Like other tech giants, the company used its event to make important announcements in generative AI to help accelerate its enterprise adoption with Red Hat OpenShift AI, as well as several new capabilities in its automation platform Ansible.

The company is also focusing on simplifying management for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and securing the software supply chain.

Let’s look at the more notable announcements from the Raleigh, North Carolina-based tech firm’s announcements at its Red Hat Summit event in Boston, Mass.:

Red Hat OpenShift AI and Generative AI

According to Red Hat, the company is building and expanding upon the capabilities of OpenShift and OpenShift Data Science with OpenShift AI to give IT operations leaders, data scientists and developers a unified solution to train, serve, monitor and manage the lifecycle of artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models and applications.

The company says Red Hat OpenShift AI underpins the generative AI services of IBM watsonx.ai, IBM’s new AI platform designed to scale intelligent applications and services across all aspects of the enterprise.

Red Hat says OpenShift AI solves a few key issues: the infrastructure-intensive training of AI models and requirement of specialized platforms and tools before serving, tuning and managing the model. OpenShift AI provides the infrastructure consistency across training, deployment and difference, the company says.

OpenShift AI provides a standardized foundation for creating production AI/ML models, as well as running the resulting applications, along with the ease-of-use and cloud-to-edge deployment options of OpenShift, the company says.

OpenShift AI provides several technology partner offerings, including Anaconda, IBM Watson Studio, Intel OpenVINO and AI Analytics Toolkit, NVIDIA AI Enterprise and Starburst, as well as 30 additional certified partners as part of the OpenShift ecosystem.

Customers with regulatory and compliance requirements, including air-gapped and disconnected environments can use OpenShift AI on -premises, while customers can also develop models in the public cloud and deploy them on-premises or at the edge, the company says. This provides a unique hybrid MLOps environment that enables collaboration between IT, data science and application developers, the company says.

According to Red Hat, new enhancements to OpenShift AI include deployment pipelines for AI/ML experiment tracking and automated ML workflows, model serving with GPU support for inference and custom model serving runtimes, and model monitoring to help organizations manage performance.

Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant

OpenShift AI, Red Hat says, is the base of IBM’s new AI enhancements including IBM Watson Code Assistant, to deliver domain-specific AI to IT organizations and developer teams.

This is done by bringing IBM Watson Code Assistant to Ansible, giving users the ability to write Ansible Playbooks with AI-generated recommendations. This new service is designed to help drive consistent and accurate automation adoption across an organization, the company says.

According to Red Hat, Ansible Lightspeed is the next phase of its Project Wisdom initiative, making it available to users, contributors, customers and Red Hat’s partner ecosystem. The service integrates with Watson Code Assistant, which will be available later this year. This allows access to IBM foundational models to quickly build automation code.

Event-Driven Ansible

Sticking with the IT automation theme, Red Hat also announced Event-Driven Ansible, a scalable solution designed to expand how organizations activate automation as a reliable strategy across the hybrid cloud.

The solution, slated for availability in June, is for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.4 customers; is designed to connect infrastructure and application observability tools with enterprise-grade Ansible automation, helping IT teams to pre-determine and define rules to initiate automated responses to situations like unresponsive system processes or unauthorized access requests.

When an event is trigged, the solution automatically executives the desired action via Ansible Playbooks or direct execution modules, with the ability to chain multiple events together into more complex automation actions, Red Hat says.

Event-Driven Ansible integrates with event sources form third-party monitoring, observability and IT tools, including Cisco ThousandEyes, CyberArk, Dynatrace, F5, IBM Instana, IBM Turbonomic, Palo Alto Networks, with additional partner integrations to follow.

Supplementary Red Hat-developed content is available for Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Insights, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and ServiceNow, the company says.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux management

To help organizations better manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat is launching new capabilities in Red Hat Insights to give IT teams more insight and management tools to find and resolve IT issues much faster across the hybrid cloud. The tools are available through any browser via console.redhat.com and are designed to unify the management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments in a single user interface, the company says.

According to Red Hat, these expanded capabilities build on the information provided by existing Red Hat Insights’ predictive analytics, which can detect potential bugs, misconfigurations or security vulnerabilities using Red Hat’s expertise in running Linux platforms in critical production environments.

