Friday Five — October 14, 2016

Be part of the world's leading open source technology event and share your expertise with other IT professionals at Red Hat Summit 2017. We are now accepting original session proposals for: presentations, breakout sessions, panels, birds of a feather (BoF) sessions, and hands-on labs. Sessions can be on a variety of related topics and themes, from IT strategy, products, and solutions to cultural diversity. After the submission deadline, a group comprised of associates from all over the company will vote to determine the final session agenda. Here's a submission guide (also posted on redhat.com/summit) with details on content we're looking for and how to complete a submission. The call for proposals will be open through Dec. 2, 2016.

Red Hat announced the launch of the Ansible Galaxy project with the full availability of Ansible Galaxy's open-sourced code repository. Ansible Galaxy is Ansible's official community hub for sharing Ansible Roles. ... Ansible Roles are content directories that are structured in a conventional way to enable simple reuse, refactoring and sharing of processes in ways that are highly portable across teams, organizations and environments. Ansible Roles act as the "common language" of Ansible functionality, and may include variables, handlers, files, templates, tasks and modules. As Ansible Roles are more widely used by organizations, the Ansible Galaxy project has emerged as the best way to organize, search and share them. ... The upstream Ansible project is one of the most popular open source automation projects on GitHub with an active and highly engaged community, encompassing over 2200 contributors.

The tech industry isn't a stranger to building astronomical hype about a technology and one of its latest golden gooses [sic] is containers. The hype around containers is somewhat similar to that in the field of big data, in the sense that in essence the concept for the technology has been around for decades but has now become extremely popular. Containers aren't new but they can be a very efficient way to do DevOps, as Lars Herrmann, GM, Integrated Solutions at Red Hat told CBR: "Containerisation can be an amazingly efficient way to do DevOps, so it's a very practical way to get into a DevOps methodology and process inside an organisation, which is highly required in a lot of organisations because of the benefits in agility to be able to release software faster, better, and deliver more value." The hype is understandable and the myths are starting to be debunked as tech companies continue to push the technology.

Skills and knowledge that are regularly applied can stay fresh, but they deteriorate when they are not applied. We can forget how to perform even relatively simple tasks if we never perform them. Furthermore, the requirements for job roles also change over time. ... For IT professionals, it is critical to stay up to date with new and revised technologies. Red Hat's policies about staying current ensure that Red Hat Certified Professionals' skills and knowledge are fresh and up to date. ... We hope that everyone who has earned a Red Hat certification views it as an achievement and views themselves as a Red Hat Certified Professional even if their certification is no longer current. That said, we also must recognize that there is a difference between the person whose certification is current versus someone who is not. ... The problem is that we do not know that so we cannot make representations about what such a person knows or does not know based on that person's experience. All we know is that we have data from ten to fifteen years ago that might or might not be relevant today. ... The biggest benefit to being Red Hat certified is being Red Hat certified—a benefit that is strongest when it is current and up-to-date. In Part 2 [of this blog post series, the author] will describe the options available for Red Hat Certified Professionals to keep their certifications current.

DaVita Rx needed to migrate from outdated infrastructure to a more flexible solution. With help from Red Hat Consulting, the company implemented Red Hat JBoss^® Fuse to integrate critical healthcare data on Red Hat Enterprise Linux^®. As a result, DaVita Rx reduced costs and improved time to market.