Friday Five — September 9, 2016

Red Hat is showing once more its intention to be the king of the OpenStack hill with its release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOP) 9. This is a highly scalable, open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform. It's designed to deploy, scale, and manage private cloud, public cloud, and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) environments. ... The focus of this release was to make the notoriously hard-to-install OpenStack easier to deploy. RHOP 9 is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.2. This version of Red Hat's flagship operating system was designed to make it more cloud and container friendly than ever. RHOP also features Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 for software-defined storage and Red Hat CloudForms for cloud management and monitoring.

Norwegian airport express train operator Flytoget has deployed Red Hat's lightweight, flexible integration platform, JBoss Fuse, and API management technology developed by 3scale, acquired by Red Hat in June 2016, as part of an initiative to digitise and automate the company's key value chain. Flytoget, which operates the airport express between Oslo Airport and the city center, is modernizing its IT infrastructure to help develop its competitive advantage in order to increase the attractiveness of public transport. As part of this modernization effort, the company is moving from on-premise servers to a cloud-based approach, and adopting DevOps practices to help the company's IT team offer its customers new features and services. ... By establishing a modern and elastic integration infrastructure using JBoss Fuse and API management technology developed by 3scale, Flytoget is able to build smarter services designed to help the company remain competitive.

Docker Inc. has been the keeper of the core Docker code, but it's also been adding new management and orchestration features atop that core. Meanwhile, a raft of other companies...are building their own management and orchestration tools. ... All of these tools promise to make it easier to manage and deploy many Docker containers quickly, a task that gets confusing fast. Earlier this year, Docker Inc. added some of its advanced features and capabilities–a product called Swarm–to the core Docker download. That raised a ruckus among many of those other companies that are basically doing the same thing. ... Tech publication The New Stack followed up with more on the kerfuffle, reporting that some tech companies are considering a fork to lessen what they see as Docker Inc.'s control of the core code. ... The idea of forking code is controversial. Some see it as a hostile act of seizing freely available code and taking it another direction. That could mean two separate sets of code develop over time, which in turn can lead to incompatibilities. ... Red Hat, which ships core Docker with its Linux operating system, is officially opposed to any sort of fragmentation of the basic Docker runtime and packaging format. ... [The] company says it wants no part of any fork. Red Hat's take is that the Open Container Initiative backed by nearly everyone in this space–including Docker Inc.–should drive the container standard, ensuring no one company dominates the process or the technology.

Red Hat commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study to examine the value that Red Hat CloudForms customers could achieve by deploying Red Hat CloudForms. [Forrester] spoke with a large US software company about the benefits, costs, risks, and flexibility of Red Hat CloudForms and cloud management platforms. ... Prior to Red Hat CloudForms, this customer had developed and maintained an internal, "homegrown" solution. ... However, with growing and more frequent requests from the business and staff turnover challenges, the company found it difficult to continue using its homegrown solution. ... After researching 10 vendors and narrowing down to 6 for technical assessments and conceptual discussions, the customer offered a 2-week POC opportunity to 2 vendors. The POC would consist of proving out the vendor's performance and capability in completing the company's 140 use-case test. While the alternative vendor was unable to complete all the use cases given an extended 6 week timeline, Red Hat was able to complete more than 140 use cases in 1.5 weeks. ... [Forrester] found that the interviewed company experienced a 97% ROI, $ 5.95M net present value, and 6.8 month payback period over a three-year model.

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