IBM and Red Hat have expanded their Project Lightwell open source security initiative to speed up patch management, bringing Palo Alto Networks into the fold.

The idea is to combine vulnerability intelligence, software remediation ,and network-based protections to help organizations respond more quickly to newly discovered vulnerabilities.

Palo Alto Networks will deploy a virtual patch at the network layer to block exploit attempts, while Project Lightwell follows up with software remediation for open source software that customers can test and deploy in their environments.

"AI has compressed the window between vulnerability discovery and exploit from weeks to minutes. Traditional patching cannot keep pace," said Nikesh Arora, CEO and chairman of Palo Alto Networks.

"By collaborating with IBM and Red Hat, we are shifting the advantage back to defenders. This powerful combination allows us to neutralize threats in the network while providing uninterrupted business continuity for our global clients."

How Project Lightwell works

According to the trio, the deal will provide enterprises with broader vulnerability coverage, with protection across open source software, commercial applications, operational technology (OT) environments, and connected devices.

Organizations can receive virtual patch protections before official software patches become available, helping reduce exposure while remediation is underway. When a new vulnerability is discovered, network-level protections can be deployed the same day, reducing the time from validated discovery to protection.

The companies also said that in future they plan to establish secure processes for sharing vulnerability information across participating software vendors, technology providers, and security teams.

This aims to support coordinated vulnerability disclosure, accelerate protection development, and provide anonymized telemetry on real-world exploitation attempts.

"IBM established Project Lightwell to secure the open source software foundation that enterprises rely on every day. By collaborating with Palo Alto Networks, we are extending that security from the source code directly to the network front lines," said Arvind Krishna, chairman and CEO of IBM.

"This joint solution gives our clients exactly what they need to thrive in the AI era: immediate, automated resilience against emerging threats, combined with the rigorous validation required to safely update their core systems."

Software security in the spotlight

IBM and Red Hat launched Project Lightwell last month with a $5 billion investment and a team of more than 20,000 engineers.

Early adopters include Bank of America, BNY, Citi, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Mastercard, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Canada, State Street, Visa, and Wells Fargo.

The idea was to use advanced AI capabilities, offered through commercial subscriptions, to validate and test fixes across a huge volume of open source code.

While more than nine-in-ten Fortune 500 companies rely on open source software, Black Duck research has indicated that 86% of codebases contain open source vulnerabilities.

Notably, 81% of those were classified as high or critical risk, up from 74% in the previous year.

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Red Hat is expanding its sovereign and private cloud capabilities in a move it says will give organizations greater control over tech stacks and data.

The expansion of sovereignty features will offer users five new capabilities for those operating under Red Hat Confirmed Stateside Support and Red Hat Confirmed Sovereign Support for the EU, the company said.

Chief among these is an expanded compliance framework to automate audit preparation, with new Compliance Profiles for the Red Hat OpenShift Compliance Operator.

These, combined with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, allow organizations to automate technical reviews.

The idea is to make it easier to generate appropriate evidence for regional and industry regulations such as NIS2, GDPR, and DORA, and to keep up with new regulations as they evolve.

Elsewhere, Red Hat is also launching a new cross-platform installer, delivering automated, pre-configured isolated computing platforms across Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift, and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

"By enforcing operational guardrails at launch, these landing zones turn reference architectures into deployable infrastructure," said the firm.

"This approach reduces time-to-value for hardened and compliant workloads without requiring manual configuration of baseline controls."

New Red Hat OpenShift, Lightspeed features

Announced at the company’s flagship summit in Atlanta this week, enterprises will also gain access to a new service provisioning interface. The company said this aims to help partners and customers deploy virtual machines (VMs), clusters, and AI service on OpenShift more efficiently.

These tools can then be used to provide GPU as a Service, Models as a Service, and Inferencing as a Service as components within private clouds, helping to maintain control of the AI model lifecycle.

Notably, on-premises telemetry for data sovereignty is a key focus for the company, with Red Hat Lightspeed now providing cost management tools for OpenShift that remain entirely within customer-controlled environments.

"This capability gives organizations comprehensive visibility into cloud spend while maintaining data residency, helping to eliminate the need to transmit operational data across sovereign boundaries," the company said in an announcement.

Software supply chain gains

Red Hat says it plans to localize the software supply chain to help mitigate risks associated with regional disruptions.

Efforts on this front will start in the EU initially, with in-region content delivery allowing customers and partners to download Red Hat Enterprise Linux locally.

The company plans to expand this regional network to additional products by the end of 2026.

"Innovation should not be a trade-off for control. Whether an organization is meeting jurisdictional mandates or reclaiming its data from proprietary silos, we are providing the capabilities and platforms to build a more self-determined future," said Red Hat senior vice president and chief product officer Ashesh Badani.

"Red Hat is focused on helping the organizations that use these technologies to drive the next decade of AI and cloud innovation on their own terms.”

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More than two-thirds of UK companies have an exit strategy prepared if their primary AI provider restricts access – a concern that's increasingly driving companies to prioritize digital sovereignty.

That's according to a survey of 500 IT decision makers across the UK, Netherlands, France, Germany, and Italy by Red Hat, which found plans for digital or AI sovereignty are no longer aspirational but an operational priority.

While 67% of UK companies are prepping for the worst case scenario, the Red Hat study suggested that 43% of those organizations would still face moderate to significant business impact if a primary AI provider restricted service.

“AI platforms are increasingly part of UK organizations’ critical infrastructure," said Joanna Hodgson, Country Manager for the UK at Red Hat. "Many have written exit strategies in preparation for any challenges, but our survey shows that actually executing a switch without disruption remains difficult."

Red Hat noted that 87% of UK companies are already using agentic AI systems – slightly behind France at 91% and Germany at 90% – but while they're using AI, they don't have key business continuity considerations in place yet.

Just 25% reported having strong governance frameworks in place for how they used agentic AI, with 17% saying such governance is "basic or minimal". Beyond that, fewer than half (48%) of UK companies said they had complete visibility of where their data is stored, processed, and potentially accessible, suggesting full AI sovereignty is some way off.

"To close that gap, enterprises need greater control over how and where AI runs, and a consistent way to govern fast‑moving technologies like agentic AI," she added.

The Red Hat survey marks the latest in a string of studies highlighting increased efforts to shore up digital sovereignty across Europe. Research from Gartner, for example, predicted sovereign cloud spend will triple in the next few years.

This increased investment is, at least in part, being driven by geopolitical developments that have sparked concerns about an overreliance on American tech giants.

Last week, the Open Rights Group called for a "strategic shift" in the UK to help boost spending on local tech firms while avoiding vendor lock-in and security or surveillance risks.

Is open source AI the answer?

The Red Hat survey found strong support for government-driven AI sovereignty, in particular focusing on open source principles. Nine-in-ten respondents said that public policy and regulation should "actively mandate" open source principles as a route to achieving AI sovereignty.

"Enterprise open source gives UK businesses the transparency, flexibility and shared innovation they need to treat AI as a resilient, sovereign capability," Hodgson said.

A recent study from Gartner found that roughly one-third of countries will introduce region-specific AI platforms within two years in a bid to shore up data sovereignty efforts.

That process could result in higher costs, however, with nations opting for this route forced to spend at least 1% of GDP to expand AI infrastructure capabilities.

Freedom to choose

The survey results suggest companies are looking for more flexibility in their AI stack and want to keep control, according to Hans Roth, Red Hat’s senior vice president and general manager for EMEA.

"Across EMEA, boardroom conversation has moved beyond experimentation to how AI can be deployed in a way that meets sovereignty, security and regulatory expectations," Roth said.

"The survey results show strong support for open source principles and for clear policy frameworks that embed transparency and auditability into AI."

Roth added that organisations aren’t looking for “another closed, one-size-fits-all stack” and value the flexibility to combine different models and cloud services while retaining strict control.

However, companies need to be wary of "open washing", a common issue in open source AI, where openness can often refer only to specific weights, rather than more widely.

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Red Hat has expanded its partnership with Google Cloud in a bid to supercharge legacy infrastructure modernization and cloud migration.

As part of the deal, Red Hat OpenShift will now be integrated with the Google Cloud console, making life easier during onboarding and when managing workloads alongside Google's own native compute.

Similarly, Red Hat said OpenShift Virtualization is now available on Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud, letting customers use traditional virtual machines (VMs) and modern containers in the same place.

“Red Hat’s hybrid cloud vision is built on consistency – the ability to run any workload, anywhere, with the same operational model," said Mike Barrett, vice president and general manager of Hybrid Cloud Platforms at Red Hat.

Red Hat OpenShift on Google Cloud Console

The integration of Red Hat OpenShift with Google Cloud console will help streamline workload optimization on the platform, the company said, and simplify onboarding processes.

"Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated users can natively validate Google Cloud prerequisites before transitioning to a guided cluster provisioning flow within the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console," the company noted.

The integration will also simplify billing and procurement, with pay-as-you-go billing through Google Cloud Marketplace that applies their Red Hat subscription against Google Cloud spend.

Beyond that, the deeper collaboration allows for native service integrations, with support for services including Google Cloud Secret Manager, Certificate Authority Service, and Workload Identity Federation.

“Our customers are constantly looking for ways to simplify their infrastructure and accelerate innovation without sacrificing performance," said Nirav Mehta, vice president of Product Management for Google Cloud Compute Platform at Google Cloud.

"Customers now have a smoother path, enabling them to run both virtualised and containerized workloads consistently on Google Cloud's global, secure, and performant infrastructure."

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is designed to help enterprises modernize legacy infrastructure at their own pace, using modern containers in a way that lets old and new work together.

The tool allows traditional VMs to work seamlessly with more modern containers and serverless workloads on a consistent Kubernetes platform, the company said, letting users have a single interface, toolset and operational practices across workloads.

Additional tools, such as a migration toolkit and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, also aim to make shifting to modern systems easier.

Beyond upgrades and migration, RedHat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud offers easy scaling and more predictable performance, Red Hat said.

"This extended collaboration with Google Cloud further empowers organisations with comprehensive cloud native capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift, whether they need to accelerate application development or streamline migration to the cloud," said Barrett.