The enhancements allow IT administrators to fix bugs without needing Red Hat Satellite Server and act on server groups simultaneously using patch templates, as well as build standardized operating system images that comply with organization-specific requirements.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service

According to the company, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service is a new service that brings together Kubernetes-native security capabilities with a fully Red Hat-managed offering to help organizations take a security-forward approach to building, deploying and maintaining cloud-native applications regardless of the underlying Kubernetes platform.

The managed service supports both Red Hat OpenShift on private and public clouds and non-Red Hat Kubernetes services across major cloud providers, including Amazon EKS, Google GKE and Microsoft AKS, bringing security coverage to containerized applications regardless of where they are deployed.

Organizations can scale security capabilities across multiple clusters, whether on-prem or in the cloud while lowering operational costs by reducing the learning curve for implementing Kubernetes-native security without sacrificing necessary capabilities or enforcement, the company says.

Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain

Red Hat announced its Trusted Software Supply Chain Solution designed to protect against software supply chain vulnerabilities. The company says two new cloud services, Red Hat Trusted Application Pipeline and Red Hat Trusted Content, are joining in preview mode the existing Red Hat software and cloud services, including Quay and Advanced Cluster Security (ACS), to advance the successful adoption of DevSecOps practices, and embed security into the software development lifecycle.

Essentially, Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain allows customers to more efficiently code, build and monitor software using proven platforms, trusted content and real-time security scanning and remediation.

The solution allows customers to import git repositories and configure container-native continuous build, test, and deployment pipelines via a cloud service; inspect source code and transitive dependencies auto-generate Software Bills of Materials and verify and promote container images via a release criteria policy.

Visit the Red Hat Summit newsroom to learn more about these announcements and others.

The post Red Hat Summit 2023 Releases: AI, Automation, IT Management, Security appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The release comes less than week after the company released RHEL 8.7, and both are designed with IT system security and the hybrid cloud in mind. The company says each version comes with operating system images that are pre-configured to meet organization-specific system security needs.

The Raleigh, N.C.-based firm says both RHEL 8.7 and 9.1 enable security compliance profiles in image builder blueprint files, allowing IT to specify an OpenSCAP security profile when extending RHEL deployments with image builder to deliver operating system images that meet security and compliance requirements from installation.

According to Red Hat, the new versions also extend multi-level security support for agencies or other sensitive organizations to better document and control classification needs. Admins can also use new attestation technologies to verify that their operating system is booting with validated, unmodified components.

Red Hat Insights can now scan RHEL systems for the presence of known vulnerabilities or malicious code with a new malware detection capability, and Sigstore technology is now incorporated into RHEL’s native container tools as a technical preview to help users sign and verify code signatures using local keys, the company says.

The company says updated Red Hat Enterprise Linux system roles in both versions make it easier to automate and standardize manual tasks for RHEL deployments across they hybrid cloud, and new features such as automation support via Ansible and Redfish help IT better manage underlying hardware and more.

Available in RHEL 9.1 is PHP 8.1, an update of the PHP language as a certified, validated and supported Application Stream that enables enterprise developers to deliver new applications without risking stability.

RHEL 8.7 and 9.1 also include new tools and capabilities designed to help drive reliability and stability that IT departments need for hybrid cloud computing, including support for Extended Update Support (EUS) releases via Convert2RHEL and Leapp in-place upgrades to help IT operations teams plan and migrate in a consistent and standardized way to the latest versions of RHEL across the hybrid cloud.

The new RHEL versions also feature containerized application performance diagnostics via the RHEL web console to help users understand where a hardware bottleneck exists and what is consuming the most resources, even if those processes exist in a container.

RHEL 8.7 and 9.1 also include support for embedding containers, including UBI, into image builder blueprints to help IT teams create operating system images that embed a container image pulled from the associated container registry. This allows for containerized applications or processes to be used immediately upon booting up the image, the company says.

Existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions can access Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 and 8.7 via the Red Hat Customer Portal.

Gunnar Hellekson, vice president and general manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, says enterprise IT is becoming more complex as it expands to encompass traditional hardware, multiple public cloud environments and edge devices.

