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Tag: red hat

  • Red Hat Unveils Ansible Platform

    Red Hat Unveils Ansible Platform

    At the AnsibleFest 2019 conference, Red Hat this week announced the general availability of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform that combines several IT automation technologies into a single subscription.

    Built on top of Red Hat Ansible Engine, the platform also includes Red Hat Ansible Tower, a management console, and Red Hat Network Automation, an instance of Ansible designed to automate the management of network resources.

    Red Hat is also providing access to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) analytics application that enables IT teams to monitor how deeply Ansible has been adopted within any IT environment. That application also provides access to Ansible Content Collections, a packaging format that streamlines the management, distribution and consumption of Ansible content, and Automation Hub, a repository for certified content packaged using Ansible Content Collections.

    Richard Henshall, product manager for Red Hat Ansible Automation, said with this offering Red Hat is trying to make it easier for enterprise IT organizations to implement Ansible at scale. Most of the time the Ansible framework is adopted from the bottom up within an IT organization. Red Hat Ansible Automation is intended to make it easier for enterprise IT organizations to centrally deploy and manage all their instances of Ansible, he said.

    Although it’s not possible to know how many instances of the open source IT automation framework have been installed, Henshall noted there are already more than 4 million Ansible nodes that are tied to a paid support subscription from Red Hat. Most of those instances involve organizations that have adopted a declarative IT automation framework as part of their overall DevOps strategy, he said. While IT organizations don’t necessarily have embrace DevOps to employ Ansible, Henshall said there is a strong correlation.

    Much of that success can be tied to the fact that as a declarative framework Ansible doesn’t require IT operations teams to learn how to program to manage IT operations at scale. That approach has allowed IT teams to adopt the open source framework to meet the demands for more agile approaches to managing IT infrastructure stemming from developers who have embraced best DevOps practices.

    In addition, IT infrastructure vendors such as Cisco Systems, NetApp and F5 Networks have begun to embed Ansible within their server, storage and networking platforms. As those vendors sell the latest edition of their offerings, the number of IT organizations exposed to Ansible should begin to substantially increase.

    Henshall said the biggest issue now is expanding the scope of Ansible deployments. Most organizations initially wind up using Ansible to automate disaster recovery before moving on automate additional existing processes. Red Hat is now trying to encourage those teams to create new processes that previously would not have been possible without an IT automation framework, he said.

    Ansible may not be a de facto standard in the enterprise just yet, but it’s well on its way. Of course, there are still many IT professionals for one reason or another still tend to resist relying on IT automation frameworks. There are also several rival IT automation frameworks that have been embraced by DevOps teams. But when it comes IT automation, it’s clear Ansible is starting to emerge as the path of least resistance.

    — Mike Vizard

  • IBM Closes $34B Red Hat Acquisition

    IBM Closes $34B Red Hat Acquisition

    Following the official closing of IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat today, leaders from both companies reiterated Red Hat will continue to operate independently of IBM but will leverage IBM resources to advance the hybrid cloud computing ambitions of the newly combined entity.

    Arvind Krishna, senior vice president for cloud and cognitive software at IBM, said IBM and Red Hat together will be in a better position to address what he described as Chapter Two of a continuing cloud journey. With 80% of applications still running in on-premises IT environments some 10 years after the arrival of public clouds, it’s apparent hybrid cloud computing will become the dominant form of IT, he said.

    Red Hat will play a critical role in helping customers achieve that goal using a common operating model based on distributions of Linux and Kubernetes container orchestration software, Krishna said. However, he added, IBM sees no need to rationalize its current middleware software portfolio, which often addresses use cases that Red Hat doesn’t.

    Paul Cormier, executive vice president and president for products and technologies for Red Hat, said Red Hat will continue to invest in products and projects independently of IBM. As such, Red Hat does not expect its relationship with its partners that compete directly with IBM to change substantially, he said. At the same time, he stressed that working more closely with IBM will accelerate a 100% open source approach to hybrid cloud computing that otherwise would have taken Red Hat “many years” to execute on its own. That hybrid cloud computing strategy, in contrast to rivals, will span virtual machines, bare-metal servers and public clouds, Cormier said.