"Together, Red Hat and Google provide a clear, unified path for organizations to modernize their entire application portfolio, helping them manage both their traditional VMs and containerized applications on a single platform."

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Red Hat has announced new options for European customers aimed at bolstering data sovereignty.

The enterprise open source software supplier has announced Red Hat Confirmed Sovereign Support, a new offering purpose-built for the 27 EU member states and set to go into operation early next year.

The aim here is to help organizations strengthen operational control, resilience, and compliance in line with Europe’s digital sovereignty goals.

“Digital sovereignty means keeping control over your own technology destiny, from data location to software and operations. Navigating the EU's stringent regulatory and compliance frameworks demands an open source-driven, transparent, auditable foundation and a local operational support model," said Chris Wright, Red Hat's CTO and senior vice president, global engineering.

"Red Hat Confirmed Sovereign Support offers exactly that: a fully EU-anchored support experience, run by EU citizens for EU organizations, backed by the trust of our open hybrid cloud portfolio.”

The company said the offering will provide high levels of technical expertise, with localized technical support staff and greater independence from non-EU dynamics.

Support will be delivered entirely by verified European Union citizens operating solely within the 27 EU member states, with localized operational control. There will be 24/7 in-region availability, the company added.

Red Hat partners reducing reliance

Red Hat revealed its network of more than 500 EU cloud partners – many of which already offer sovereign clouds – will strategically reduce reliance on non-EU hyperscalers.

Instead, it said, customers will have robust, local alternatives that align directly with regional regulatory policies and economic priorities.

“Red Hat is making a clear, demonstrable investment in European digital sovereignty," said Hans Roth, senior vice president and general manager EMEA at Red Hat.

"This offering underscores Red Hat’s commitment to empowering EU organisations to own their digital destiny and build upon our open hybrid cloud foundation for greater digital autonomy and resilience.”

Sovereignty in the spotlight

Digital sovereignty is becoming increasingly important in the EU, thanks to provisions in the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, the Digital Services Act, and the Data Act.

The aim is to insulate operations from geopolitical tensions and safeguard EU data, technology and operations.

In Europe, according to a recent report from Accenture, 62% of organizations are now looking for sovereign solutions - particularly those in sectors with regulatory requirements and sensitive data, such as banking, public services, and utilities.

"A sovereign AI approach is not about holding everything in one place. The goal is to make technology choices according to the degree of control organizations want to exercise over data, AI infrastructure and models, while benefiting from the scale, service breadth and pace of innovation that some non-European providers offer," said Mauro Capo, Digital Sovereignty lead for Accenture in EMEA.

"These choices are decided by the use case and national priorities. Some cases need only local data residency, while others, in defense for instance, call for full sovereignty over the different AI components - local data, infrastructure and model, advanced encryption, or even air-gapped systems when necessary.”

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Red Hat has announced the launch of new AI features as the company targets streamlined developer workflow efficiency.

The company said the launch of Red Hat Developer Lightspeed, a portfolio of AI solutions, will equip developer teams with “intelligent, context-aware assistance” through virtual assistants.

Available on the Red Hat Developer Hub, the first of these AI tools is accessible through the hub’s chat interface.

The company said this will help speed up non-coding-related tasks, including development of test plans, troubleshooting applications, and creating documentation.

This AI assistant can be used via both publicly available and self-hosted large language models (LLMs).

Red Hat targets app modernization gains

Elsewhere, a new AI assistant will be available in Red Hat’s migration toolkit for applications (MTA) suite. Speaking to ITPro, James Labocki, senior director of product management at Red Hat, said the tools will help developers simplify application modernization.

“The challenge I think that we see is, especially in large enterprises, a lot of them have developed custom languages, custom libraries, and custom frameworks,” he said.

“So code modernization can often be a challenge, and especially as those custom languages and frameworks percolate and organically move through organizations and get adopted,” he added.

“The question of how do you maintain currency of software is really a challenge for many of our customers, and this happens not just at the code level, but even at the operating system level, at all layers of the stack.”

New AI-powered features in MTA aim to address these challenges directly, Labocki explained. The AI assistant will help automate source code refactoring directly within a developer’s integrated development environment (IDE), for example.

It’s not a simple code editor, however, with Red Hat noting that it “understands migration issues and how to solve them”, allowing users to input queries in natural language to troubleshoot migration issues.

Continuous learning on the part of the assistant also targets long-term improvements, according to Red Hat. With each migrated application, the assistant will provide more accurate code solutions over time, thereby speeding up future processes.

“Let's say I have a statically coded IP address, and I know I'm moving into containers, and that's an anti-pattern, so I need to modify this code,” Labocki explained.

“They [developers] could then simply right click and say ‘please fix this’ - that will then reach out to the LLM of their choice…and will come back with a fix.

“The benefit of this that we see is that by having the static code rules and the examples and the patterns inside the static code analysis, and feeding that into the model we're getting, I would say more accurate answers than simply using an off the shelf model.”

Understanding the developer environment

The launch of the new AI assistants forms part of a push at Red Hat which aims to make it “easier for them [developers] to understand their environment,” Labocki told ITPro.

“When I have a question about a software template, it can answer those sorts of things,” he noted. “If I have a question about documentation, it’s just much easier to chat than to have to go open up a giant HTML file and web page, do a Control-F and find things.”

Labocki said initial internal use of the tools has so far delivered promising results, and long-term the aim is to further alleviate strain placed on development teams.

“Some of the early work that our engineers have done – and this was literally last week – I had a demo where one of our engineers was showing one of our product managers an example software template asset to modify it, and it did it correctly,” he explained.

“I think we're still early, but I think it's promising…Instead of having to understand TypeScript to define a software template in backstage, I could simply [do it] in Developer Hub, which is based on the backstage, be able to ask for it, and then it goes ahead and modifies it.”

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Open source software firm Red Hat has been hacked, with extortion group Crimson Collective claiming it has exfiltrated more than 570GB of data.

Red Hat has confirmed the incident, which it said related to a specific GitLab environment used by the Red Hat Consulting team.

"We recently detected unauthorized access to a GitLab instance used for internal Red Hat Consulting collaboration in select engagements," it said in a statement.

"Upon detection, we promptly launched a thorough investigation, removed the unauthorized party's access, isolated the instance, and contacted the appropriate authorities. Our investigation, which is ongoing, found that an unauthorized third party had accessed and copied some data from this instance."

The compromised GitLab instance housed consulting engagement data, which the firm said, could include Red Hat's project specifications, example code snippets, and internal communications about consulting services.

However, it said, this particular GitLab instance doesn't typically house sensitive personal data, and there's no indication that any has been accessed. And there was no sign, it said, that the incident had affected any of its other services or products, including its software supply chain or downloads of Red Hat software from official channels.

Red Hat said it had now implemented additional hardening measures designed to help prevent further access and contain the issue.

"If you are not a Red Hat Consulting customer, there is currently no evidence that you have been affected by this incident, it said. "We are engaging directly with any customers who may be impacted."

The Crimson Collective

The attack has been claimed by a little-known group called Crimson Collective, which said on its Telegram channel that it had exfiltrated data from more than 28,000 internal repositories.

These, it said, included client documents, Customer Engagement Reports (CERs), that could hold details of infrastructure, configuration data, authentication tokens, and full database Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).

"These consulting reports contain detailed information about how these companies' networks and systems are set up, including network designs, passwords, tokens used for system access, and other technical details," said Aras Nazarovas, a senior information security researcher at Cybernews.

"For hackers, these documents are pretty much golden – a step-by-step map showing exactly how the affected companies' computer systems are built and connected – reconnaissance is no longer needed."

According to International Cyber Digest, the repositories reference major banks, telecoms firms and airlines, along with Citi, Verizon, Siemens, Bosch, JPMC, HSBC, Merrick Bank, Telstra, Telefonica, and even the US Senate.

The Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium (CCB) has issued a warning.

"The Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium (CCB) assesses this breach poses a high risk for Belgian organisations that used Red Hat Consulting services or shared sensitive information (e.g., credentials, tokens, network data) with Red Hat," it said. "There is also potential supply chain impact if your service providers or IT partners worked with Red Hat Consulting."

It recommended that Red Hat customers revoke and rotate all tokens, keys, and credentials shared with Red Hat or used in integrations; check with their IT providers or partners whether they have used Red Hat Consulting, and assess potential exposure; and ramp up the monitoring of authentication events, API calls, and system access for anomalies.

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Red Hat has launched a new self-service platform that offers simplified access to its developer program.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Business Developers platform aims to help development teams build, test, and deploy applications quicker and more efficiently – and at no extra cost, the firm said.

Modern developers need to be able to move at their own pace to deliver innovative applications, according to Gunnar Hellekson, vice president and general manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Moreover, he stressed that they must do so without increasing friction with IT operations teams or production systems.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Business Developers helps empower developers with direct access to the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform without having to move through centralized IT channels, giving them a more consistent, reliable foundation that aligns with the business’s demands for production-readiness,” Hellekson said.

The new service will offer simplified access to the enterprise Linux platform – the self-service allowance is up to 25 physical, virtual, or cloud-based instances per registered member of Red Hat’s developer program.

It also includes curated and signed developer content with many of the latest open source application programming languages, tools, and databases, according to Red Hat.

Similarly, the company announced this will come with ‘powerful open source container tooling’ through Podman Desktop – Red Hat’s preferred container development tool.

This new offering complements existing developer offerings, according to Red Hat, and it includes a no-cost Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals.

Red Hat targets security gain across developer workstations

IT complexity continues to grow, the company noted, especially as services are intermingled with AI, cloud native, and virtualized workloads.

This creates further challenges for the cybersecurity industry, which is seeing a continued upward trend in not just software vulnerabilities, but also software supply chain attacks.

The firm’s recent Red Hat Security Risk Report showed this confluence of issues and complexity is hampering security teams and developers alike, leaving enterprises open to an array of threats and stunting innovation.

For Red Hat, this underscores the importance of a “reliable, hardened and consistent platform” across production environments and also developer workstations.

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Red Hat has unveiled the launch of a new generative AI assistant aimed at helping enterprises streamline OpenShift environments.

Unveiled at the firm’s annual summit in Boston, Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed will be available for users from June 2025, the company confirmed.