“The latest versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux continue our commitment to making hybrid cloud computing more than just accessible, but successful at the scale of global business by pairing reliability and stability with features designed for innovation and flexibility,” Hellekson says.

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Zoom is reportedly preparing email and calendar product launches

Zoom is reportedly preparing to launch new email and calendar products in an attempt to make the Zoom platform a more comprehensive suite of business tools and better compete with the likes of Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.

First reported by The Information, citing anonymous sources, the videoconferencing giant could announce those new offerings as soon as its Zoomtopia conference in November. This comes nearly two years of the company quietly developing the new services. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan reportedly wants to transform the company from a videoconferencing platform into a fully-fledged communication platform. The company has recently rolled out improvements to its Chat capabilities.

Red Hat announces flexible work policy

Red Hat is embracing flexible workplace arrangements and is giving the majority of its employees full autonomy to choose where they want to work. The enterprise Linux provider says no employee is required to be in the office, and the company is offering employees a work-from-home stiped to cover the costs of remote work.

Employees that do go into the office need to book work stations online. Red Hat office spaces now contain fewer desks and booths, couches and small collaboration spaces.

Red hat is also introducing quarterly “recharge” days—essentially a company-wide day off—to address burnout.

Learn more about Red Hat’s workplace strategy here.

New Microsoft 365 app update experience

Microsoft is introducing a new update experience for Microsoft 365 apps called update under lock, a new feature that uses Click-to-Run technology that helps IT teams reach compliance within their timeframes without disrupting end users. It is designed to reduce the need for abrupt forced updates and make updates more reliable by saving app state before closing.

Update under lock will try to shut down any Office apps running when it is safe to do so, and after the update is applied, apps will be restored to their previous state—all in about four seconds.

Learn more about this new feature in this Tech Community blog.

U.S. government issues security guidance to software companies

The U.S. Office of Management and Budget is issuing guidance to ensure federal agencies use software that has been built using common cybersecurity practices. The guidance comes after two years of supply chain attacks and software vulnerabilities that threaten U.S. national security and the security of private organizations as well.

According to Chris DeRusha, federal CISO and deputy national cyber director, the guidance was developed with input from the public sector, private sector and academia. The guidance directs agencies to use only software that complies with secure software development standards, creates a self-attestation form for software producers and agencies, and will allow the federal government to quickly identify security gaps when new vulnerabilities are discovered.

Read the guidance here.

Apple adds new security features in iOS16

Apple is adding a host of new security features to iOS devices with the release of iOS16, including passkeys that are synced across Apple devices through iCloud Keychain, faster security updates, Lockdown Mode and more.

Read about all the new iOS features.

The post This Week in IT: Zoom Email, Red Hat’s WFH Strategy, Software Updates, Supply Chain Security appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Here’s a look at those announcements.

New cross-portfolio edge capabilities

Red Hat is expanding its capabilities across its portfolio of open hybrid cloud solutions to help accelerate enterprise adoption of edge compute architectures through its Red Hat Edge initiative b focusing on helping customers and partners better adapt to edge computing by limiting complexity, speeding deployments, enhancing security and increasing confidence in system management.

The additional capabilities include management of OpenShift edge topologies by Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, support for single-node OpenShift with OpenShift Data Foundation 4.10.

In addition, the company says it is adding new Red Hat Edge validated patterns for IT teams that need to build edge architectures quickly, including Medical Diagnosis for healthcare providers and Multicloud GitOps for organizations running workloads of different clusters on different clouds.

Red Hat says it is also focusing on customer diversity and choice to further hybrid cloud and edge adoption by bringing on two new edge-centric partners, OnLogic and Intel NUCs.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for Microsoft Azure applications

The company launched the general availability of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Microsoft Azure, which Red Hat says enables IT organizations to quickly automate and scale in the cloud and deliver any application anywhere without additional complexity.

The new offering combines low overhead and integrated billing with Microsoft with the latest Ansible Automation Platform features and packaged cloud content. Red Hat says new capabilities in Ansible Automation Platform 2.2, such as Ansible content signing technology that validates automation content, makes it even more powerful on Azure.

New cloud services for modern application development

Also announced during Red Hat Summit 2022 were new advancements within its Cloud Services portfolio to deliver a fully managed and streamlined user experience for building, deploying, managing and scaling cloud-native apps across hybrid environments.