    Other than introducing Red Hat to a potentially larger customer base, it’s not quite clear how being a unit of IBM accelerates the Red Hat strategy. Red Hat and IBM sales teams, for example, will have no incentives to cross-sell offerings and Red Hat will continue to promote its brand independently of IBM, in much the same way VMware operates independently of the rest of Dell Technologies. Both Red Hat and IBM also stressed there is no plan to impose an IBM culture on Red Hat or lay off any personnel. There is a consensus that open source software will play a role in enabling hybrid cloud computing that should generate opportunities for IBM to generate more professional services revenue.

    Longer-term, there’s clearly an opportunity for both Red Hat and IBM to promote the adoption of a common set of best DevOps practices across a hybrid cloud computing environment. Many organizations, however, are already moving to extend those best practices across all the platforms that make up very diverse IT environments.

    For now at least, organizations that have already committed to Red Hat appear to be lending their continued support. Red Hat’s fiscal year 2019 revenue was $3.4 billion, up 15% year over year. Fiscal first-quarter 2020 revenue was $934 million, up 15% year over year. Services revenue for Red Hat also grew 17%. Precisely how IBM and Red Hat intend to unlock the value of this merger beyond the momentum Red Hat already enjoys, however, remains a bit of a mystery.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Open Innovation Labs: How Lockheed Brought Better Security to Fighter Jets

    Open Innovation Labs: How Lockheed Brought Better Security to Fighter Jets

    How Red Hat’s Open Innovation Labs have helped accelerate Lockheed’s software development for the F-22 Raptor

    As the key government contractor charged with helping the U.S. Air Force keep its F-22 Raptor jets in fighting trim, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics increasingly values software delivery speed as much as engine speed. So much of the continued evolution of these fighter jets depends upon continual upgrades of the software code powering all of the physical systems built into them, from tip to tail.

    Until a year ago, these jets, which first rolled out of the manufacturing plant in the 1990s, were supported by the waterfall development methods of that same era. Lockheed executives and Air Force brass recognized that the F-22 needed a DevSecOps transformation, and fast.

    “When you have a world-renowned platform like the F-22 Raptor, adversaries are constantly looking for ways to counter it,” said Michael Cawood, vice president of F-16/F-22 product development at Lockheed Martin. “This means we must constantly add capabilities and improve the F-22. And we must do it faster than ever before. We needed to transform our own organization and how we did things.”

    To accelerate that process, Lockheed last year sent a small contingent of engineers through a residency program at the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs to fast-track the process of implementing an open source architecture onboard the F-22 while adopting agile development methodologies and DevSecOps practices. Since bringing back their learning to the organization, these engineers helped to catalyze a faster development process that has helped Lockheed introduce software features for the F-22 years ahead of schedule.

    How Open Innovation Labs Works

    Now in their third year of operations, the Open Innovation Labs were developed by Red Hat as immersive training grounds to help its enterprise customers figure out how to deliver better software, faster. A standard engagement has companies such as Lockheed pay for residency for anywhere between three to six developers and operations staff to get paired one to one with Red Hat employees—engineers, consultants and others—with deep knowledge in DevOps and agile development. They work with them in a time-boxed four- to 12-week engagement to build out application prototypes using DevSecOps practices along the way. The residents are also teamed with a designer and an engagement lead who doubles as an agile coach, typically working with the customer’s product owner for the prototype.

    Obviously, Red Hat has a vested interest in training these people in technology such as its OpenShift Container Platform, getting them up to speed on how to orchestrate and manage containers and microservices. But the labs approach is in a different league than the standard vendor training program. It more closely follows the DevOps dojo model that enterprises like Target and Capital One are running internally to scale up cultural and process transformations across their IT organizations. Like those dojos, the working model is to build real software through a guided learning process that helps participants get hands-on experience in how to change the way they deliver software.

