Friday Five — January 4, 2019

Since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta was released in November 2018, it's been undergoing rigorous testing from existing customers and developers. In true open source community spirit and practice, our customers have played an important part in the development of the product. We're inviting existing customers and subscribers to test Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta for themselves to see how they can deploy applications with more flexibility, more confidence and more control.

With the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 beta, we wanted to take a look at some of the changes that are coming in identity management in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. We've been preparing for the update of the Linux authentication toolbox for some time. This is part of our continuous focus on providing IT organizations with features that are designed to give them control over their environments and raise confidence in their deployments.

Red Hat's director for developer experience Edson Yanaga believes that microservices might be "entering the trough of disillusionment", to use Gartner's turn of phrase. "I expect that in the next year we'll start to see the testimonies of teams and organisations that failed when adopting microservices. We'll realise that microservices is not a silver bullet - nothing is - but it's very useful in some particular situations," he says, adding that he expects "some consolidation" on best practices.

Over the last two years, there has been a shift from developing and deploying apps over bare metal and virtualized environments to cloud-native environments based on containers. Many customers have focused on building their hybrid cloud infrastructure using containers and Kubernetes. As Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform has become more prominent, our customers are looking at their workloads and seeing where it may make sense to embrace application development services that can take advantage of Kubernetes and containers. With all that in mind, I believe that 2019 will be the year of cloud native app dev workloads and services. –Craig Muzilla, Senior Vice President, Core Products and Cloud Services Business Group, Red Hat

Fukuoka Financial Group, Inc. ("FFG"), a banking and financial services company based in Japan, has completed a residency with Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, the first residency completed in Japan. During the residency, the teams worked to improve corporate competitiveness and advance the company's digital transformation efforts. Through the residency, FFG hopes to increase the speed at which it can release new services into the market to meet customer demands.