The AI assistant is designed to simplify application platform deployments in hybrid cloud environments. Rapid application delivery is a common friction point for enterprises, the company said, despite the crucial role this plays in driving customer experiences.

This is due to a combination of factors, Red Hat noted, including increasingly complex IT infrastructure and growing skills gaps for enterprises across a host of industries.

Indeed, analysis from IDC found that by 2026, more than 90% of organizations will experience significant challenges as a result of IT skills gaps, resulting in $5.5 trillion in losses due to product delays and loss of business due to impaired competitiveness.

“Delivering AI-enabled applications is a top priority for organizations around the globe, but many IT teams already struggle with the complexities associated with hybrid cloud computing, let alone bringing these intelligent applications to life,” said Mike Barrett, VP of hybrid platforms at Red Hat.

Red Hat believes its Lightspeed tool will help enterprises address the issue by essentially lowering the barrier of entry for IT professionals working with OpenShift.

“Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed helps flatten the learning curve for Red Hat OpenShift users, enabling novices to get started more quickly and more experienced users to maximize efficiencies on the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes,” Barrett added.

“With Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed, organizations can improve their productivity, freeing up time and putting a greater focus on delivering innovation to their customers.”

How Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed works

According to Red Hat, the new AI assistant will guide users through application deployments by providing “proactive, step-by-step, tailored assistance” directly within the OpenShift web console.

Throughout the deployment process, users of all experience levels will be able to draw upon the assistant using natural language queries. This could include questions about OpenShift specifically, troubleshooting queries, and prompts to investigate cluster resources.

“Users can easily share information from their environment to the chat window, allowing OpenShift Lightspeed to answer questions using real context,” the company said.

Enterprises also have the option to choose from a range of AI model providers based on their preferences or main provider. This includes OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, and IBM's watsonx, for example.

Private AI options hosted on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI and OpenShift AI will also be available. The aim here is to provide users with “enhanced control and customization” based on their individual needs.

“This diverse compatibility ensures organizations can choose the AI models that best suit their specific needs and security requirements,” Red Hat said in a blog post.

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Red Hat has unveiled a raft of upgrades for Red Hat Developer Hub (RDHD), including support for a local version as well as new analytics.

First announced in May 2023, Red Hat Developer Hub is the company's internal portal designed to help streamline the developer process.

Based on Backstage, an open source framework for building developer portals from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, RHDH is the enterprise grade version designed to pull together curated tools and other resources into a single place.

The updated version, RHDH 1.5, is available immediately, though some of the additions remain developer previews.

The company said that organizations are prioritizing AI and edge applications, but noted these can be complicated and time consuming to develop. As a result, the firm is keen to push for wider adoption of internal developer portals, which can help streamline development and productivity.

"As organizations turn to intelligent applications to gain a competitive advantage, streamlining development processes and maximising productivity is imperative to getting these applications into production faster," said Balaji Sivasubramanian, senior director of developer tools at Red Hat.

"The latest features in Red Hat Developer Hub are designed to not only help organisations increase adoption and efficiency, but also allow for a more tailored portal, providing developers direct access to the tools, templates and components they need to drive innovation," Sivasubramanian added.

So what can users expect from the new updates? Here’s everything you need to know.

Red Hat targets deeper dev insights

Red Hat noted that it's not always easy to understand how a developer portal is being used — if at all.

That's the motivation behind Adoption Insights, a new analytical dashboard plugin that shows how development teams make use of RDHD.

The dashboard tracks active users, total users, and portal searches, as well as the top catalog entities such as APIs, templates, documentation entries, and plugins.

Adoption Insights is available now as a developer preview with installation instructions here.

Red Hat Developer Hub Extensions Catalog

Another new feature in RHDH version 1.5 is a collection of plugins that have been verified by Red Hat or the community.

The RHDH Extensions Catalog features over 60 dynamic plugins, viewable through a streamlined interface, to offer greater control but also flexibility inside the portal.

Teams can manage plugins, including their own custom ones, at runtime, without rebuilding and redeploying the portal. Red Hat said this will help teams speed up the process to onboard new tools.

"No two organizations approach application development in the same manner and as such, they need access to tailored and curated tools and components that best meets the unique needs of their platform engineers," the company said in a statement.

RHDH Local

The third, major change to RHDH is a local development tool. Like the name suggests, RHDH Local lets platform engineers run a lightweight, self-contained version of RHDH on their own local machine to let them get to work faster and troubleshoot changes before deploying to a production system.

"With RHDH Local, users can work on templates, try out plugins, validate software catalogues and more, without having to install Red Hat Developer Hub on a Kubernetes cluster," the company said in a statement.

"Additionally, because it runs in a containerized environment, users can spin up RHDH Local in seconds and tear it down just as quickly."

Last year, Red Hat bundled RHDH together with Trusted Artifact Signer and Trusted Profile Analyzer to create Red Hat Trusted Application Pipeline, for security-focused development templates.

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Orange has signed a deal with Red Hat to enhance the underlying common telco cloud foundation for Orange International Networks, unifying its containerized and virtual network functions.

As part of the move, Orange will transition its services to a cloud native infrastructure based on Red Hat platforms, with Red Hat OpenShift now forming the foundation for cloud native network functions.

The partnership will also see Orange incorporate Red Had OpenShift virtualization tools, while the open source giant's Ansible Automation Platform will enable fully automated deployment and scaling across the network.

Orange said the aim is to create a vendor-agnostic cloud native and automation framework for its international telco cloud infrastructure.

The firm is also eying up a range of potential use cases, from SD-WAN and SASE gateway, to IMS, 4G and 5G core, IoT and roaming services. So far, it has successfully deployed six new points of presence (PoPs) to run live on the platform.

"We have recently selected Red Hat OpenShift for our next generation of telco cloud, and our move to containerization," said Jean Louis Leroux, executive vice president, international networks, Orange, and chief technology and innovation officer, Orange Wholesale.

"We are very happy with the first deployments and are moving forward to cover the globe with this new technology. We are ready to host advanced telco services, such as SD-WAN, IoT, voice and mobile core within 10 milliseconds of any customer."

Orange is expecting some big benefits from the new platform, including greater availability and operational efficiency, with improved lifecycle management, an easier upgrade process, and 'near-zero' downtime.

The telco giant also anticipates improvements in terms of flexibility, scalability, and future-readiness, along with a faster time to market via fully automated deployment and scaling and zero-touch provisioning.

Orange targets network resilience gains

Orange specifically highlighted improved resilience with infrastructure as code (IaC) following the deal with Red Hat, along with greater security capabilities through network and container isolation and controlled access to applications.

Orange said it’s on track to increase its common telco cloud infrastructure based on Red Hat OpenShift to 75 telco cloud PoPs around the world over the next two years, migrating from its existing 50 OpenStack platforms and deploying 25 new PoPs.

With sustainability in mind, it said, it will be able to reuse existing equipment and take advantage of the power monitoring capabilities in Red Hat OpenShift to reduce its carbon footprint.

"The Orange and Red Hat teams have built a close collaboration over the years based on transparency and simplicity. We’re delighted to see Orange unlocking significant benefits in stability, resilience and time to market with the use of Red Hat technologies," said Fran Heeran, vice president, global telecommunications at Red Hat.

"Orange is a best-practice example of harnessing end-to-end automation and cloud-native orchestration to target large scale deployments and workload migration to modern infrastructure with the help of Red Hat."

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T-Mobile has selected Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus to power its common telco cloud across its core and edge operations.

The telco giant said the deal will help it automate operations, support cloud native 5G applications ,and unlock new opportunities in edge computing, private networks, and IoT.

Meanwhile, the firm hopes to reduce costs and accelerate time-to-market for new applications and services.

"T-Mobile’s multipurpose cloud will bridge us from a traditional telco to a dynamic techco, exposing previously untapped innovation while enhancing operational efficiencies," said Lori Ames, senior vice president, cloud, IP & transport technology at T-Mobile.

"By partnering with best-in-class providers like Red Hat to leverage cloud native agility, automation and AI-driven insights, we’re redefining connectivity for the digital economy by meeting our customers where they need us."

The common telco cloud can help keep costs low by consolidating and standardizing infrastructure across various workloads, including end-to-end automation for greater operational efficiency.

Standardized training, support, compliance, and security capabilities across all stacks should help reduce risk and complexity in managing diverse telecom workloads, the firm said.

T-Mobile also expects to accelerate the roll-out of new services, thanks to simple certification, pre-validation, and lifecycle management processes including integration of VNFs, CNFs, and IT applications.

It also promises greater scalability and flexibility in hybrid multi-cloud environments to enable more reliable, carrier-grade services to meet telecommunication service provider’s needs.

"As telecommunications service providers face increasing demands for cloud flexibility, consistency and cost optimization, Red Hat OpenShift provides a standardized, scalable foundation to drive efficiency and innovation," said Fran Heeran, vice president, global telecommunications, at Red Hat.

"By collaborating with T-Mobile to power its common telco cloud, Red Hat will help unlock new opportunities for streamlined operations, faster service delivery and a simplified approach to managing diverse workloads across the core network."

T-Mobile eyes closer open source ties

Notably, T-Mobile said the deal will make it easier for telecommunications service providers to interact with a broader array of open source technologies and communities, including a direct pipeline for requests and feedback upstream.

All told, this means telcos will have access to a unified, standards-based environment that will deliver more efficient development, testing, and deployment while simplifying workload integration and speeding up certification processes.

Cloud computing investment in the telecoms sector has increased significantly in recent years, with providers seeking to improve agility and flexibility while delivering cost efficient services.

Recent analysis from Juniper Research, for example, predicted telcos will spend upwards of $65 billion on cloud services by 2028.

This investment comes at a critical time, with the expansion of 5G networks and the arrival of cloud native 6G networks expected to rapidly increase the volume of cellular data.

The study noted that more than half of cellular data will be serviced by cloud-based systems by the end of the decade.

MORE FROM ITPRO

• Red Hat launches Build module as part of partner program refresh
• T-Mobile security chief insists its defenses stood up to Salt Typhoon attacks
• The secret to Red Hat’s success: Trust, trust, and more trust

Open source giant Red Hat has announced the next wave of updates to its partner program, which includes a new Build module aimed at Red Hat technology partners.