    Red Hat runs the labs either out of a handful of dedicated spaces it runs around the world or within pop-up labs of the customer’s choosing. Besides Lockheed, other notable alumni include the likes of Volkswagen, UNICEF and Heritage Bank. According to a recent analysis by Forrester Consulting, participants in the Open Innovation Labs program are accelerating application development by more than 60%.

    Lockheed’s Accelerated DevSecOps Transformation

    In Lockheed’s engagement with the Open Innovation Labs, the organization sent out a cross-functional team of five developers, two operators and a product owner. They were tasked with building out a new application for the F-22 on OpenShift, using that process as a model for future development workflows. As a part of the process, Lockheed also worked with the labs to help it build out an internal dojo that could facilitate the scale-out of the knowledge gained by its small team across the entire F-22 development team. Six months after the initial residency, Lockheed managed to scale its OpenShift deployment and DevSecOps transformation across its entire 100-person team.

    “By working with the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs team, we changed everything—our toolchain, our process and, most importantly, our culture,” explained Cawood.

    As a result, the F-22 development organization has been able improve its ability to forecast for future sprints by 40%. More importantly, it has cut what was once an onerous five- to seven-year process of rolling out new software capabilities for the aircraft. Lockheed is on track to deliver new communications capabilities for the F-22 this summer a full three years ahead of schedule.

    — Ericka Chickowski

  • With RHEL 8, Red Hat Adds More Automation to IT Ops

    With RHEL 8, Red Hat Adds More Automation to IT Ops

    At the Red Hat Summit 2019 conference, Red Hat today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8, which includes among other things a Smart Management add-on designed to make it easier to manage RHEL 8 across hybrid cloud computing environments.

    In addition, RHEL 8 includes Application Streams, a set of utilities for updating languages, frameworks and developer tools without impacting the core resources, as well as updating RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 in place.

    RHEL 8 also adds Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles, which provides modules to automate complex tasks using the Ansible automation framework along with support for the Red Hat container toolkit and the general availability of the Red Hat Universal Base Image, a userspace image derived from RHEL that makes it easier to build Linux containers certified to run on RHEL.

    Red Hat also revealed that Red Hat Insights, a set of predictive analytics tools, will be included with the RHEL 8 subscription and that RHEL 8 supports both the OpenSSL 1.1.1 and TLS 1.3 cryptographic standards.

    Gunnar Hellekson, director for product management for Red Hat, said Red Hat is focusing on automating as many tasks as possible as part of an effort to make the life of IT operations teams simpler. As part of that effort, Hellekson said Red Hat is moving to lower the barrier to becoming a RHEL administrator by abstracting away many of the complexities historically associated with trying to manage Linux environments using a command line interface (CLI). Much of that focus will manifest themselves via ongoing enhancements to the Compose and Cockpit tools Red Hat provides for deploying and managing instances of RHEL, said Hellekson.

    Red Hat is making it clear it wants to make RHEL much more accessible to a larger number of IT administrators, especially those that historically have favored a more graphical approach to managing operating system environments. At the same time, however, Red Hat is infusing more automation into RHEL 8 as part of an effort to make it easier to manage deployments at scale. That latter capability is crucial for DevOps teams that, for example, need to be able to update a development environment without waiting for an IT operations team to reconfigure and reboot an operating system. Via add-ons to the core RHEL platform, Red Hat is now starting to expand those automation capabilities across both on-premises and public cloud computing environments.

    It’s unclear going forward how many instances of RHEL any one IT administrator might be able to manage on their own. Trying to determine that number might not even be worth the effort because advances in automation are now coming so rapidly that trying to determine that right number of IT administrators per environment is not possible to determine consistently. Instead, IT organizations should just assume that, thanks to automation enabled by machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics, the operating system environment is now flexible enough to scale up and down as needed.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Red Hat Adds Support for Nested Workflows to Ansible Automation Framework

    Red Hat Adds Support for Nested Workflows to Ansible Automation Framework

    Red Hat today announced it is adding support for nested playbooks created using the open source Ansible automation framework within one another, which, in turn, will make it easier to automate complex IT processes.