The company says the new services are designed to tackle the complexities of hybrid cloud and solve challenges such as application sprawl and “monolithic application support.”

New offerings  for cloud-native application development include OpenShift Service Registry, OpenShift Connectors and OpenShift Database Access.

The company also announced additions to its existing cloud services, including OpenShift Data Science, OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka and OpenShift API Management.

New security innovations

An IT company’s annual conference would not be complete in 2022 without a mention of new security features, and Red Hat delivered during its 2022 summit with new innovations designed to help organizations mitigate risks and meet compliance requirements across complex IT environments.

These innovations include a software supply chain security pattern the company will deliver via OpenShift that deliver complete stacks as code and define, build and test the necessary software configurations, the company says. Red Hat says this is available as a preview, and the pattern uses a Kubernetes-native, continuously integrated pipeline through Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines and Red hat OpenShift GitOps for version control to help reduce complexity and time. This will be available in the coming months.

Red hat says its Cluster Security for Kubernetes, now generally available, offering features key capabilities to protect edge workloads, including automated DevSecOps, threat protection and network segmentation.

The company also says Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 will include security features such as enhanced security around root privileges, support for latest cryptographic frameworks and bolstered security best practices.

Kyndryl partnership to advance IT automation for multicloud infrastructure

Red Hat announced during its 2022 summit that it is partnering with IT infrastructure services provider Kyndryl to help customers embrace open, differentiated automation and managed services to modernize core business applications and IT infrastructure while enabling scale and greater security.

The integrated services will be based on the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate critical workloads from the enterprise data center to the edge across public clouds, the company says. The Ansible Automation Platform is now the primary enterprise automation solution across Kyndryl’s infrastructure services, and the two will establish an Ansible Innovation Center to co-create solutions and help customers adopt the hybrid cloud by automating IT operations and services from the infrastructure level to the cloud and edge.

The post What Red Hat Announced During Its 2022 Summit appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The platform, which will be generally available in the coming weeks, is said to be built to “drive enterprise transformation in parallel with evolving market forces and customer demands in an automated and distributed IT world,” the Raleigh, N.C.-based provider of open source software said in a press release.

According to Red Hat, the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the first production releaser built from CentOS Stream, the continuously delivered Linux distribution that tracks just ahead of RHEL. That move is meant to help the broader RHEL ecosystem and solicit feedback, code and feature updates from customers, users and partners.

The company cites a recent study that found that 40% of G2000 companies will reset their cloud selection process to focus on business outcomes rather than IT requirements and will place a bigger value on access to providers’ portfolio from device to edge and from data to ecosystem. For Red Hat, that suggests the importance of a standardized platform that can reach across all of those footprints and give IT teams and developers a platform optimized for operations and production.

Red Hat says customers can use RHEL broadly, and existing customers can migrate RHEL subscriptions to the cloud of their choice with Red Hat Cloud Access. Customers can deploy the platform on-demand from major cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 includes key enhancements designed to address evolving IT needs at the edge, including comprehensive edge management, a new service that oversees and scales remote deployments with greater control and security functionality, encompassing zero-touch provisioning, system health visibility and more responsive vulnerability mitigations from a single interface.

In addition, RHEL9 includes automatic container roll-back with Podman, the company’s integrated container management technology that can automatically detect if a newly updated container fails to start and roll the container back to the previous working version.

The new platform also includes a new image builder service to deliver key operating system functions as a service. RHEL 9 supports image creation for customized filesystems and major cloud providers and virtualization technologies, including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and VMware.

The new platform includes RHEL’s Linux hardening features, including Red Hat Insights, the company’s proactive analytics service for detecting and remediating security issues. In addition, RHEL 9 includes features to address hardware-level security vulnerabilities, such as Spectre and Meltdown, and others to help user-space processes create memory areas that are inaccessible to potentially malicious code.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 also includes integrity measurement and architecture digital hashes and signatures to help users verify the integrity of the operating system and detect rogue infrastructure modifications. With the platform available on IBM Cloud, RHEL 9 will include the security features of IBM Power Systems and IBM Z systems.

According to Red Hat, the new version also includes an expanded set of RHEL System Role for automating workflows for specific system configurations, and it also supports kernel live patching from the RHEL web console to help IT address critical tasks at scale.

