transformation imperative. Offering greater speed, cloud-based strategies leave more time for companies to focus on building and delivering innovation, value, and differentiation while creating financial efficiency.

While moving to a single public cloud has many benefits, the reality is that for some workloads the public cloud simply doesn’t make sense, or meet requirements for things like control, security or regulatory compliance. As a result, a majority of today’s IT environments are inherently hybrid, comprising of applications deployed on-premises, and in both private and public clouds. Some highly optimized or secure workloads can continue to be deployed in bare metal and virtualized environments. As organizations embrace the public cloud, they may select multiple public clouds in order to take advantage of unique cloud capabilities as well as for optimizing vendors. According to IDC, 70 percent of customers already deploy multicloud environments and 64 percent of applications in a typical IT portfolio today are based in a cloud environment, whether public or private1. Therefore, many organizations are looking to embrace hybrid cloud strategies as the best way to achieve digital transformation.

As I prepare for my talk at Red Hat Summit 2019, I can’t help but think about what led to today.

Since the moment you arrived at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center for Red Hat Summit (or watched the livestream if you couldn’t join us in person) you’ve experienced the efforts of Red Hat’s Marketing Communications team. This is the big game for us, and we work all year long to deliver an immersive, creative experience to showcase what Red Hat and the open source community are up to.

But we don’t do it in a vacuum. It takes a multitude of internal teams, stakeholders, and external collaborators to bring this to life. It takes the Red Hat Open Studio.

Gone are the days when IT decisions were black and white.

The lines are blurred today. Virtualization and container platforms have started to converge. DevOps has taken on a central role as mediator between developers and system admins. Kubernetes has emerged as a platform for both infrastructure and applications. CIOs think in terms of on-prem and cloud deployments. Clearly, the operative word has changed from ‘or’ to ‘and’. This imperative is one of the drivers fueling the rise of hybrid cloud technologies.

Recently, Joe Brockmeier wrote a great blog post on the value of enterprise open source technologies. I’d like to extend that discussion to the value of open source in the era of the hybrid cloud.

At Red Hat Summit, OpenShift version 4 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 are announced, as new foundations on which enterprise applications can be developed and delivered.

When looking at the modern IT landscape, few if any technologies are as pervasive for enterprise application and cloud deployment as Linux. Leading the charge for enterprise Linux has long been Red Hat, which held its annual Red Hat Summit May 7- 9, announcing new Linux and Kubernetes container platform releases.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL) is the first major release of Red Hat's flagship Linux platform since July 2014. The RHEL 8 release benefits from a new web console project that makes it easier for users to manage a system.

Traditionally, a hybrid cloud runs simultaneously on a public and private cloud. Historically, that's been done with three models: Hybrid-cloud management software such as HPE Helion; vendor-native hybrid cloud platforms, such as Microsoft with Azure and Azure Stack; and Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS) clouds, including Cloud Foundry, which can bridge over Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. Or, you can do what Red Hat announced at Red Hat Summit: Use Kubernetes container orchestration with Red Hat OpenShift 4.

As a technology partner with SAS, it is inspiring to see that real life challenges are being addressed with SAS Viya and other SAS products. SUSE plays an important role by providing open infrastructure which is reliable, secure, high performing, available on all major architectures and public clouds, with SUSE’s world class global support. We work closely with SAS to ensure an excellent platform for their applications, and a great experience for our joint customers. Masood Noori, solution architect at SUSE, worked closely with SAS R&D and SUSE’s performance experts to create a tuning guide for running SAS with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). This SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Tuning and Configuration for SAS guide was the basis of Masood’s session topic at the event. Along with covering the tuning recommendations and methodology, Masood also provided background about SUSE, including news of becoming independent (see blog from CEO Nils Brauckmann), and our partnership with SAS.

SUSE Expert Days are free, one-day training sessions, full of technical conversations and demos that will provide you with the tools you need to keep pace with your evolving business. Sessions are delivered by SUSE engineers, experts, and IT professionals that realize that in today’s business environments, every company is a digital company. The content is curated knowing that you not only have to keep up, you need to be ready to transform in an agile and strategic way.