    Bill Nottingham, product manager for Ansible, said the goal is to enable DevOps teams to reuse existing Ansible playbooks to kick off a series of nested IT jobs and workflows using version 3.4 of Ansible Tower, the console Red Hat provides for creating and managing Ansible playbooks.

    Version 3.4 of Ansible Tower also now makes it possible to slice an IT job into a series of smaller jobs that can be distributed across a cluster to accelerate execution. That capability makes it possible to scale out the processing of an Ansible playbook, he said.

    Finally, Red Hat also announced that Ansible Tower. 3.4 is now able to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) compliant mode.

    Nottingham said Red Hat expects the ability to reuse Ansible playbooks within a set of nested processes will encourage IT organizations to create more playbooks now that it’s easier to reuse them as a set of modular components. IT organizations can even make launching jobs dependent on the completion of other jobs using a scheduling mechanism within Ansible Tower, he added.

    Although adoption of IT automation frameworks has been uneven, the last few years has seen IT organizations rely more on them to manage tasks as IT environments become more complex. That level of complexity will only increase as IT organizations deploy more applications that are based on microservices created using containers that need to be updated frequently. IT automation frameworks also go a long way toward making up for what has become a chronic shortage of skilled IT administrators. That capability is especially critical as both the number of applications and the rate at which they are being updated continue to accelerate.

    Most IT administrators have limited programming skills, which is why a declarative approach to IT automation in the form of an Ansible open source project has been gaining significant traction. In fact, thanks to automation, traditional IT metrics such as the number of servers being managed per administrator increasingly are becoming obsolete.

    It may take a little while longer before IT automation frameworks are the rule than the exception. But as the IT community now approaches the end of the second decade of the 21st century, reliance on manual processes that were developed at the end of the last century is no longer viable in this era of distributed workloads. In fact, regardless of where applications are deployed, the expectation in the DevOps era is that existing IT operations teams will be able to manage them without having to hire additional IT administrators.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Red Hat Injects DevOps Flexibility into RHEL 8

    Red Hat Injects DevOps Flexibility into RHEL 8

    With the beta release of the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat is setting the stage for making it easier for DevOps teams to consume emerging operating system services without having to upgrade their entire operating system.

    The beta release of RHEL 8 adds an Application Streams capability designed to make it possible to leverage userspace more flexibly, as modules running in userspace now can be updated more quickly than the core operating system.

    Matt Micene, the technical product marketing manager for RHEL 8, said it’s also now possible for multiple versions of the same package—for example, an interpreted language or a database—to be made available via an application stream. That means different DevOps teams will be able to more easily work with different versions of various classes of technologies without having to wait for the next upgrade of the operating system, he said.

    As part of that focus on flexibility, Red Hat is also moving to make it easier for organizations that have embraced microservices based on containers to build applications. Open source tools such as Buildah for container building, Podman for running containers and Skopeo for sharing and finding containers are now fully supported in the operating system. Red Hat is also extending support for container networking using IPVLAN, which enables containers nested in virtual machines (VMs) to access networking hosts. There’s also a new TCP/IP stack with Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR) congestion control. As organizations increasingly adopt containers, many of them are starting to make operating systems decisions based on which platform has the most containerized optimized services built in.

    Other capabilities being added include support for OpenSSL 1.1.1 and TLS 1.3 along with Systemwide Cryptographic Policies; a Stratis file management system for dealing with lots of volumes; a Composer tool for building custom images that can deployed on hybrid clouds; support for the Yum 4 packager; and a new web console for managing the RHEL environment that presents administrators the same user interface experience regardless of their experience.

    Micene said Red Hat is trying to strike a balance between stability and IT agility. There are plenty of organizations that still prefer to upgrade their operating systems at very well-defined intervals. But there are also an increasing number of organizations that want to be able to take advantage of the latest IT innovations without having to wait for an operating system upgrade. Many of those organizations increasingly view IT as being core to their ability to compete, he said.

    Over time most organizations will develop a more schizophrenic approach to IT. There will be some application workloads where stability trumps all other requirements. At the other end of the scale, innovation will be the most prized attribute. To one degree or another, every workload is going to fall along a spectrum between those two extremes. The challenge is defining the right mix of DevOps processes to serve the needs of every and any workloads regardless of its attributes.