At launch, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 will include a foundation ready for key Microsoft technologies, including SQL Server.

Mathew Hicks, executive vice president of products and technologies at Red hat, said in a statement that modern IT starts with Linux.

“As the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 extends wherever needed across the open hybrid cloud and beyond, pairing the trusted backbone of enterprise Linux with the innovative catalysts of open source communities,” Hicks said. Linux is positioned at the epicenter of rapid technological evolution and that Linux is Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

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Announced during Red Hat Summit 2022, the solutions being developed by both companies are designed to help organizations migrate to hybrid cloud, including four main areas of focus: open hybrid cloud application and mainframe modernization, automation, edge computing and sovereign cloud.

According to a press release, the companies are developing a solution to the lack of a one-size-fits-all solution for hybrid cloud modernization by developing a holistic cloud strategy that embraces hybrid to enable greater operational efficiency and drive innovation based on Red Hat OpenShift.

In addition, the Red Hat and Accenture are developing standardized hybrid cloud management solutions to help IT automate workloads, reduce risk and lower cost. This includes the development of Accenture solutions on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to deliver stable and automated cloud computing capabilities.

Per the press release, such solutions helped one client achieve a 99% reduction in downtime for rolling upgrades, a 100% reduction in downtime for operating system patching and 50% faster development time through infrastructure as code.

Red Hat and Accenture are also co-developing solutions to help organizations solve the problem of scale and complexity created by data and connected devices that are testing the limits of network and infrastructure capabilities. The new solutions are focused on analyzing and processing data where it is generated to improve the customer experience and reduce latency using OpenShift and Ansible Automation Platform to deploy and automate at the edge.

The companies are also developing solutions to help customers navigate an “intricate patchwork of technology solutions” while aligning with new industry standards and compliance requirements. The solutions would help clients control the location, access to and processing of their data in the cloud via open-source technology and services.

Stefanie Chiras, senior vice president of partner success ecosystem at Boston, Mass.-based Red Hat, said in a statement that operating in the hybrid cloud gives organizations the ability to optimize their existing systems with the added layers and capabilities needed to support innovation and efficiency at scale. 

“At Red Hat, we believe that success not only lies in the technical components we bring to the cloud, but also with the impactful partnerships that drive successful implementations and business outcomes,” Chiras said. “Our long-standing collaboration with Accenture means that customers have access to the open source solutions they need and expertise they can trust to navigate the complexities of open hybrid cloud and grow their business where it needs to be – in the cloud.”

The post Red Hat, Accenture Expand Partnership for Hybrid Cloud Innovation appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Red Hat Marketplace and the private, more personalized Red Hat Marketplace Select, are operated by IBM and deliver an ecosystem of software from a range of independent software vendors built on Red Hat OpenShift to provide clients with modern, consistent solution discovery, trial, purchase and deployment, the companies said in a press release.

OpenShift is Red Hat’s open source container application platform based on Kubernetes for enterprise application development and deployment. It allows for the portability of mission-critical workloads across secured hybrid cloud environments with certified enterprise software to help companies avoid vendor lock-in, according to the press release.

Red Hat Marketplace is designed to help companies building cloud-native infrastructure and applications and make the most out of their cloud investments.

“We believe that removing the operational barriers to deploy and manage new tools and technologies can help organizations become more agile in hybrid multicloud environments,” said Lars Herrman, senior director of technology partnerships at Red Hat. “The software available is tested, certified and supported on Red Hat OpenShift to enable built-in management logic and streamline implementation processes. This helps customers run faster with automated deployments while enjoying the improved scalability, security, and orchestration capabilities of Kubernetes-native infrastructure.”

Red Hat, now owned by IBM, touts a “growing ecosystem” of independent software vendors that have embraced the marketplace. The growing list of more than 50 commercial products includes solutions across 12 different categories, like artificial intelligence/machine learning, monitoring, security, storage, big data, developer tools and more.

Independent software vendors include Anchore, Cockroach Labs, CognitiveScale, Couchbase, Dynatrace, KubeMQ, MemSQL, MongoDB, and StorageOS.

