Red Hat and Fedora News: Financial Report, New Partnerships, Fedora 21 Plans
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-04-02 10:28:28 UTC
- Modified: 2014-04-02 10:28:28 UTC
Google Relationship
Red Hat has announced a new collaboration with Google that will enable Red Hat customers to move eligible Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions to Google Compute Engine using Red Hat Cloud Access. Google joined the Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider program in November 2013.
Google announced the public availability of the Google Compute Engine platform earlier this year. Compute Engine placed the company in direct competition with Amazon Web Services (AWS), and represented a strong step into the Infrastructure-as-a-Service space. Now, Google becomes only the second Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider to earn designation as a Red Hat Cloud Access-enabled partner.
Finance
"While we remain cautious around the maturing Unix-to-Linux migration cycle, the strength of the fiscal Q3 bounce back suggests that the combination of core Linux and JBoss (middleware), some contribution from RHEV (virtualization) and storage, and the halo effect of Red Hat's aggressive move to become 'Red Hat of OpenStack' are sustaining mid-teens growth," Turits wrote.
Red Hat reported its full-year fiscal 2014 earnings late Thursday, showing continued momentum for the Linux server operating system business leader. As Red Hat looks for future growth, the open-source OpenStack cloud platform is front and center.
Shares of Red Hat (RHT) today closed down $3.90, or almost 7%, at $52.23, after the company yesterday afternoon reported fiscal Q4 revenue and earnings per share that topped analysts’ expectations, but forecast this quarter, and the full year’s results below consensus.
Red Hat is out with a slew of news this week. As Susan covered earlier, the company reported better-than-expected quarterly results, aided by strong subscription growth for its Linux operating system, but also forecast full-year profit following below average analyst estimates. Along with that news, the company announced the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.4 Beta, which builds on the recent Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.3 release, and aims to automate enterprise virtualization tasks while providing integration with OpenStack.
Virtualisation
The new oVirt 3.4 release improves storage, high-availability and networking features.
The open-source oVirt virtualization project debuted its 3.4 release on March 27, providing users with new features to meet the expanding needs of workload virtualization.
Red Hat begins beta test of RHEV 3.4, an enhanced KVM virtual machine designed to continue simplifying and automating enterprise virtualization tasks while providing an on-ramp and a seamless integration with OpenStack.
People
Whitehurst is an avid advocate for open source software as a catalyst for business innovation.
"I am to technical people what a groupie is to a rock band," he laughs. "In other words, what's the point of being in a rock band if you don't have people to appreciate the music?"
As an OpenDaylight project board member and the technical director of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) at Red Hat, Chris Wright knows what it takes to launch a successful open source, collaborative project. He'll share some of what he's learned through his experience with OpenDaylight in his keynote presentation at Collaboration Summit, March 26-28 in Napa. Here he gives us a preview of the talk and shares his predictions on which industries are primed for disruption through collaborative development.
Development
If you're a system administrator, what you really want is a stable operating system with long-term support, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). If you're a system programmer, what you really want is the latest and greatest program. What to do!
The next version of Red Hat's Software Collections package includes Apache httpd and Nginx Web servers, Ruby 2.0, and NoSQL database MongoDB. They are all part of version 1.1 of Software Collections, a beta of which can now be downloaded, Red Hat said in a blog post Thursday.
One of Red Hat Enterprise Linux's big selling points has been its consistency, in the operating system itself and the software packaged with it. Red Hat goes so far as to offer application certification -- now with Docker support -- to ensure the software running on top of RHEL behaves as expected.
Red Hat is out with its latest Sofware Collections package, arriving at version 1.1, and it is embracing Apache httpd and Nginx Web servers, Ruby 2.0, and NoSQL database MongoDB, among other previously unseen offerings. As Infoworld has noted: "One of Red Hat Enterprise Linux's big selling points has been its consistency, in the operating system itself and the software packaged with it. Red Hat goes so far as to offer application certification -- now with Docker support -- to ensure the software running on top of RHEL behaves as expected. But what about developers who want to step outside the lines, so to speak, and run something a little more cutting-edge?"
Insiders have publicly bet against Red Hat's platform-as-a-service, but I say it will stand by OpenShift without regret.
Bad Behaviour
Matthew Garrett, a former Red Hat employee who has gained something of a public profile, suggested that Piston had got itself into Red Hat's bad books by competing against it for a contract - and winning.
Docker
Containers aren't quite virtual machines, but with recent advances in Linux, they can do many of the same jobs as a VM while using far less memory.