    — Mike Vizard

  • VMware Extends Scope of Alliance with IBM

    VMware Extends Scope of Alliance with IBM

    On the heels of IBM announcing its intent to acquire Red Hat, VMware announced at the VMworld Europe 2018 conference this week an extension of its longstanding cloud alliance with IBM.

    Red Hat competes directly with VMware; yet, there are also more than 1,600 customers running VMware on the IBM cloud. Ajay Patel, senior vice president of product development for cloud services, said VMware remains committed to the IBM cloud alliance even while its relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to expand.

    VMware and IBM jointly announced this week they have opened Joint Innovation Lab and that IBM Cloud Private Hosted can now be installed on VMware vCenter Server on IBM Cloud. In addition, IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions are now integrated with the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. IBM is also adding support for VMware NSX-T Data Center to provide VMware customers with access to a network virtualization (NV) overlay on IBM Cloud.

    In addition, VMware vRealize Operations automation software is now available on IBM Power Systems, and VMware will use the IBM Watson cognitive computing platform within VMware customer support portals.

    Despite the obvious tension between VMware and Red Hat and IBM and AWS, Patel noted that VMware has more customers running on the IBM cloud service than any other cloud environment. In addition, IBM, VMware and Red Hat all are committed to advancing Kubernetes. Point of fact: VMware, separately at the conference, announced its plans to acquire Heptio, a provider of management tools for Kubernetes and added support for Kubernetes running on top of VMware virtual machines in version 3.5 of VMware Cloud Foundation.

    VMware, via its alliance with IBM, is making a case for enabling customers to run stateless components of an application on Kubernetes, while maintaining stateful components such as databases on virtual machines, which provide better support for persistent storage.

    IBM said it intends to treat Red Hat as an independent subsidiary capable of making independent alliances, in much the same way VMware operates as an independent unit of Dell Technologies. It may take a while for IT organizations to get used to navigating strange-bedfellow relationships in the era of the cloud; for example, Red Hat has an extensive relationship with Microsoft that spans both Microsoft Azure and on-premises IT environments.

    What remains to be seen is the degree to which DevOps teams will navigate conflicting vendor alliances in isolation from one another instead of trying to unify the management of all those clouds under a common framework. A recent IDC report finds that while most customers (64 percent) are employing multiple clouds, the degree to which those clouds are interoperate varies widely. IDC finds that only 24 percent of IT organizations have a high degree of interoperability between their cloud environments. Another 40 percent say they have achieved low interoperability between their clouds. Only 7 percent say they have a true hybrid cloud in place.

    As the number of organizations with hybrid cloud capabilities starts to increase, the next battle in the cloud won’t be focused on what platforms are employed as much as what management plane might be employed to unify them all.

    — Mike Vizard

  • How IBM’s $34B Bid for Red Hat Will Spur DevOps Adoption

    How IBM’s $34B Bid for Red Hat Will Spur DevOps Adoption

    IBM’s proposed acquisition of Red Hat for $34 billion will have an immediate impact in raising awareness for a programmatic approach to managing hybrid clouds based on best DevOps practices.

    A recent survey published by International Data Corp. (IDC) finds most organizations (64 percent) have already embraced multiple clouds to varying degrees. Only 7 percent of respondents said they have built a truly hybrid cloud. Another 24 percent, however, said they have achieved a high degree of interoperability across multiple clouds. IBM made it clear this week that its primary motivation for acquiring Red Hat was to tap into a trillion-dollar opportunity that will manifest itself as hybrid cloud computing continues to evolve. In fact, IBM is betting that Kubernetes clusters will play a key role in advancing the state of hybrid cloud computing.

    But for hybrid cloud computing to take hold, it’s also clear the level of mastery over DevOps within enterprise IT organizations will need to improve substantially. In fact, hybrid cloud computing might not even be the ultimate destination, said CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey. Enterprise IT is increasingly being defined by programmatic services rather than platforms, he noted, and those services need to be weaved together to drive modern applications. But where each of those services resides is becoming less relevant as organizations become more DevOps proficient, Labourey said, noting the rise of hybrid cloud computing will drive more organizations to embrace DevOps to bring order to the services being consumed.