All products are certified for Red Hat OpenShift and come with commercial support. They can run on OpenShift like a cloud service with capabilities like automated install and upgrade, backup, failover, and recover.

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The new jointly-managed and supported enterprise Kubernetes service on AWS — set to launch later this year — will provide a self-service experience for cluster creation and operations, deeper integrations with AWS services, on-demand billing, a single invoice through AWS and the ability to contact AWS for support.

According to an AWS blog, the new managed Red Hat OpenShift service will also allow customers to deploy fully operational and managed Red Hat OpenShift clusters with “leveraging the full breadth and depth of AWS.”

In a separate blog, Red Hat said the service will enable IT organizations to more quickly build and deploy applications in AWS on Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform with the same tools and APIs.

Developers will be able to build containerized applications that integrate natively with the more than 170+ integrated AWS cloud-native services to enhance agility, innovation and scalability. By blending Red Hat’s and AWS’ decades of enterprise IT knowledge and experience into Amazon Red Hat OpenShift, IT organizations will be able to launch cloud-native systems that can retain enterprise-grade security, be more agile and see improved performance while driving cost efficiencies.

According to Red Hat, customers of the new service will gain what the company calls the “world’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform”, extensive, native integration with AWS services and a path to hybrid cloud deployments through OpenShift.

With Amazon Red Hat OpenShift, customers gain:

• The world’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform,already used by more than 2,000 customers globally. The choice of Kubernetes services for AWS customers further expands with the backing of two leaders in cloud computing and Kubernetes.
• Extensive, native integration with AWS services. AWS’ robust portfolio of cloud services, from compute, storage, networking, database, analytics and machine learning are directly accessible via Amazon Red Hat OpenShift, making it easier to build, operate and scale globally on-demand through a familiar management interface.
• A clear path to hybrid cloud deployments through Red Hat OpenShift. Amazon Red Hat OpenShift delivers the production-ready Kubernetes that many enterprises already use on-premises today, simplifying the ability to shift workloads to the AWS public cloud as business needs dictate.

Contrary to some industry vendors, we do not see enterprise Kubernetes as being truly successful if it’s based on legacy virtualization infrastructure or layered across proprietary technologies. Red Hat views the cloud-native platform for the enterprise as fully open and highly-scalable in a model that embraces upstream innovation safely for use in production. Bringing Amazon Red Hat OpenShift to the market alongside our long-time partner AWS pairs the enterprise leader in open source technologies, including Kubernetes, with the leader in public cloud infrastructure and services. Together, we’re delivering an innovative, cloud-native platform that’s enterprise ready today, no matter the technology challenge.

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Instead, the open-sourced enterprise IT software giant’s annual conference was held virtually due to COVID-19 using the very infrastructure and solutions the company brings to its enterprise customers.

In a virtual keynote, newly minted Red Hat CEO Paul Cormier spoke about the open hybrid cloud, its history and its future, breaking down each word and illustrating how organizations can benefit from a transition to the open hybrid cloud model.

We all have an open source story

According to Cormier, open-sourced solutions are brought to market more quickly and effectively and taps into experts across the tech industry, allowing the best ideas to win.

“Open just results in better, more innovative, more secure code,” Cormier said.

The IT executive gave a brief history of the open source movement, which he said began at the University of Manchester in 1948 with the development of the first software programs.

That first programming language brought consistency and efficiency to computing. It was free until the 1970s and 1980s when the industry – primarily Microsoft – won a legal battle to charge money for the software.

Simultaneously, the open source movement was beginning to hake hold as a hobby and for some niche players. Most software was taken to market by proprietary vendors, like Unix, Cormier said.

“Every hardware vendor had their own Unix operating system and they added proprietary pieces,” Cormier said. “The OS would also only function on their boxes. And believe it or not, they all saw this as a lock-in feature, not a bug.”

Then came Linux, a hobby group that “exploded into a massive worldwide project,” Cormier said.

When the enterprise-grade Linux was introduced, the “Unix chokehold was finally broken,” the IT chief said.

Then, enterprise and governments started using Linux and open source software, and that innovation eventually spawned virtualization, cloud computing, containers, Kubernetes and now out to the edge.

Now, open source-developed solutions essentially run the world, Cormier said.