The move follows the first round of changes introduced to the program last year, which saw Red Hat adopt a modular framework alongside the implementation of standardized incentives and upgraded digital tooling.

With the latest refresh for 2025, the firm has introduced a new Build module, alongside a streamlined distribution engagement model, improved go-to-market support, and new incentives.

As part of the update, the firm has introduced a new Build module alongside its existing Resell, Distribution, and Sell pathways in a bid to better recognize and reward its technology partners.

Available in the coming weeks, the module has been designed for partners that certify or validate their products and develop new solutions on Red Hat technologies - particularly independent hardware and software vendors (IHVs and ISVs), systems integrators (SIs), and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

These partners will earn points for activities such as co-creating solutions with Red Hat, validating or certifying solutions on the firm’s platforms, as well as developing content and go-to-market plans, to unlock a range of benefits across enablement, sales, marketing, and technical support.

The revamped partner ecosystem also now features an aligned distribution model which Red Hat said has been designed to drive greater engagement between distributors and their focused partners, as well as improve skills development and go-to-market execution.

With the streamlined model, partners can select a preferred Red Hat distributor to work with, while distributors gain an easier way to allocate resources with their partners.

Red Hat expands go-to-market support

Elsewhere, Red Hat has also expanded its go-to-market support across all of its partner program modules, enabling partners to leverage customer and market data to drive demand for their solutions.

Partners can earn points through development of joint solutions, marketing campaigns, and customer demos to advance their engagement with the open source firm.

Additionally, rebates and incentives have been standardized for Resell and Distribution partners in a move Red Hat said will create “greater visibility and more predictable growth.”

In an announcement, the firm added that partners can also expect additional updates later in the year as part of the ecosystem’s ongoing transformation.

“At the core of our strategy is providing greater autonomy for partners to benefit from more choice, clearer growth opportunities, and stronger collaboration with each other and Red Hat,” commented Stefanie Chiras, SVP of Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat.

Nokia and Finnish telco provider Elise have carried out the first successful commercial deployment of a 5G Cloud RAN solution, with the help of Red Hat.

With Cloud RAN, Elisa can shift network computing power closer to its customers, whose network usage is transforming closer to the network edge.

Elisa said the deployment puts it in a strong position during a move towards the 6G era – which it expects to be increasingly cloud native. ‘Cloudification’ also plays a key role in Elisa’s work on self-driving and self-healing autonomous networks.

"This successful Cloud RAN deployment with Nokia is another important step on our cloudification which started with cloudifying the network core and edge, and now includes the radio access network," said Kalle Lehtinen, Elisa's chief technology officer.

"We continue to pioneer new technologies in our journey towards autonomous operations helping us to continue innovating and delivering the best customer experience."

Nokia and Elisa previously carried out Europe’s first Cloud RAN trial in October 2023.

"This successful collaboration with Elisa confirms that our Cloud RAN solution is ready for commercial deployment," said Aji Ed, head of Cloud RAN at Nokia.

"Under our anyRAN approach, we work very closely with strategic partners like Red Hat and bring together best-in-class partner solutions to offer true flexibility and scalability to operators and enterprises. For our customers, cloudification will enable new revenue models and monetization options."

This commercial deployment completed end-to-end 5G voice and data calls with Nokia’s 5G Cloud RAN solution, including its AirScale Massive MIMO radios, baseband software, and AI-powered MantaRay network management solution.

The deployment verified areas such as capacity, performance, features, life cycle management, automation, and energy management.

Elisa used Dell XR8620 servers as well as hybrid cloud application platform Red Hat OpenShift to support cloud native RAN functions across the network. Red Hat OpenShift integration, the firms said, gives service providers the option to scale their 5G network footprint and quickly introduce new services.

"Red Hat is excited to continue our partnership with Nokia by helping service providers implement RAN for full end-to-end cloudification and automation of next-generation networks," said Honoré LaBourdette, vice president, telco, media, entertainment and edge ecosystem, Red Hat.

"Cloud RAN’s significance lies not only in providing an efficient and flexible way to deploy applications and derive value at the edge but also in boosting collaboration and innovation across the ecosystem."

Dell Technologies and Red Hat are teaming up to bring the Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI) to Dell's PowerEdge servers, aiming to make it easier to develop, test and deploy generative AI models.

The idea is to help organizations to implement successful AI and machine learning strategies to scale their IT systems and power enterprise applications across their businesses.

"AI by nature requires extensive resources spanning enabled servers, compute power and GPUs,” Joe Fernandes, vice president and general manager, Generative AI Foundation Model Platforms at Red Hat.

“As organizations evaluate and implement GenAI use cases, it is imperative that they build on a platform that is able to scale with their business while also providing the agility to experiment and develop AI-driven innovations.

"By collaborating with Dell Technologies to validate and empower RHEL AI on Dell PowerEdge servers, we are enabling customers with greater confidence and flexibility to harness the power of GenAI workloads across hybrid cloud environments and propel their business into the future."

The duo said they're providing a more consistent AI experience on optimized, AI-enabled hardware solutions, all delivered on RHEL AI on Dell PowerEdge. This involves continuously testing and validating hardware solutions, including Nvidia accelerated computing, with RHEL AI.

"In today’s fast-paced market, it is critical for organizations to be equipped with validated and trusted AI-enabled solutions to kick-start their GenAI use cases," said Bob Pette, Nvidia's vice president, enterprise platforms.

"Red Hat and Dell will extend GenAI capabilities for customers with an optimized experience for Nvidia accelerated computing, including Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs, with Dell PowerEdge servers and RHEL AI."

RHEL AI brings together open source-licensed Granite large language models (LLMs) from IBM Research, InstructLab model alignment tools based on the Large-scale Alignment for chatBots (LAB) methodology, and a “community-driven approach” to model development through the InstructLab project.

The solution, which will be available in the third quarter of this year, is packaged as a bootable RHEL image for individual server deployments across the hybrid cloud.

It's included as part of Red Hat OpenShift AI, Red Hat’s hybrid cloud machine learning operations (MLOps) platform, for running models and InstructLab across distributed cluster environments.

"Validating RHEL AI for AI workloads on Dell PowerEdge servers provides customers with greater confidence that the servers, GPUs and foundational platforms are tested and validated on an ongoing basis," said Arun Narayanan, senior vice president, Dell Technologies.

"This simplifies the GenAI user experience and accelerates the process to build and deploy critical AI workloads on a trusted software stack."

Red Hat has announced a first wave of updates to its partner program in a move the open source software provider said will accelerate partner revenue realization and collaboration. 

First announced in January, Red Hat has been undergoing a transformation of its partner experience in a bid to provide greater simplicity, choice, and flexibility to partners.

As part of this refresh, the overhaul includes a new modular program design that aims to drive partner growth and profitability, alongside fresh partner incentives and an upgraded Partner Connect Portal.

“With the rise of industry trends in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), virtualization and more, the need for coordinated cross-collaboration across multiple technology vendors and solution providers is imperative,” commented Stefanie Chiras, senior vice president of partner ecosystem success at Red Hat, in an announcement.

“At Red Hat, we have been paying close attention to how these market dynamics are impacting partners and customers in order to better understand how we can help implement an ecosystem-driven approach to IT modernization.”

Red Hat's new 'modular framework' for partners

As part of the program’s new modular framework, Red Hat has launched its first three modules – Resell, Distribution, and Sell With – that will act as the foundation of the initiative and enable partners to earn points for specific activities that align with their business goals.

Partners can self-select activities within these modules, as well as opt to work solely within one module or within multiple to help make it easier to engage in focused business areas with Red Hat.

Further modules will become available throughout the course of the year, the firm said, as it looks to support additional partner activities across build, sell, and service business areas.

New incentives

The points earned by partners within these new modules will open access to additional benefits, tailored support, and enhanced opportunities suited to their level of engagement. 

The program’s new standardized deal registration process will allow global partners to register opportunities to receive additional discounts and support, while improved marketing development fund (MDF) tools and processes aim to make it easier to receive additional funding.

“With the launch of these new partner modules and benefits, Red Hat is establishing a unified global partner engagement experience founded on choice and flexibility to deliver optimal customer value,” Chiras explained.

“Partners can more easily collaborate with Red Hat across multiple engagement routes and unlock new rewards through a universal activity-based points system.”

Portal upgrade

Additionally, Red Hat has upgraded its Partner Connect portal, introducing a new interface to streamline user interactions, guide users through module activities, and boost visibility of deal registration and opportunities.

Partners will be able to leverage real-time performance and reporting dashboards that offer greater detail, the company revealed.

“As partners move through the modules, the transparent program structure offers clear pathways for collaboration, real-time reporting and greater visibility into business opportunities with Red Hat and the broader ecosystem,” Chiras added.

The secret to success and longevity in this industry is trust, according to Hans Roth, Red Hat senior vice president and general manager of EMEA. 

Depending on how you measure milestones, Red Hat turned 31 (based on when it was founded) in March, or will become 25 in August (based on when it went public). 

Either way, by anyone’s standards 25-31 years is a long time in an industry as dynamic and fast-paced as tech. 

So what is the secret, or even secrets, to this success? IT Pro sat down with Roth at last month’s Red Hat Summit to try and find out. 

“The key thing for me is genuine trust. What we're building, it’s different. We are trying - and I mean every day -  to basically run the whole company on a trust base, rather than on fear or pressure,” Roth told us. 

Of course, there is still pressure to achieve certain goals as in any business, which Roth is honest about, but how the culture supports and facilitates achieving these goals (through trust) makes that more manageable. 

“There are enough studies about how quickly you can destroy trust and how long it takes to build it up.”

That culture of trust isn’t just an internal-facing thing, either – something Roth is keen to stress. 

“We're working that way with partners and customers. We just had a Partner Advisory Council in London. It's amazing how open you are, you're sharing things with that group,  even encouraging the partners who are almost competitors… to talk openly about topics,” he said. 

“That openness, the trust level with customers and partners, even goes beyond Red Hat. It’s really good.”

Roth has previously talked about ‘the secret sauce’, or the three pillars he believes underpins Red Hat’s success: Culture, ecosystem, and innovation. Clearly, trust runs deep in all three areas. 

