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MWC19 For Red Hat, it may sometimes be easier to list what the company doesn't do rather than what it does. The overall umbrella of 'making open source technologies for the enterprise' can range from containers, to cloud, to 5G. But ultimately, as the company has noted at MWC Barcelona this week, it's all developing into a hybrid universe – and it's a space where their customers and partners feel increasingly comfortable.

This is a message of which regular followers of the company – particularly since the acquisition by IBM – will be aware. Take the quotes issued at the time of the original announcement in October. IBM chief executive GInni Rometty described it as 'the next chapter of the cloud…requir[ing] shifting business applications to hybrid cloud, extracting more data and optimising every part of the business, from supply chains to sales."

Lo and behold, a similar message came forth last week, when Rometty keynoted IBM's annual Think conference in San Francisco. "I've often said we're entering chapter two – it's cloud and it's hybrid," she told delegates. "In chapter one, 20% of your work has moved to the cloud, and it has mostly been driven by customer-facing apps, new apps being put in, or maybe some inexpensive compute. But the next 80%… is the core of your business."

For Ashesh Badani (left),  VP and general manager of the cloud business unit at Red Hat, it's a fair position to take. "The press around IBM acquiring Red Hat and we focused on becoming a leader in hybrid cloud – a lot of work we're doing in the cloud business is essential to some of that future direction that we expect to go in," he told CloudTech. 

"The goal of the cloud business is to help customers with their journey to the cloud," Badani added. "Our firm belief is that, in as much as people talk about a revolution happening, most enterprises have decades of investment in existing assets, skills, as well as application services.

"How can we ensure that we move that set of technologies and leverage the skill our customers have to move towards what I'll call the next generation platform? Being able to bridge both of those worlds is what we're focused on at the moment."

This focus is around such concepts as cloud-native development, microservices-based architectures, and DevOps. But it may be prudent to take a step back for now. Badani sees customers in various traditionally slow-moving industries take the plunge. As many companies have been realising – and as this publication put it earlier this week with one eye on AWS' release of Outposts last year – different services suit different workloads. 

Red Hat sees it as 'footprints' – physical/bare metal, virtualised, private cloud and public cloud. The goal is to have these different workloads – for instance, mission critical workloads in virtualised environments, performance sensitive workloads in bare metal, compliance-sensitive in private cloud and test workloads in public cloud – but an overarching control plane to take care of it. "That abstraction, that commonality, is what we're looking to build," said Badani. "Whether you run OpenShift on bare metal, OpenShift on OpenStack, OpenShift on Amazon, Google, Azure – the interfaces that you're writing to, the application that you build will be ported across."

How much of this is a technological challenge and how much is an organisational one? "Inevitably, you find that you can over time get there [technically], work with partners, parties that augment you. The one that oftentimes is harder is the cultural challenge," said Badani. "Just changing that mindset takes time. We work with partners, system integrators, or have our own practices around things like open innovation, to help companies transform and have smaller agile teams put in place."

The world of open source is another which is changing. Earlier this month, Redis Labs announced it would be changing the licensing terms of its modules again. The rationale in the first instance – and indeed the second – was clear; stop the big cloud providers making profits from their technology without previously contributing to it. However in the case of Redis, the initial change confused and antagonised some developers. 

Other companies have done similar things, from Confluent – whose co-founder said at the time the big cloud vendors shouldn't be judged, as the-then licensing terms enabled it – and MongoDB. Badani saw the reasoning behind this.

"I cast no judgement on one side or the other," he said. "My expectation fully is that companies like Amazon, who want to work with open source-based technologies and communities, increasingly need to find ways to build bridges. You see them already doing that, but we just have to be careful not to overreact."

For Red Hat as 2019 carries on, it's a good theme to sum up their strategy – building bridges, building up and out and keeping an eye on all bases as enterprise cloud workloads become increasingly complex.

Picture credit: "Das Gesicht der Hoffnung", by Kai C. Schwarzer, used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

MWC19 For Red Hat, it may sometimes be easier to list what the company doesn't do rather than what it does. The overall umbrella of 'making open source technologies for the enterprise' can range from containers, to cloud, to 5G. But ultimately, as the company has noted at MWC Barcelona this week, it's all developing into a hybrid universe – and it's a space where their customers and partners feel increasingly comfortable.

This is a message of which regular followers of the company – particularly since the acquisition by IBM – will be aware. Take the quotes issued at the time of the original announcement in October. IBM chief executive GInni Rometty described it as 'the next chapter of the cloud…requir[ing] shifting business applications to hybrid cloud, extracting more data and optimising every part of the business, from supply chains to sales."

Lo and behold, a similar message came forth last week, when Rometty keynoted IBM's annual Think conference in San Francisco. "I've often said we're entering chapter two – it's cloud and it's hybrid," she told delegates. "In chapter one, 20% of your work has moved to the cloud, and it has mostly been driven by customer-facing apps, new apps being put in, or maybe some inexpensive compute. But the next 80%… is the core of your business."