“Open source is the backbone of inventions that has changed our lives, like the internet. Even the development model continues to drive the internet. … Open Source puts rockets into space, open source runs the stock market, it helps doctors save lives. Today, every one of us touches open source on a daily basis.”

Read Next: Red Hat Releases Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2

Hybrid: a strategic imperative

According to Cormier, a hybrid cloud will meet you wherever you are and hep you future-proof what you have today and what you’re going to build for tomorrow.

“Hybrid is the reality for now and for a very long time to come,” Cormier said. “Just as we don’t want to be locked into software, we don’t want to be locked in the closed infrastructure either.”

A hybrid cloud gives organizations the ability to run applications on any footprint that makes sense for them, whether it be bare metal, virtualized, private cloud, public cloud, multiple public clouds and all the way to the edge.

Cormier provided another history lesson about how Linux helped level the playing field when Linux started accelerating innovation in the tech world.

“This is where virtualization came into play,” Cormier said.

Virtualization enabled the enterprise to scale within their existing footprint, allowing applications to be built and deployed in new ways. The cloud was then built on the foundation of Linux and open source virtualization.

“Virtualization now became a key piece to this horizontal world, enabling the enterprise to scale within their existing footprint, allowing applications to be built and deployed in new ways. And then the cloud was built on the foundation of Linux and open source virtualization.”

Now, a hybrid strategy is essential to scale.

“Hybrid isn’t a trend — it’s a strategic imperative,” Cormier said.

Distributing technology seamlessly on the cloud

Cormier, an IT historian, said cloud computing took hold in the 1990s, primarily with SaaS applications like Salesforce.

“From an infrastructure standpoint, the early cloud-like experience was when someone else hosted our hardware. It was still ours, but managed by someone else,” Cormier said.

“Our data centers could be co located with other companies, saving us time cost management costs. We were then able to consume applications that lived outside our firewall managed by someone else.”

Then came Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud in 2006, which allowed others to use their excess data center infrastructure. That model eventually became Amazon Web Services.

Cormier defines cloud as consuming technology in a seamless way, extending from on premises, to multiple clouds all the way to the edge, the latter of which is the most important piece as it puts computing closer to users and the data.

Users shouldn’t have to worry or care about where the cloud is or which cloud it is, Cormier said.

“For all of us running the infrastructure, we should be able to choose the right cloud or on prem technology for the right application,” he said. “We should be able to have the agility and portability to move data, workloads in management, wherever it needs to be whenever we want.”

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Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.2 is designed to extend beyond the reliability of previous versions of the platform and help organizations get more value from existing RHEL subscriptions with new intelligent management capabilities, enhanced container tools and a more streamlined experience.

In a statement, Stefanie Chiras, vice president and general manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, said IT organizations need to do more with existing technologies in their software stack, drive operational stability and maintain service availability with remote or limited IT teams “without mortgaging their technological future.”

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 provides this and more, with proactive, intelligent monitoring capabilities and enterprise-ready container tools, enabling IT teams to support the crucial needs of today while maintaining ready to take on a cloud-native future, whenever their operations can support it,” Chiras said.

In an official press release, Red Hat said the new version can help organizations manage the COVID-19 pandemic by giving organizations more IT tools for to detect and fix issues across hybrid and multicloud footprints before they impact productivity.

Read Next: Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16 Provides Long-Life Enterprise Support

That’s made possible with new updates to the Red Hat Insights, which is equipped with new updates in the new RHEL version.

Those new updates to Red Hat Insights, the company’s proactive operations and security risk management solution, include improved visibility into IT security, new policies and patch services and drift service to help IT teams compare systems to baselines.

RHEL 8.2 also includes improved resource management, better capabilities for optimizing performance-sensitive workloads, and a new service to help organizations view and manage Red Had subscriptions across hybrid cloud infrastructure.

The new version also includes an updated application stream of container tools supported for two years, containerized versions of Skopeo and Buildah in Tech Preview, a new tool for creating customized container-centric SELinux security policies and enhancements to Red Had Universal Base Image.

Version 8.2 also streamlines the user experience by adding integrated RHEL subscription registration as part of the installation, the ability to enable Red Had Insights during installation and continued refinement and control of the RHEL live cycle.

Red Hat says Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 will be available soon via the Red Hat Customer Portal.

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