“Our contribution to the communities makes such a big impact. We are putting everything back into open source,” Roth said before referencing last month’s Summit announcements as multiple cases in point. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and IBM Research’s Granite tie-up is but one example. 

“We are contributing, too. We're not taking, we're also giving, I think that makes a big difference because other companies didn't crack the secret sauce on that, because they don't really know how to deal with that.” 

Red Hat is working hard behind the scenes

IntrustLab was also a highlight of last month’s Summit announcements, with many wowed by the potential for it to really break down barriers. The initiative again showcases IBM and Red Hat working together on a project to enhance generative AI capabilities by ensuring anyone – including those with pretty much no machine learning experience – can bring their contributions to the table. 

“Instruct Lab is a massive [deal]. There were a lot of people involved. A few months ago, Matt [our CEO] basically announced it internally and asked everyone in Red Hat – regardless of whether they were in engineering or in sales or an admin person or whatever -  to participate in it,” Roth said. 

“It's not about some data scientists or geeks working somewhere in a dark room. Everybody's involved in it. I even submitted something and I’ve never studied any line of code in my life, right? So everybody can contribute. For me, that was the biggest announcement [at Red Hat Summit 2024].”

When asked what he would like to be talking about come Red Hat Summit 2025, Roth said he would like to see more examples of how AI is being used for good, like in the Boston Children’s example shared on stage at this year’s event. 

The hospital is using Red Hat OpenShift for AI to pilot imaging analysis in its radiology department with the aim of making leaps forward when it comes to image quality and the accuracy and speed at which those images can be interpreted. 

“There is nothing I don’t want to talk about,” Roth said. “Today is really the foundation. Next year, I want to be talking about how that model has changed the lives of many, many people. That’s just the way it should be. We’ve come back to our old theme of ‘open unlocks the world’s potential.”

Red Hat has expanded its collaboration with hybrid multi-cloud specialist Nutanix in a move that will see Red Hat Enterprise Linux incorporated into the Nutanix Cloud Platform. 

Nutanix will leverage Enterprise Linux for traditional operating system capabilities to help drive innovation across hybrid cloud multi environments, as well as allow Nutanix to concentrate on its own IP.

The Nutanix Cloud Platform is designed to provide users with a single platform for running applications and data across hybrid multi-cloud endpoints, complete with self-healing nodes, natively integrated storage, as well as the ability to eliminate unused compute and storage resources.

The platform runs on Nutanix AOS, which bundles together the components of a traditional operating system with additional services and packages. Thanks to the expanded collaboration with Red Hat, AOS will now leverage Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its operating system capabilities to enable Nutanix to focus on the novel intellectual property delivered by Nutanix AOS.

In an announcement, Red Hat said the move will deliver a more consistent cloud operating model for customers running applications and data across hybrid multi-cloud endpoints.

“From virtualized and cloud-native applications to AI and edge workloads, a trusted, more consistent and comprehensive operating system foundation remains a critical component of the technology stack,” explained Stefanie Chiras, senior vice president of Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux has served as an enterprise-ready innovation catalyst for decades, and we’re pleased for the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform to underpin the expansion of our existing collaboration with Nutanix.”

Red Hat said its Enterprise Linux platform offers direct access to dedicated, enterprise-grade Linux experts, alongside enhanced stability for hybrid cloud infrastructure for more consistent management and scaling of cloud-native workloads from on-premises data centers to multiple public clouds. 

Customers can also benefit from Red Hat’s security capabilities and product security and security incident response teams.

As part of the freshly expanded collaboration, Nutanix will also contribute to CentOS Stream and work with both Red Hat and the open source community on hypervisor functionality, networking, and storage performance for emerging AI workloads on Enterprise Linux.

As a result, Nutanix said it will be able to contribute to future distributions of the platform to drive adoption of “more performant applications on the Nutanix Cloud Platform.”

“Nutanix and Red Hat are in a unique position to help customers manage the ongoing market disruptions,” commented Thomas Cornely, senior vice president of product management at Nutanix.

“We’re excited to strengthen our product and go to market partnership with Red Hat to further build on each other’s strengths and enable enterprise customers to make the most of opportunities around cloud, modern application platforms, and AI."

AI may be the talk of the town, but Red Hat is betting big and believes that adding open source to the mix will be what moves the needle. 

That was the message attendees got from the opening keynote at this year’s Red Hat summit as the firm’s president and CEO Matt Hicks took to the stage to unveil some big news and generate excitement around how its customers and partners can get on board. 

“This year’s summit is going to hone in on the intersection of open source and AI and the incredible impact that happens when we combine those two. It’s hard to even describe just how much AI has advanced since last summer," Hicks said. "We said it was ‘the moment of AI’ and for those of us trying to keep track of the changes, it’s been a long moment."

“The rate of innovation has only accelerated. It is every month, every week, every hour at this point. But in all the advancements, the most interesting thing that has happened to AI over the last year has been the explosion of choices. 

"What used to be only achievable in trillion parameter models is now being replicated in models orders of magnitude. Capabilities that just a year ago were coupled to high-end, fairly exotic hardware can now run on a laptop. Training techniques that once ran in the hundreds of millions of dollars are now being replicated for a few thousand.” 

An open source education from Red Hat

Looking back two decades ago, academic breakthroughs took an age, according to Hicks who said “The rule of thumb, I would often say, was about 10 years to never.”

This was because the pace at which academia and software were working were massively at odds. It made it almost impossible to find a “meaningful intersection" between the two worlds. That all changed when academia embraced open source, according to Hicks. 

“These days it feels like we go from breakthrough to model in a week,” he said. “The capabilities in AI are being developed by some of the best academic researchers on the planet. And open source gives them a channel for their work.” 

Myriad press announcements hit today, a heady mix of product, customer and partner news. Not all were AI-focused, but the topic definitely dominated and with good reason as it’s a solid direction of travel for Red Hat. 

Key highlights in the news lineup included the launch of:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI), which is now available as a developer preview. 
• RHEL Lightspeed, which will infuse GenAI capabilities across the firm’s Linux and hybrid cloud applications and platforms to help reduce complexity and increase efficiency when it comes to computing tasks.  
• Image mode for RHEL, which is now available as a technology preview in RHEL 9.4. 
• Podman AI Lab which extends on the capabilities of Podman Desktop and enables developers to make use of an intuitive GUI to create, test and then run GenAI-powered apps in containers. 
• Instruct Lab, an open source initiative created by Red Hat in collaboration with IBM Research, designed to enhance LLMs that are used in GenAI apps. The hope being that barriers to entry will be removed so almost anyone can get involved. 

Open for AI business

Red Hat has already done a lot to help realize the promise of AI. But there is still much more to be done. The company realizes it cannot do this alone. 

Indeed, as is the open source way, community, collaboration, cooperation and, at times, 'coopition' that will enable Red Hat to turn theory into reality when it comes to delivering impactful AI use-cases. 

“AI won’t be built by a single vendor. It isn’t going to revolve around a single monolithic model. Your choice of where to run AI will be everywhere and it’s going to be on open source,” Hicks added.

“When I saw Meta take the first step into the open source arena with their Llama model, making it accessible to the world, it was a tectonic shift," he said. "Then I witnessed Mistral expand on that by releasing a model under the Apache license, allowing unhindered use of what they released. And I’ve watched Hugging Face aggregating the data and models to allow research scientists to iterate on this.” 

“Today, I am very proud to announce that Red Hat is going to add the next link in the chain of open source contributions. We believe in the power of open to drive innovation. That means open licensing, open data, and open contributions.”

While on stage, Hicks reminisced about his start in the industry and his work as a Linux administrator. He said that his passion for tech has been “reinvigorated by seeing what AI can do,” something he said he believes he has in common with the Summit audience. 

“I feel fortunate to be experiencing the convergence of open source and AI and am proud to be contributing to it… I know you are all at different points in your AI journey. That's the good thing. There is no set in state end date,” he said. 

“Every organization is trying to determine what is real for the industry and what is real for them. Wherever you are, Red Hat can reach you…Let’s show the world what we can do with open source AI.”

Red Hat has introduced three new developer tools to its Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain solution in a move designed to help organizations ramp up security earlier in the supply chain.

The Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain platform provides software and services to help organizations tackle software supply chain threats early and strengthen their overall resilience to vulnerabilities.

The first of its three new additions – dubbed Red Hat Trusted Artifact Signer – is based on the open-source Sigstore project and aims to increase trust in software artifacts progressing through the supply chain. Available now, the tool enables developers to cryptographically sign and verify artifacts using a keyless certificate authority - without the need to manage a centralized key management system, Red Hat said.

The second, Red Hat Trusted Profile Analyzer, has been designed to simplify vulnerability management. The offering operates as a hub for security documentation such as Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) and Vulnerability Exploitability Exchange (VEX), enabling organizations to efficiently manage and analyze the composition of software assets and documentation of custom, third party, and open-source software. Trusted Profile Analyzer is also available now.

The third new offering, Red Hat Trusted Application Pipeline, bundles together the Trusted Artifact Signer and Trusted Profile Analyzer with Red Hat’s internal developer platform, Red Hat Developer Hub, to provide developer self-service templates loaded with security-focused software supply chain capabilities.

Acting as a hub for validated software templates, Red Hat said organizations can leverage the tool to verify pipeline compliance and ramp up traceability and auditability in the CI/CD process through an automated chain of trust that validates artifact signatures, as well as provides provenance and attestations. Trusted Application Pipeline is currently in tech preview, with general availability expected later this quarter.

In an announcement, Red Hat said it is releasing its new offerings as organizations are increasingly looking to proactively integrate security protocols directly into their software processes.

“Organizations are seeking to mitigate the risks of constantly evolving security threats in their software development - to keep and grow trust with users, customers and partners,” explained Sarwar Raza, vice president and general manager of Red Hat’s Application Developer Business Unit.

“Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain is designed to seamlessly bring security capabilities into every phase of the software development life cycle. From code time to runtime, these tools help increase transparency and trust and give DevSecOps teams the ability to lay the groundwork for a more secure enterprise without impacting developer velocity or cognitive load.”

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) is rapidly emerging as the primary engineering practice for enterprises ramping up application modernization, according to new research from Red Hat. 