    “Within a hybrid cloud DevOps will be required,” said Labourey.

    While platforms are still relevant, they increasingly are being hidden behind services that expose an application programming interface (API), added Chip Childers, CTO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, which oversees the development of the open source Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment. A developer consuming a service might have little to no idea what platform that service runs on.

    “IT teams are building on the abstractions that have gone before,” Childers said.

    The ability of one organization to differentiate itself will come down to the maturity of the DevOps processes they rely on to most efficient consume a service, he added.

    Demand for that level of DevOps expertise is already starting to accelerate, said Tim Beerman, CTO of Ensono, a provider of managed IT services. As IT continues to transform into microservices enabled by containers and serverless computing frameworks, the complexity of the overall IT environment requires a more sophisticated approach to managing the overall environment, he said.

    But, he added, “A lot of organizations simply don’t have the talent.”

    Of course, IBM is betting that once it owns Red Hat, more organizations will look to IBM Services for that expertise. But as always, competition across the IT services space remains fierce. IBM is also betting that it will provide the management plane through which hybrid cloud services will be unified. But even there, competition from rivals small and large will be significant. Vendors such as Rackware are already providing frameworks for managing hybrid clouds.

    While hybrid cloud computing is still relatively immature, organizations that embrace DevOps will be much further down that path than others, said Todd Matters, chief architect at Rackware.

    “DevOps will absolutely be a critical part of hybrid clouds,” he said.

    IT has always been about striking a balance between people, process and products. It’s too early to say whether IBM will recoup its $34 billion investment to acquire Red Hat. But the deal inevitably will lead to a greater awareness for a more comprehensive approach to DevOps capable of spanning a hybrid cloud computing environment that includes multiple platforms.

    — Mike Vizard

  • IBM and Red Hat: Now, That’s an Interesting Combination

    IBM and Red Hat: Now, That’s an Interesting Combination

    Like everyone else, Sunday night I got a surprise with the pre-announcement of IBM’s intent to acquire Red Hat (I might have seen it a little earlier than the rest of you, as a friend from IBM shared it as soon as it was public). I’ve been mulling this over and checking out the information being provided thus far, and have some early thoughts:

    • No matter what, some people aren’t going to like this.
    • Very much like Microsoft purchasing GitHub, you’ll see negative knee-jerk reactions.
    • Early indicators are that it is good for everyone.

    Of course, since the acquisition isn’t expected to close for about a year, all we have is early indications, but they do seem positive.

    Fear for Open Source

    IBM goes a long way to assuaging the instant fear that many will have. From the press release to the investor relations call, the company makes it very clear that Red Hat will operate on its own. IBM stops short of saying, “wholly owned subsidiary,” but is keeping all that makes Red Hat, well, Red Hat. That will likely change over time—it does for any acquisition—but for the near future, Red Hat’s strategies and values will continue. So those people who will inevitably equate this to the death of open source can be safely shushed or ignored.

    Customer Concerns

    Red Hat knows that there is an open source equivalent to everything it does, and as such it treats those willing to fork over money either for support or more polished products as if they could walk away tomorrow. There is nothing in any of the released documentation to suggest this will change. In fact, “keeping Red Hat’s strategy” specifically was mentioned to investors, and this world view informs all of their strategy. One Red Hat person I worked with years ago put it: “We need to give them a reason for paying us when they don’t have to. That’s where support and service come in.” In the short term, that does not appear to be changing.

    Cloud Boom!

    IBM is right, the future of cloud is in two narratives: one of cloud portability and another of on-premises for stuff that just isn’t that portable. IBM plus Red Hat is in a unique position to serve those two markets and offer up DevOps toolsets based on standards that will spin up whatever, wherever. Between them, they work with every major public cloud vendor, support containers and have fingers deep into the private cloud space. If their predictions that workloads will continue to move toward on-demand is accurate, it will be difficult to find a better solution set than the two can offer together.