The other is an open source tool called Docker. Docker bundles applications into self-sufficient units called “containers.” These can be easily moved from server to server, and they include everything the application needs to run. Unlike a virtual machine — which recreates the entire operating system — Docker containers are can take advantage of the host server’s operating system and other software, even though the containers are separated from each other. Basically, it’s another way of improving the efficiency of your infrastructure.
“Containerization has emerged as an essential solution for sys-admins and developers, as it provides a flexible way to build, scale and deploy applications, and reduces the time and expense of cloud infrastructure,” said Al Hilwa, program director, application development software at IDC. “Docker is emerging as a standard for containerization, driving innovation among developers, sys-admins, and DevOps alike.”
Since we first wrote about Docker last August, the open source container project has advanced in numerous ways. Not only did the company behind it officially shed its original dotCloud name and put Docker at the forefront of its focus, but it also raised $15 million in funding and announced partnerships with the likes of Rackspace, OpenStack, Red Hat and Fedora.
Open source developer adds container certification for Enterprise Linux apps, aims to improve workload portability and ease maintenance burden.
Docker is nothing more than a handy container. But for a lot of use cases, it's opening up amazing new possibilities for making development and deployment work together more closely than ever. It's an open source project designed to make it easy to create lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers of an application, allowing that containerized application to run just as easily on a massively scaled cloud as it does on a developer's laptop. For projects like OpenStack, it's a new way of deploying applications as an alternative to (or on top of) a virtual machine, while potentially using fewer system resources in the process.
Red Hat's application certification program is nominally about ensuring that third-party applications and app platforms run reliably on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The newest candidate for certification, though, isn't an application per se. Rather, it's an application technology that stormed the Linux world and quickly became a major part of its landscape: containerization, which allows apps to be packaged to run almost anywhere with minimal muss or fuss.
"One of the most-requested features is private repos. Say you’re working on a project that you want to share with the world but is not yet ready for prime time. Now you can push your work-in-progress to a private repo on docker.io and invite only specific collaborators to pull from and push to it. When you’re ready, you can make your private repo public, and it’ll automatically be indexed and publicly searchable."
Fedora
I saw on the Fedora Xfce mailing list today that it looks like xfdashboardand xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin are coming to the Fedora Xfce spin's ISO, if not as default choices at least as things you can add to your desktop after the fact.
Docker is a hot topic in the Linux world at the moment and I decided to try out the new trusted build process. Long story short, you put your Dockerfile along with any additional content into your GitHub repository, link your GitHub account with Docker, and then fire off a build. The Docker index labels it as “trusted” since it was build from source files in your repository.
It’s been a relatively quiet week. Snapshot support in virt-manager, automatic latest-code repos with dgroc, Fedora Plasma KDE-based product proposal, and Fedora Atomic Initiative.
We have very positive brand. When I go to a conference and talk about Fedora, obviously there are some complaints about specific things, but overall, people are happy with us. We have a very strong user and developer community — people are using Fedora in production in the real world, sometimes in amazing and crazy ways (for large-scale web hosting, as a platform for very high-stakes rapid stock trading, as the desktop for a not-small law firm, as the basis for the most popular CS course at Harvard…).
Fedora 21
The Fedora Engineering and Steering committee convened today for talking about another round of Fedora 21 features. One week after approving a bunch of features for this Fedora Linux update due out in late 2014, there's more features added to the list.
Last week there were a great number of interesting features approved for the Fedora 21 release due out in October~November. This week there isn't quite as many items that were on the FESCo agenda, but there's still some interesting work that hopes to make it into this next Fedora Linux release. The approved items at yesterday's FESCo meeting were
Profiles would cover things like TLS/SSL and DTLS versioning, ciphersuite selection and ordering, certificate and key exchange parameters including minimum key length, acceptable elliptic curve (ECDH or ECDSA for example), signature hash functions, and TLS options like safe renegotiation.
Misc.
Red Hat (RHT) has highlighted the transition from Unix platforms to open source Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in awarding the 2014 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year Award. The recognition goes this year to Jorge Juarez Acevedo of Banco Azteca, who oversaw the bank's migration from Sun Solaris, HP UX and AIX servers to RHEL.
Red Hat did this because it believes there are three very different ways that 70 to 80 percent people tend to use Red Hat Linux distros. Businesses that want a lot of support and device and staff certification pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Fedora is for users, often developers who use the latest and greatest Linux and open-source software and want to be ahead of the curve. CentOS is for Linux experts who can handle their own support and want a stable platform.
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