68% of respondents to a Red Hat survey highlighted “improving CI/CD” as their primary focus in application modernization while 66% of respondents pinpointed “data modernization” as a key enterprise goal over the last year.

More than half (53%) of respondents also revealed they have accelerated efforts to automate workloads while 51% have begun investing in "serverless computing".

The popularity of CI/CD came as a surprise to Red Hat, according to program manager Tobias Hartwig. 

Speaking to ITPro at KubeCon 2024 in Paris, Hartwig said the study highlighted evolving enterprise interpretations of application modernization, as well as the exploration of new ways to accelerate infrastructure transformation efforts. 

A 2021 study from the firm showed that the majority of enterprises had prioritized containerization as a key method to overhaul legacy applications and infrastructure. Two years later, the landscape appears to have changed significantly.

“We asked it two years ago and back then, to a lot of customers, it meant containerization,” Hartwig told ITPro.

Seeing this recent shift was interesting, he said, and could be in some ways attributed to declining “hype” around containerization. 

“People realize what the reality is and what the priorities are,” he added. 

CI/CD has surged in popularity since 2021

The decline in containerization has been brought into sharp clarity by the rise in focus on CI/CD, which was far closer to the “bottom of the list” last time according to Hartwig. 

Red Hat's 2021 Application Modernization report showed containerization and CI/CD occupied almost opposite positions, a degree of change that is “rare” to see from survey to survey, according to the wording of the report itself.

Hartwig described this change as surprising, explaining that, “as vendors, we often feel like … everyone does CI/CD,” but that the figures of the report clearly show an overestimation of how far along the market is in CI/CD. 

The importance of CI/CD doesn’t just apply to the development of new products either, Hartwig expanded, as companies need to look to their legacy infrastructure to unlock all the advantages of CI/CD.

Data modernization as a top definition of application modernization in the report can largely be attributed to the increasing focus on AI within organizations, as well as the importance of “modernizing the data exchange” between applications. 

“Now that people start to think about how to leverage AI, they realize there's a data problem there,” Hartwig said.

“They need to get their data ready and they need to be able to harvest the data for … within the applications, but also for AI use cases,” he added.

In terms of the report’s more fundamental results, the core drivers of application modernization centered around security, reliability, and scalability. 

Respondents almost “universally” cited these drivers as factors in their organization’s decision to modernize, according to the report.

Technical debt has been, and will continue to be, a significant hurdle for IT leaders pursuing digital transformation, according to a senior figure at Red Hat.

Gordon Haff, technology evangelist at the IBM-backed open source giant, told ITPro that key hurdles to digital transformation, which aren’t limited solely to technical debt and include overhauling manual processes and skills shortages, will remain an acute challenge for IT leaders in 2024 and beyond.

Haff’s comments follow the publication of Red Hat’s annual Global Customer Tech Trends report, which found more than a quarter (28%) of European companies believe digitization efforts are being scuppered by the issue.

While barriers to digital transformation have remained “relatively consistent” in recent years, organizations are consistently failing to overcome these challenges, the study noted, begging the question of how IT leaders can begin accelerating their digital goals.

Fundamentally, Haff believes that digital transformation and overcoming technical debt is a cyclical process that can’t be avoided. Once one project is finished or one aspect of their IT architecture is modernized, teams naturally begin preparing and building on top of existing technologies.

“There’s always going to be technical debt,” he told ITPro. “You’re never going to have enough hands to do all the work that’s going to be required. There’s always going to be integration issues.

“At some level, it’s almost a moving of the goal posts type of thing. These are always going to be issues, you’re never going to solve them, at least with large companies.”

Haff pointed toward application modernization as a prime example of this rinse and repeat trend. Many enterprises, he said, deliberately choose to not tinker with certain applications due to the fact they still worked nominally.

Fast forward several years later, these applications are overhauled and modernized, then are left to their own devices - to some extent - and reassessed during the next transformation cycle.

“If you go back 10 years, we had this sort of bimodal IT, or fast-slow IT, that was kind of the thing,” he explained. “The idea was 'we’ll leave that old stuff, we’ll shove that off into the corner and not worry about it' and the cool kids can work on all this greenfield, often new customer-facing applications.

“But by and large, it’s then a case of ‘oh we actually need to deal with this core business stuff’ and these older applications.”

Technical debt will always be there, but there are things that can be done

Rather than downing tools and accepting their fate, Haff noted that “there are things you can do to make things better”. 

The report noted that while automation “is not a panacea to deal with having too much work and too few hands”, it represents a powerful tool to help reduce workloads and improve quality and consistency.

More than one-third (36%) of respondents told Red Hat they are prioritizing funding for both security automation and cloud services automation over the next 12 months.

“You can do things like getting your data in order with data modernization,” Haff said. “You can do things like automation, and those can certainly help with those kinds of problems.”

However, if, for example, an organization successfully implements automation across aspects of its IT infrastructure, Haff noted that the bar is once again raised for teams and it’s onto the next project.

“Then the goalposts move and you have another set of things to do,” he said.

For some IT leaders, this can be demoralizing. But Haff urged enterprises to avoid approaching transformation efforts with a “one and done” mindset. It’s a continuous learning process and a battle against the tides.

“With another survey we’re working on, one of the things we’ve found is that there are some companies where application modernization is not a ‘one and done’ thing. It’s something that you continuously do,” he said.

“There’s always more work to be done. You’re never at the point where you go ‘we don’t need an IT staff anymore’ - is something we need to keep working at. It’s never going to be good enough.”

Haff has witnessed this first-hand at Red Hat during the 14 years he’s been with the company, underlining the fact that even solutions providers in this sense aren’t immune from the laborious process of continuous change.

“I see this internally at Red Hat, frankly. We’ve made such big internal changes since I joined 14 years ago,” he explained. “We’ve now got single sign-on (SSO) for all of our applications, we’ve just had a big modernization of our sales enablement and sales learning systems and tracking systems.”

“Those are great, and I think there’s a certain level of ‘let’s declare a success in this area’ - but we still have a big IT department, we still have tons of work we can do.”

Red Hat has announced a refresh of its partner program in a move it says will offer greater simplicity, choice, and flexibility to partners collaborating with the open source giant. 

As part of the revamp, the company is launching a new program framework, which includes improved tools to drive streamlined cross-collaboration, as well as provide better access to key technology, training, and resources.

Slated for launch during the second half of 2024, key new features include the Red Hat Partner Practice Accelerator Program and the Red Hat Demo Platform.

Red Hat says its new simplified model will enable improved transparency across its partner ecosystem, while a new modular program design will give partners greater choice and flexibility.

The open source specialist said the changes will also encourage ecosystem co-creation to deepen partner capabilities.

“This latest evolution of Red Hat’s partner engagement model sends a clear signal to our partners that Red Hat is prioritizing the ecosystem as the leading catalyst for customer value,” commented Stefanie Chiras, Red Hat’s senior vice president of Partner Ecosystem Success.

“In order to deliver on the promise of hybrid cloud with customers, it is critical that we innovate collectively and transparently, and empower partners with easy access to information and shared data so we can address our customers’ unique challenges as a united front.”

Red Hat Partner Practice Accelerator Program

Red Hat’s partner engagement model overhaul includes the new Red Hat Partner Practice Accelerator Program, which centers on identifying, enabling, validating, and incentivizing partners within the commercial segment to position them as tailored experts.

The firm says its aim is to help these partners lead the full commercial customer lifecycle, while leveraging the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat OpenShift to serve up differentiated business outcomes.

Partners involved in the program will have achieved Red Hat professional services credentials and certifications related to automation and application development and will have “extensive access” to resources and professional services to help tackle customers’ digital transformation roadmaps.

The invite-only Red Hat Partner Practice Accelerator Program is open to eligible global partners now. The current pool of participants includes: Li9, Linux Plus Information Systems, SEKOM, Stone Door Group, and System Vertrieb Alexander (SVA) GmbH.

Red Hat Demo platform

To complement its new engagement model, Red Hat says it is also working to make its resources, expertise, and portfolio of open source solutions more accessible to partners. 

Available via Red Hat Partner Connect, the new Red Hat Demo platform will offer on-demand product demos to help partners to demonstrate Red Hat’s range of solutions in a low risk environment, complete with step-by-step instructions and talking points for customers.

Scheduled for availability in May 2024, partners will be able to utilize multi-product demos and fully scripted workshops to deliver either one- or two- day experiences for their customers, while the platform will also provide early access to demos of new product releases ahead of time.

As one of the world's leading visual effects (VFX) providers for the entertainment industry, UK-based DNEG has worked on blockbuster films like Dune, Blade Runner 2049, and Oppenheimer. However, after rapid growth to over 9,000 employees across seven global sites, DNEG's legacy infrastructure was struggling to keep pace.

Software infrastructure architect Ollie Harding tells ITPro that his firm was dealing with outdated systems and tricky delays. "We've got a traditionally very monolithic architecture and that comes with all the classical problems, it takes a week to release a change ... there’s very little agility.

“Even small software changes took an extremely long time for artists to access, slowing productivity and innovation.”

It became clear DNEG needed to modernize its core infrastructure to enable the scale and agility demanded by today's fast-paced VFX industry. The company soon launched an ambitious initiative to re-platform parts of its technology stack and overhaul delivery processes.

Objectives for DNEG’s cloud-native journey

The key goals DNEG aimed to achieve included accelerating software delivery times to artists (from a week plus per release to under 10 minutes). It also wanted to move from a rigid "department of no" to a flexible "department of yes". There was also a need to future-proof architecture for innovation and next-generation demands.

"We will be able to completely revolutionize this space [in our architecture]," Harding tells ITPro.

"Now we’ve got this thing out in the corner, it’s separate: we can now start saying okay, that aspect of it, we are going to change the way we represent that asset.”

DNEG began implementing this cloud-native initiative in early 2020. The initial evaluation process considered ease of on-prem support, flexibility for future growth, and depth of vendor expertise as key criteria.

We needed something which could be cloud-native architecture while on-prem," Harding explains. "We definitely knew that we needed a well-supported platform.” After assessing options, Red Hat OpenShift was selected for its ability to enable DNEG’s complex multi-cluster topology.