    So Overall, it Looks Good

    I was in discussions on several social media platforms over the course of Sunday evening about this, and the consensus seems to be that it could be far worse. If Red Hat were for sale, think through all the companies that would see benefit in owning Red Hat, and could afford the price tag IBM paid. There are not a lot that could be counted on to “Let Red Hat be Red Hat.” Over the long term, IBM can’t either, but that is simply business. In the short term, it is reasonable to expect that not much will change except Red Hat customers get pitched more IBM software and gear, while IBM offers Red Hat standard with their other offerings. Other potential purchasers would likely completely fold Red Hat into their business, thereby destroying what makes the company unique. So if Red Hat was going to be sold, the face the two companies are putting on it is the best we could hope for.

    Ops Side Love

    Red Hat has done a good job of integrating containers as they came along, and Ansible provides decent configuration support for a variety of deployment targets. Merging that with IBM’s cloud work should offer a streamlined DevOps pipeline that can handle whatever target you want it to configure. Oh, certainly there will be speed bumps along the way—we do live in a time of change, which brings them along—but portability plus programmed configurability will (as IBM has hinted) equate to prequalified stacks that can then be dropped into deployment toolchains.

    Not too Long to Wait

    While the official merger will not be consummated until late next year, expect to see the two organizations use their longstanding partnership to begin exploring cross-company cooperation before that. We should see the first fruits of this arrangement relatively quickly, and unless Red Hat’s investors find some reason to vote down a HUGE raise of their per-share stock value, expect that the cooperation will continue to ramp up until the acquisition is completed.

    If Red Hat Stays the Same…

    Given that IBM has said Red Hat would stay the same for the foreseeable future, that means all you are doing with the company can keep going, and you can pick and choose which of the partnership options that are bound to come along pre-completion you wish to take advantage of. That’s a benefit to the customer. So grab what you like and keep making your DevOps environment better.

    — Don Macvittie

  • IBM Acquires Red Hat to Create DevOps Behemoth

    IBM Acquires Red Hat to Create DevOps Behemoth

    In a move that has massive implications for DevOps teams across the enterprise, IBM today announced it is acquiring Red Hat in a deal valued at $34 billion.

    Red Hat will join IBM’s Hybrid Cloud group as a distinct independent unit. Red Hat will continue to be led by Jim Whitehurst and Red Hat’s current management team. Whitehurst will join IBM’s senior management team and report to IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. IBM intends to maintain Red Hat’s headquarters, facilities, brands and services practices.

    IBM expects to close the deal, which will be financed using both cash and debt, in the latter half of 2019. IBM also said the deal will be accretive within 12 months after close, as the combined entity moves to address a total market that spans application development and deployment, IT services and security and collectively exceeds $1 trillion, or more than one-fifth of the total global IT market valued at $3.7 trillion in 2018 by Gartner.

    IBM and Red Hat have had a partnership in place for 20 years, spanning everything from reselling and supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to collaboratively working on open source projects such as Kubernetes.

    IBM officials said they expect Red Hat to significantly bolster IBM’s hybrid cloud business, which already generates $19 billion a year in revenues. IBM noted that about 80 percent of application workloads have yet to move to the cloud.

    The move to acquire Red Hat comes on the heels of Red Hat acquiring CoreOS, which augments the company’s existing open source expertise with a container management platform built on top of Kubernetes.

    Once the deal is closed, IBM said the two companies will remain committed to open source software licensing, including initiatives such as Patent Promise, GPL Cooperation Commitment, the Open Invention Network and the LOT Network.

    IBM and Red Hat also plan to continue to build and enhance existing Red Hat partnerships, including those with major cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba and others that compete directly with IBM Cloud.

    It’s too early to say to what degree those cloud service providers will be open to continuing to work with Red Hat as unit of IBM. In recent months Red Hat increasingly has been positioning itself head to head against VMware, which operates as a unit of Dell Technologies. IBM also has a strong relationship with VMware that could change in the years ahead. What is clear, however, is that any deal of this magnitude usually begets others in very short order.

    — Mike Vizard