For Ashesh Badani (left),  VP and general manager of the cloud business unit at Red Hat, it's a fair position to take. "The press around IBM acquiring Red Hat and we focused on becoming a leader in hybrid cloud – a lot of work we're doing in the cloud business is essential to some of that future direction that we expect to go in," he told CloudTech. 

"The goal of the cloud business is to help customers with their journey to the cloud," Badani added. "Our firm belief is that, in as much as people talk about a revolution happening, most enterprises have decades of investment in existing assets, skills, as well as application services.

"How can we ensure that we move that set of technologies and leverage the skill our customers have to move towards what I'll call the next generation platform? Being able to bridge both of those worlds is what we're focused on at the moment."

This focus is around such concepts as cloud-native development, microservices-based architectures, and DevOps. But it may be prudent to take a step back for now. Badani sees customers in various traditionally slow-moving industries take the plunge. As many companies have been realising – and as this publication put it earlier this week with one eye on AWS' release of Outposts last year – different services suit different workloads. 

Red Hat sees it as 'footprints' – physical/bare metal, virtualised, private cloud and public cloud. The goal is to have these different workloads – for instance, mission critical workloads in virtualised environments, performance sensitive workloads in bare metal, compliance-sensitive in private cloud and test workloads in public cloud – but an overarching control plane to take care of it. "That abstraction, that commonality, is what we're looking to build," said Badani. "Whether you run OpenShift on bare metal, OpenShift on OpenStack, OpenShift on Amazon, Google, Azure – the interfaces that you're writing to, the application that you build will be ported across."

How much of this is a technological challenge and how much is an organisational one? "Inevitably, you find that you can over time get there [technically], work with partners, parties that augment you. The one that oftentimes is harder is the cultural challenge," said Badani. "Just changing that mindset takes time. We work with partners, system integrators, or have our own practices around things like open innovation, to help companies transform and have smaller agile teams put in place."

The world of open source is another which is changing. Earlier this month, Redis Labs announced it would be changing the licensing terms of its modules again. The rationale in the first instance – and indeed the second – was clear; stop the big cloud providers making profits from their technology without previously contributing to it. However in the case of Redis, the initial change confused and antagonised some developers. 

Other companies have done similar things, from Confluent – whose co-founder said at the time the big cloud vendors shouldn't be judged, as the-then licensing terms enabled it – and MongoDB. Badani saw the reasoning behind this.

"I cast no judgement on one side or the other," he said. "My expectation fully is that companies like Amazon, who want to work with open source-based technologies and communities, increasingly need to find ways to build bridges. You see them already doing that, but we just have to be careful not to overreact."

For Red Hat as 2019 carries on, it's a good theme to sum up their strategy – building bridges, building up and out and keeping an eye on all bases as enterprise cloud workloads become increasingly complex.

Picture credit: "Das Gesicht der Hoffnung", by Kai C. Schwarzer, used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Clare Hopping

Clare Hopping

Last year, an interesting headline appeared on Forbes.com: On-premise is dead. Long live on-premise. The author explained that although public cloud is pervasive, on-prem is certainly not dead. Pundits who declared on-prem computing dead and buried several years ago started to backtrack in 2018.

Industry analysts seem to agree. Now it looks like even public cloud vendors recognise the market is not satisfied with only public cloud; therefore, they are pursuing on-prem opportunities. With the announcement of AWS Outposts, AWS made the tacit admission that not everything is moving to the public cloud.

Choosing a cloud experience along a continuum of options

Yet, is embracing these same two options a flawed view moving forward? Historically, technology limited organisations to a binary choice: Go to the public cloud or stay on premises. In the future, businesses large and small will have a broad continuum of options of locations and consumption models. And the lines separating all of those options will blur as IT embraces the cloud experience.

As organisations evaluate their best deployment and consumption options, they are finding that cloud is no longer a destination. Instead, it is new way of doing business that focuses on speed, scalability, simplicity, and economics. This type of business model allows IT to distribute data and apps across a broad continuum of options. In the past, IT routinely optimised infrastructure to positively impact applications. In the future, IT will manage applications to deliver the best experience wherever the infrastructure is located.

Start with data and applications and then choose options

Data and applications should be placed where each performs best – amidst changing requirements of service delivery, operational simplicity, guaranteed security, and optimisation of costs. For example, the General Data Protection Regulation dramatically changed how many global businesses secure customer data, which often leads to changes in deployments of certain applications. And since change is constant, IT will need to be agile when choosing deployment options.

Smart organisations will deploy applications and data on the continuum — between the two ends of the public cloud and on-prem spectrum. Some organisations may choose colocation (colo) because it provides the infrastructure and security of a dedicated data center without the costs of maintaining a facility. Other workloads are best served in a private cloud using traditional on-prem with consumption-based pricing, which could save the business from an unplanned capital expenditure. Another application may demand high security and control, yet flexibility and scalability, which would make on-prem private cloud the best alternative.