The new platform leverages technologies including OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift GitOps, and Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines to automate containerization, building, testing, and software delivery. As Ian Abbott, software architect at DNEG, outlined, “What this allowed me to do was to construct, from initial git commit to final deployment, an automated system that required very little intervention from developers. The developers could just change their code and that would then automatically kick off an OpenShift Pipeline of custom Tekton tasks.

“This would then build the software, and run some tests. At the end of this, if tests pass, it creates a manual gate via a pull request on the production configuration in Git to update the release version. The developers are emailed to take a look at the test system running, and if all is good, they can just merge the PR. OpenShift GitOps, which is a Red-Hat-packaged version of Argo CD, detects that configuration change and then automatically deploys the new software images directly to all of our global clusters."

Rewards of DNEG’s cloud-native journey

DNEG’s switch to cloud-native architecture with Red Hat and automated delivery pipelines in line with continuous integration practices has yielded massive improvements. It slashed its software deployment time from one week or more to under 10 minutes per release. There has also been much greater infrastructure flexibility and ability to support innovation, and significantly increased developer productivity and feature velocity.

As Harding summarized, “Our change in architecture and the development of the delivery pipeline using OpenShift means that that pipeline from developer commits to it being in production in every facility around the world is under 10 minutes."

By removing infrastructure bottlenecks, DNEG’s VFX artists and other users now experience much faster access to the latest tools, assets, and updates needed for their cutting-edge projects.

Challenges to adopting cloud-native architecture

Implementing this sweeping modernization did involve some expected hurdles. The shift to cloud native and GitOps methodologies represented significant learning curves. Supply chain issues amid the pandemic also drew out timelines.

However, DNEG made use of Red Hat's training and expertise to skill up. Abbott credited blogs and shared best practices with guiding the configuration of optimal pipelines. Both emphasized the close vendor partnership as instrumental in designing, troubleshooting, and ultimately succeeding with the new infrastructure.

For Harding, one of the most important lessons has been the value of adopting mainstream best practices even when they don’t seem immediately relevant: “It really pays to take mainstream techniques in their complete sense … the complete mainstream definition of GitOps is the best way of doing it. 

If you lop little bits off the side ... you would have a much less resilient architecture."

He also emphasized never believing your company is too unique to benefit from standard techniques: "Never ever believe that your company or your technology is too special to benefit from those mainstream techniques. It’s just a case of how you frame your understanding."

Abbott concisely summarized his advice as: "As much as possible try to follow best practices all the way, as you're less likely to tie yourself in knots later on, and it means that you can effectively scale.”

This project is only the beginning for DNEG. With a solid cloud-native foundation now in place, Harding hinted at plans to further enhance and scale developer productivity: "We’ve got quite clear expectations of where we will be going in terms of application programming interface (API) management and developer experience – investing both in implementation of things that we know we need to do and investigation of areas that we know that we need to address.”

For an organization entrenched in a monolithic legacy, DNEG’s journey showcases the massive benefits attainable – and highlights why cloud-native architecture has become the new norm for modern application infrastructure.

This article has been updated to clarify the quotes included.

Linux users are set to get their own version of the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) as part of a new update to the operating system. 

The latest release of systemd for Linux will now generate the error message across a number of distributions, Phoronix reported yesterday. Systemd is a software suite used in a number of Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu, Red Hat, Debian, and Fedora.

Dubbed ‘systemd-bsod’, the new component will be displayed in the event that a user has a “LOG-EMERG” emergency condition.

This is intended specifically to alert users in the case of a boot failure, and was developed as part of Outreachy 2023, an open source development internship scheme, according to Phoronix.

In the event that users encounter the Linux blue screen of death, a QR code will also be displayed to provide additional information on the cause of the error and offer remediation tips.

GitHub changelogs note that this feature is still very much in its infancy, and could be changed in due course.

“A new component in “systemd-bsod” has been added, which can show logged error messages full screen, if they have a log level of LOG_EMERG log level,” the changelog reads. “This component is experimental and its public interface is subject to change.”

This wouldn’t be out of the ordinary given that Windows has tinkered with the BSOD repeatedly in recent years.

The BSOD changed to a ‘black screen of death’ for Windows 11 following its launch in 2021. However, this was subsequently reverted back to the original color scheme.

QR codes were added to Windows 10 in 2016 to provide users with crash report details.

What is the Blue Screen of Death?

The infamous blue screen of death is an error that appears when a Windows operating system - such as Windows 10 or Windows 11 - encounters an unexpected fault. 

This halts all critical processes and is used to prevent unintended damage to the operating system in the event of a fault.

Windows users have long lamented the blue screen of death as a major inconvenience. However, it plays a vital role in preventing unintended damage to the operating system in the event of a fault.

The BSOD halts all critical processes, including networks, applications, and platforms.

Blue screen errors typically appear after a major update or installation of a new application.

A growing AI skills gap now ranks among the leading stumbling blocks for enterprise innovation, according to new research from Red Hat.

In a survey of 300 UK IT managers at large enterprises Red Hat found the most concerning challenge currently faced by tech leaders was a lack of strategic thinking and business skills (73%) and AI skills (72%). 

Respondents also reported deficits in cyber security and agile delivery (CI/CD pipelines, GitOps, automation) skills as crucial barriers inhibiting innovation in their business.

There is some evidence to suggest it is not just skills gaps that are hurting firms, however, as 46% of respondents said they need to upgrade their systems to support business operations.

Yet some respondents challenged this view, with a third of IT leaders maintaining they have the proper systems in place to serve business needs, but skills shortages are holding their organization back. 

What’s behind the AI skills gap?

The source of these skills gaps are thought to be high workloads and budget constraints, Red Hat said.

The majority of respondents (44%) attributed the prevailing skills gaps to staff having less time to upskill due to increased workloads, and the same number cited insufficient budget allocations for training, upskilling, and recruitment. 

Skills shortages were also suggested to be a result of the siloed work structure at many organizations, which in turn prevents cross-team learning opportunities (35%).

A key factor in the widening AI skills gap is the current pace of innovation in the field, Red Hat found. More than one-third (34%) of respondents said staff are unable to keep track with the rapidly evolving software landscape, with many now ill-equipped to work with cutting-edge technologies such as generative AI. 

Red Hat also asked what IT managers saw as the biggest barriers to innovation in their organization. Lack of budget for training was again near the top of the list, cited by 35% of respondents, as was slow adoption of the latest processes and efficient work practices (36%).

Furthermore, 30% of respondents highlighted their inability to recruit and retain talent and a lack of access to the right software platforms to accelerate software delivery. 

Tackling the AI skills gap

Recent research from AWS has demonstrated the demand for AI talent in the current labor market, and has committed to boosting AI proficiencies with the launch of its ‘AI Ready’ initiative.

Yet, some experts claim the AI skills gap needs to be addressed with a more holistic approach, not limited to boosting technical skills.

Erica Langhi, senior solution architect, EMEA, at Red Hat said AI skills shortages are not simply the result of dwindling coding proficiencies, arguing that collaboration will be important in addressing the talent gaps currently holding businesses back. 

“This is about more than technical and coding ability, where generative AI can certainly help. Organizations need to build expertise in areas like data bias, ethics of AI and model explainability, and make sure they have the right collaboration platform in place”.

“This range of expertise is vital to achieve transparency and accountability for outcomes to ensure they are as fair as possible and deliver against business goals. Companies that actively engage in the open source community to share best practices and collaborate on ethical AI standards can gain a competitive edge in this evolving landscape.” 

Workforce reluctance and talent shortages are creating significant barriers for organizations seeking to automate IT operations, according to new research. 

A survey from Red Hat found that nearly one-third (29%) of IT leaders believe their teams do not have the relevant skills to implement automation. 

“People barriers”, the survey revealed, were often highlighted as a key stumbling block for firms embarking on projects to achieve enterprise-wide IT automation.

A key issue highlighted by leaders centered specifically on workforce hesitancy, with 92% of IT managers believing their teams are - or will be - reluctant to change. 

There are a variety of factors behind this reluctance, according to Red Hat. Nearly half (45%) of survey respondents said they “don’t have the time” to implement automation. 

40% also said they feel overwhelmed by the prospect of implementing sweeping changes to IT operations and that projects are “over-complicated or too technical”. 

Respondents said organizations should place a stronger focus on outlining the benefits of change at the beginning of a transformation project to alleviate workforce hesitancy. 

31% believe providing teams with relevant educational resources and training will ensure staff have the “skills to manage change”. 

Similarly, 29% revealed that involving teams in projects and considering feedback will deliver better outcomes as staff feel like they have a voice in the situation. 

“Enterprises today are asking where they can find the right people, how they can upskill them and how they can motivate wider teams to embrace change,” said Richard Henshall, director of product management for Ansible at Red Hat. 

“Automation should be a collaborative and agile movement; people need to be enabled and motivated from the start and continuously engaged.”

Business survival will depend on IT automation

Organizations that are slow to implement automation within IT operations could face long-term challenges with regard to adoption of emerging technologies, Red Hat warned. 

One-third of UK-based IT leaders whose organization has not achieved enterprise-wise automation believe that they won’t be able to adopt new technologies such as generative AI. 

With businesses globally focusing heavily on the use of generative AI tools to augment and streamline operations, there is a serious risk many could fall behind competitors if they fail to automate key aspects of their IT estate. 

UK companies outpace their European rivals

Despite lingering concerns over skills shortages and workforce hesitancy, Red Hat’s study revealed that UK organizations are performing well with regard to enterprise IT automation. 

UK firms were shown to be outpacing European counterparts, with more than one-quarter (27%) of large UK businesses having fully achieved enterprise-wide IT automation. 

The majority of respondents to Red Hat’s survey said they currently have an IT automation strategy in place. Nearly one-third (29%) said they are “already on the path” to automating IT operations while 25% revealed they have a strategy, but are still in the process of launching projects. 

Compared to European firms, the study found that IT automation among UK businesses is maturing at a faster pace. 

Only 18% of organizations in Germany have achieved enterprise-wide IT automation while only 12% have done so in France. 

Open source giant Red Hat has announced a new strategic partnership with Cohesity that will see Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) become the foundational operating system for Cohesity Data Cloud. 

Cohesity specializes in combining AI-powered data security and management to provide users with security features, operational simplicity, and scalability. The firm’s Data Cloud platform offers a single interface that unifies the security posture of data across sources, services, vendors, and technologies. 

