More than 14,000 people, more than 100 exhibits and dozens of international speakers converged on the 2018 Red Hat Summit in San Francisco last week. It was an opportunity for the open-source company to tout its significant growth in the past few years. The leading Linux company, which turned 25 this year, made nearly $3 billion in total revenue after its latest fiscal year. In addition to IBM and Microsoft announcing major expansions to their existing partnerships with Red Hat, the company celebrated its 25th anniversary with 300 breakout sessions and makers, artists, coders sharing their stories about the open source community. Pictured above, Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat president and CEO. We’ve compiled some of these moments here.
Red Hat and Microsoft co-develop first Red Hat OpenShift jointly managed service on a public cloud
The two companies expanded their alliance to allow enterprise developers to run container-based applications across Microsoft Azure and on-premises. Through this collaboration, the two introduced the first jointly managed OpenShift offering in the public cloud, combining Red Hat OpenShift and Azure, Microsoft’s public cloud. Above, Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s president of products and technologies with Scott Guthrie, executive vice-president of the cloud and enterprise group in Microsoft, announcing the availability of Red Hat OpenShift on Azure. The launch is anticipated to be available in preview in the coming months.
IBM and Red Hat join forces to accelerate hybrid cloud adoption
Red Hat and IBM took to the main stage and announced an expansion to their current relationship, which builds on IBM’s recent move to re-engineer its entire software portfolio with containers, including WebSphere, MQ Series and Db2. IBM and Red Hat customers can now build and deploy containerized applications on a single container platform, resulting on a single view of all enterprise data. Above: Red Hat’s Matt Hicks, senior vice-president of engineering, addresses the crowd with Arvind Krishna, IBM’s senior vice-president of hybrid cloud and director of research.
RBC enters the spotlight
Raj Channa, senior director and head of cloud devops and distributed hosting engineering for global technology infrastructure for the Royal Bank of Canada, walked on to the stage during one of the summit’s main keynotes and talked about the banks digital transformation. “Today, business strategies and IT strategies are one in the same,” he said. “We understand that most of the innovation out there happens in the open source community. We rely on Red Hat as a partner to consume open source innovations in a manner that meets our enterprise needs.” Channa also pointed to the fact that RBC has the largest Red Hat Enterprise Linux footprint in Canada.
Red Hat announces 2018 Women in Open Source Award winners
Two women were recognized for their work in the open source community: Dana Lewis, founder of the Open Artificial Pancreas System (OpenAPS) movement, and Zui Dighe, a Duke University student. Lewis has been an open source contributor for more than four years, and it started after becoming frustrated by her diabetes device which wouldn’t let her access her blood glucose data in real time and the continuous glucose monitor designed to alert her when her blood sugar dropped was not loud enough to wake her up at night. She then became the founder of the OpenAPS movement and creator of the DIY Artificial Pancreas System. OpenAPS is an open and transparent effort aimed at making safe and effective basic Artificial Pancreas System (APS) technology available to help improve and save lives and reduce the burden of Type 1 diabetes. Dighe, who is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering and computer science, has been an open source contributor for two years. She is a primary collaborator on an open source system that tracks vaccine temperatures and GPS locations as they enter developing nations using an Arduino-based device. Above, from left: Red Hat’s Denise Dumas, vp of platform engineering, Dighe, Lewis, and Red Hat’s Delisa Alexander, executive vp and chief people officer.
Open source stories
The open source community is growing, and many its members are starting young. Femi Owolade-Coombes of Hackerfemo, is a 12-year-old coder who runs coding and robot workshops for businesses and public organizations. He took to the stage and shared his experiences running community events in the U.K. and abroad. Sarah Chipps of Jewelbots, a company that creates programmable friendship bracelets that teach girls the basics of coding, hosted a demo with one of their youngest coders Ellie Galloway. Galloway coded her bracelet in front of the live audience. Saron Yitbarek of CodeNewbie spoke to the audience about the social impact of coding and how devops have changed the game for developers. Above, Chipps introduces Galloway.