Friday Five — June 17, 2016

OpenShift Online, Red Hat's hosted open source PaaS solution, is getting a container-powered revamp. Specifically, it'll be upgraded to run Red Hat's OpenShift 3, which reworks the platform around container technology. This constitutes another step, if a small one, toward Red Hat's vision for an open source-powered enterprise hybrid cloud... The new OpenShift Online, currently only in a developer preview, provides OpenShift 3's features and workflow in what amounts to a multitenant public cloud. Many OpenShift 3 features will be deployed as complements to the new environment -- for example, using Kubernetes as an automatic traffic-scaling system, so admins can focus on the next revision of code rather than on tweaking the system to run well.

The premier open source technology conference, Red Hat Summit, is only days away at San Francisco's Moscone Center, June 27-30, and many attendees are beginning to fill their Summit calendar... With more than 50 customers featured at Red Hat Summit 2016, here are a few highlights: Attendees will hear from Elwin Loomis, senior director of Store of the Future at Target, about Target's approach to a true DevOps culture and how through technology and talent, they plan to stay on top in a rapidly changing world. Tom Soderstrom, IT chief technology officer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, believes the key to innovation lies in openness, and will discuss JPL's use of the open development model to experiment and innovate faster than ever before.

As the travel industry is transforming into a digital marketplace connecting hundreds of millions of passengers with travel agencies, airlines and operators online or via mobile devices, Amadeus was faced with a challenge to provide scalable and highly available application infrastructure and services that could not only handle billions of transactions and records and meet regulatory requirements, but which would also enable them to respond reliably and quickly to consumer demand. These business requirements led engineers from both teams to design and implement a new infrastructure architecture for scaling out across data centers and into the cloud, and to use OpenShift as the underlying, open source platform for delivering container-based applications at scale. The Amadeus Cloud Services team is an early adopter of OpenShift, containers and Kubernetes and Amadeus engineers are very active in OpenShift Origin. By actively participating in the upstream open source community, Amadeus can better influence the platform's future, ultimately making sure the commercial version will meet their needs–a contribution which can benefit other customers as well.

For the past several months the Red Hat Mobile Engineering and Product teams have been hard at work enhancing our technological core–our Node.js-based Mobile Backend-as-a-Service (MBaaS). While we have a long, feature rich roadmap which will continue to see rapid updates (we're averaging one large payload per month for 2016!) we made a conscious decision to focus on providing a new deployment option where the MBaaS can be deployed on of OpenShift Enterprise while the remaining components of the Mobile Application Platform remain hosted in the cloud... In short, Red Hat's OpenShift Enterprise and Mobile Application Platform are now working together to bridge the gap between cutting edge technologies and traditional hosting requirements. This means you can still have the control and security of on-premise deployments while receiving the benefits of shiny new technologies like docker containers and Kubernetes for containers and management, eased automation and integration, and greater scalability when needed.

Red Hat has become a successful open-source software (OSS) vendor, with mobility becoming an important technology direction for the company's platform strategy. The Red Hat Mobile Application Platform is a suite of products formed through the combination of FeedHenry's MBaaS platform and other Red Hat technology such as OpenShift Enterprise. The Red Hat Mobile Application Platform offers a no-code Forms Builder with drag-and-drop functionality to create simple hybrid apps that can be deployed to both mobile targets and the web. Built-in functionality includes adding of field validation rules and offline capabilities... Red Hat provides cloud capabilities both as a hosted public PaaS option (OpenShift Online) and an on-premises version (OpenShift Enterprise) with life cycle management for both the client apps and the cloud code via integrated Git capability. The Red Hat Mobile Application Platform supports collaborative development across multiple teams and projects, with centralized access control and project visibility, the ability to create reusable microservices, build farms for generating app binaries, as well as integrated client and cloud analytics.