Clearly, having choices provides the opportunity to select the best deployment and consumption model for each individual application. And as needs change, deployment and consumption models will also change. The beauty of having numerous choices is that it gives organisations more flexibility to manage costs, security, and technical needs.

Complexity requires expertise and a trusted advisor

Keep in mind that more choices can mean more complexity. In addition, the lines between all of these options are blurring, which can confuse things further. For example, certain models give customers the flexibility to pay for what they use but still manage the infrastructure themselves, which fits neither the traditional on-prem nor the public cloud model.

It’s often difficult for an organisation to develop a new mindset, one that adapts to IT changes quickly. Too many times, they are constrained by legacy thinking, infrastructure, and tools. Better training and tools from industry experts can solve these issues.

To adjust to this often complex yet agile environment, many business will need help and should seek out knowledgeable partners that provide the richness of options along the continuum. A successful organisation will need both professional services and tools to help support as many options as possible.

A continuum of choices opens the door to new opportunities

It’s time to stop limiting choices to only on-prem versus public cloud. Instead, consider all the options available for new opportunities and long-term success. Compliance, cost, performance, control, complexity of migration – all of these factors will determine the right mix for deployment of data and applications. To help with this determination, businesses should seek help from partners who can give them expertise in as many choices as possible.

Photo by Marcus Dall Col on Unsplash

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Bobby Hellard

Microsoft has announced HoloLens 2 at MWC on Sunday, the follow up to its mixed reality headset.

The announcement was made by Alex Kipman, a Microsoft Technical Fellow and the creator of the first HoloLens, who said that customers had been consistently asking Microsoft for three things to improve the HoloLens.

First, was for more immersion, people wanted to see more of the holographic landscape the headset presents. Second, was to make the device more comfortable, so users could stay emersed for longer periods of time. And third, was for it to have industry-leading value right out of the box.

Microsoft took this on board and improved the headset’s a field of view so that it’s more than double that of the first-generation HoloLens, approximating 2,000 pixels per eye while still maintaining the original’s pixel density. Ten-Point touch interaction with holograms, complete with the ability to sense hand movements with greater fidelity, has also been added. And, a new UI model that allows users to interact with virtual buttons and for holograms to follow the user.

Microsoft sees HoloLens 2 as an enterprise device for front-line workers and touted that the main changes such as the expanded field view, built-in AI tools and direct manipulation of holographs, will enable the headset to achieve this. The $3,500 device will be the front end for apps such as Dynamics Remote Assist, Dynamics 365 layout and Dynamics Guides applications. More importantly, Microsoft has said it will have an open approach to third-party developers.

While the news that the new device will allow more immersion and comfort will go down well with all, the integration with Azure and Dynamics will be the bigger plus for the enterprise arena.

«Microsoft’s new HoloLens device will bring the enterprise mixed reality market to its next level of adoption,» said J.P. Gownder, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. «The device itself solves many problems associated with the first model – from a vastly expanded field of view to better hand gestures. But it’s the integration with Azure and Dynamics that will empower developers to create powerful mixed reality experiences more quickly and cheaply.

«For the old HoloLens, editing the number of polygons forming a hologram into a manageable number was challenging and expensive. With cloud tools, developers can render an object in, say, 50,000 polygons on the device but also can render it in the Azure cloud with one million polygons visible to the user. This turbocharger’s the opportunity for creating holograms that workers can interact with during their daily jobs, helping them solve previously intractable problems.»

CoreOS extends CoreOS Tectonic, the enterprise Kubernetes solution, from AWS and bare metal to more environments, including preview availability for Microsoft Azure and OpenStack. CoreOS has also extended its container image registry, Quay, so that it can manage and store complete Kubernetes applications, which are composed of images along with configuration files. Quay now delivers a first-of-its-kind Kubernetes Application Registry that with this release is also integrated with Kubernetes Helm so that deployment of an application can be completely automated.

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As Apache Kafka has become increasingly ubiquitous in enterprise environments, it has become the defacto backbone of real-time data infrastructures. But as streaming clusters grow, integrating with various internal and external data sources has become increasingly challenging. Inspection, routing, aggregation, data capture, and management have all become time-consuming, expensive, poorly performing, or all of the above. Elements erases this burden by allowing customers to easily deploy fully managed discrete plug-ins that make streaming infrastructures a true hub for democratizing data across the enterprise. Eventador Elements provides unprecedented simplicity with the ability to eliminate any worry about the underlying infrastructure, configuration or management—it is all handled and managed by Eventador in a true cloud-native fashion.

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Conor Delanbanque has been involved with building & scaling teams in the DevOps space globally. He is the Head of DevOps Practice at MThree Consulting, a global technology consultancy. Conor founded the Future of DevOps Thought Leaders Debate. He regularly supports and sponsors Meetup groups such as DevOpsNYC and DockerNYC.

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