The Red Hat Summit 2013

It has taken me sometime to get over my jet lag hence the late posting....

Well it was an amazing 10 days in Boston. The Summit definitely lived up to its expectations. The vibe and the energy was just breath taking.  Every line in Jim`s keynote had a power packed punch. All I can say is that Red Hat is truly a huge contender now in the Cloud  space. Every piece of Red Hat`s technologies are all cloud enabled and they are by the far the only Vendor out there that gives you a complete end to end solution from the very roots of RHEL all the way up the stack into the cloud and beyond! The future of cloud is truly OPEN!

The highlights for me were :

Cloud Forms (ManageIQ) -

This is what cloud is all about and will be for a very long time - Its the management of your entire infrastructure. If you can have one tool that can give you a single pane of glass across your entire infrastructure (Public + Private + Hybrid) - That tool for me would certainly be CF.

In a nutshell this is Cloudforms from RH :

  

Combine this with a virtualisation layer(RHEV/KVM), a storage platform (Gluster – Red Hat Storage), a PaaS platform (OpenShift) and you are effectively delivering an entire orchestration piece that no other vendor to my knowledge can currently compete with.

The next big one was the release of its very own rendition of OpenStack - Basically giving you the ability to build a cloud out the box and this fits in under and is aligned with their IaaS offering. This will include an integrated vanilla version of OpenStack into RHEL to create the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. It will mean that Red Hat applications can run in an IaaS platform and provide support for web and mobile oriented applications that are more cloud aware. It will serve as the main platform for Red Hat’s cloud strategy.

This is clearly an alternative to the virtualized environments long dominated by VMware!

The Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider Program

Hello all, not an incredible lot to blog on this week but thought that it would be a good idea to share some insights into the CCP program that Red Hat is delivering for partners/distributors and solution providers.

As vendors all ramp up to get a piece of the cloud, Red Hat is making sure that service providers are well equipped and have the necessary nuts and bolts to drive the Red Hat portfolio of solutions in the cloud. Red Hat`s business is all based and built on the subscription model. Customers would traditionally purchase a 1 year or 3 year subscription to gain access to support, bug fixes and software maintenance which they still can  do however with the advent of cloud computing, customers and service providers are looking for a much more flexible method for consuming subscriptions in the cloud. A solution were they could deliver subscriptions on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis. To that extent Red Hat has introduced its Certified Cloud Provider (CCP) program which allows providers to do just that.  

Red Hat initially started to build an ecosystem of the top tier providers to be part of the CCP program however they do understand that the market place is huge and do realize that other large Organisations, mid sized Telcos, solutions providers and cloud vendors could benefit from this model.

More and updated information regarding the program can be found here :

http://www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud-computing/red-hat-cloud/cloud-become-partner.html

To close things off, please watch this space over the next week for daily updates as I attend the Red Hat Summit in Boston. Its going to be massive and I will be sharing lots of info.......

Have a good week!