As part of the company’s new collaboration with Red Hat, the Enterprise Linux operating system will now underpin Cohesity Data Cloud, replacing CentOS Linux 7. 

In an announcement, the pair said the move will help drive innovation across data security and management, providing customers with Red Hat’s support and domain-specific expertise and allowing Cohesity staff to place a greater focus on the Data Cloud’s customer experience. 

“The chain of modern IT security is only as strong as the most basic link, which frequently is Linux,” commented Red Hat president and CEO Matt Hicks. “With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Cohesity will bring the strong capabilities of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform to its customer base. 

“This foundation provides greater confidence that the Cohesity Data Cloud is working to address security at a fundamental level in support of modern hybrid cloud infrastructure.”

Changing needs

Cohesity made the decision to switch from CentOS Linux 7 to RHEL after experiencing challenges around the growth of its Data Cloud product. As both the platform's user numbers and capabilities grew, the firm said it particularly noticed issues with the weight of maintenance and patching burdens that this growth placed on its product engineers. 

With RHEL's hybrid cloud-ready platform, Cohesity said it will now be able to utilize OS-specific full-time customer support and engineering resources, as well as speedier response to security vulnerabilities thanks to Red Hat’s incident response teams.

The move is also expected to bring Linux consistency around skills, commands, and capabilities to IT environments, whether that’s in the datacenter or public clouds, while also offering a streamlined migration process through Red Hat’s range of transition tools.

With the migration journey already underway, Cohesity said the underlying security capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux complement its own approach to data security. 

“Enterprises look to Cohesity as the leading solution for cyber-resilient data security and management for hybrid and multi-cloud environments,” said Sanjay Poonen, CEO and president, Cohesity. “Cohesity forged a strategic partnership with IBM earlier this year, and we are thrilled to now also collaborate with Red Hat. 

“With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, our engineering teams can innovate faster on our leading data security and management platform, helping our customers stay ahead of modern-day challenges.”

A new alliance called the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA) has been formed with the goal of providing an open and free Enterprise Linux (EL) source code that’s compatible with RHEL, which recently had its source code restricted.

CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE announced plans to form the OpenELA last week. It’s a trade body aimed at promoting the importance of Red Hat Enterprise (RHEL)-compatible distributions.

The initial focus will be on RHEL 8 and 9 - the group said it might also consider RHEL 7 - but the goal is to ensure the continued availability of OpenELA sources indefinitely. The source will be available “starting later this year”.

In its initial announcement, OpenELA did not disclose how it would maintain compatibility with RHEL, saying only that it would be encouraging the development of compatible distributions. 

Before Red Hat’s recent restriction of RHEL source code, 1:1 compatibility at a binary level was relatively simple to achieve. Assured compatibility is essential for organizations accustomed to running applications on RHEL, or another compatible distribution.  

Demonstrating that OpenELA is capable of creating and maintaining code that enterprises can trust to run third-party applications is therefore critical to the association’s success. 

What have OpenELA’s members said about compatibility?

The association’s members have made differing public statements in the past regarding their interpretation of what ‘compatible’ means, despite OpenELA’s avowed intention to provide 1:1 compatible sources. 

“Rocky Linux and Oracle Linux have stated that they will continue to be 1:1 and bug-for-bug compatible,” OpenELA told ITPro.

Rocky Linux - backed by CIQ - currently claims to be 100% binary compatible and regards itself as the successor to CentOS, which was axed by Red Hat in favor of CentOS Stream. 

The team behind Rocky Linux posted that it intended to maintain access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux source via UBI container images and pay-per-use cloud instances.

At the time, Matt Yonkovit, head of open source strategy at Scarf, told ITPro that he felt that Red Hat would work to close the loophole.

Gunnar Hellekson, vice president and general manager of RHEL at Red Hat, noted that the source code was available but said Red Hat expects all subscription service users to abide by the enterprise agreement. 

He also stressed that the enterprise agreement “does not supersede the GPL but acts in parallel with it".

Oracle - whose Oracle Linux is a RHEL-compatible distribution - has warned of a greater chance of compatibility issues as time passes in an earlier blog post. However, Wim Coekaerts, head of Oracle Linux development at Oracle, told ITPro that the company’s ultimate goal remained fixed on full compatibility. 

“There are multiple ways to keep the code base the same or similar enough – while Red Hat no longer publishes the source code, the code is provided under the GPL or other open source licenses,” he said.

The Oracle approach, according to Coekaerts, is to ensure a compatible userspace application binary interface (ABI) and API is present. He said: “For applications to be compatible, an exact source code match doesn’t have to exist”. 

However, Coekaerts acknowledged that, where possible, source code compatibility would be maintained. This would only apply to code covered by the GPL with license requirements by which IBM and Red Hat must abide. 

Coekaerts also pointed out that the Linux kernel used by Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) was substantially different to RHEL’s, “yet every single application that runs on RHEL runs on Oracle Linux with UEK”.  

“So, in terms of application compatibility, we are not concerned even if IBM adds more restrictions.” 

Alma Linux, absent from SUSE’s announcement, supplies another RHEL-compatible distribution and plans to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible rather than binary or, as the group describes it, be held to “bug-for-bug compatibility”.

Although Alma Linux is not part of the association, OpenELA said it was welcome to join and, regardless of any decision, Alma Linux would also be welcome to make use of OpenELA’s source code.

An invitation to join OpenELA was also extended to Red Hat. While such a move by Red Hat would seem unlikely, its presence would address any concerns over compatibility. 

What is OpenELA and will it succeed?

“Today's announcement marks the beginning of a new era for EL,” said Gregory Kurtzer, CEO at CIQ in a joint statement. 

“With OpenELA, CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE join forces with the open source community to ensure a stable and resilient future for both upstream and downstream communities to leverage Enterprise Linux."

Coekaerts said the company had been approached by “many large organizations” highlighting their views on the matter and the importance of open, community-driven source code for EL. 

Red Hat’s decision to restrict access to RHEL source code has triggered a furor within the open-source community and those companies that depended on access to it for their own distributions.  

The restriction of access could be seen as a nudge for customers to sign-up for a Red Hat subscription rather than considering alternatives. RHEL compatibility is vital in reassuring administrators that business-critical applications designed for RHEL will work as expected and be supported.

OpenELA has the tagline of “No subscriptions. No passwords. No barriers. Freeloaders welcome”, which will appeal to open source enthusiasts. However, businesses selecting an enterprise-level Linux distribution will be more conservative when it comes to protecting their existing investments. 

Mike McGrath, vice president, core platforms at Red Hat, told ITPro that, in the company’s view, ‘Enterprise Linux’ was not an implementation standard. Instead, it went beyond to encompass the expertise, support and engineering behind the operating system.

“This is what makes Red Hat Enterprise Linux an enterprise-level Linux product,” he said.

After highlighting Red Hat’s efforts in driving open source innovation, he added: “We have always welcomed ongoing contributions to the broader Linux community, whether personally motivated or from companies like Oracle and SUSE, that actually move enterprise-level Linux forward rather than replacing one logo with another”.

SUSE itself announced plans in July 2023 to invest more than $10 million into a fork of the publicly available RHEL and maintain a compatible distribution “available to all without restrictions”. 

There have been marked differences in approach within the community since Red Hat announced the RHEL source code restrictions. OpenELA, arguably an evolution of SUSE’s plans, is a step towards creating a standardized Enterprise Linux on which other downstream distributions can be based. 

However, the association does not yet include key players, such as Alma Linux. Maintaining complete 1:1 and bug-for-bug compatibility with RHEL will also present a challenge without access to all the source, despite Oracle’s contention that: “An exact source code match doesn’t have to exist”. 

OpenELA must ensure it remains compatible with RHEL. Without that, there is a danger of it being something more for enthusiasts rather than enterprises. And without more factions in the post-RHEL world onboard, it also runs the risk of falling victim to fragmentation as Enterprise Linux alternatives proliferate. 

Open source giant Red Hat has announced the appointment of Andrew Brown as its new senior vice president and chief revenue officer. 

The former IBM executive joins the business immediately and will succeed current CRO Larry Stack from October 1. Stack will work alongside Brown through Q3 to ensure a smooth leadership transition, Red Hat said.

In his new role, Brown will oversee commercial and public sector sales, channel and alliance sales, consulting services, as well as Red Hat’s global go-to-market strategy.

“Red Hat has an enormous opportunity to fuel hybrid cloud transformation globally, but this requires seamlessly integrating our product vision with our sales approach,” said Matt Hicks, president and CEO of Red Hat. 

“Andrew understands the intricacies of Red Hat’s business and our culture, and brings vast experience in delivering customer value at scale across a wide range of technology areas as we seek to address evolving customer requirements.”

A software industry veteran, Brown arrives with more than 28 years’ experience in hybrid cloud and transformational technology. He began his career at IBM as an intern, before working his way up to a variety of senior leadership roles across its software business.

Most recently, he served as general manager of IBM Technology Sales for the United Kingdom and Ireland. In that role, he was responsible for leading, transforming, and expanding the company’s Technology go-to-market organization, as well as overseeing the sales, strategy, management, and delivery of IBM offerings – including systems, public cloud, data and AI solutions, and more. 

Commenting on his new role at Red Hat, Brown said he was attracted by the open source company’s innovative approach to its operations.

“I have followed Red Hat’s growth and progress over the last few years and have been impressed by the agility, foresight, and innovative approach that the company and its culture embrace,” he said.

“I am hugely excited about joining this unique organization and working with our customer-facing teams to innovate, collaborate and scale the hybrid cloud solutions Red Hat possesses in its open source platform approach.”

Brown will replace outgoing CRO Larry Stack from October 1, who moves on to become a senior advisor within the IBM Global Government team.

“Being a part of Red Hat, particularly working with passionate and exceptional Red Hatters, is a highlight in my career as a servant leader,” Stack said. “I am proud of everything that we have been able to accomplish using a ‘Mission First, People Always’ motto. 

“I know that there is still so much to come and I look forward to seeing what Red Hat can achieve in the next phase of open source.”

AlmaLinux has dropped its aim to be 1:1 compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and will instead target application binary interface (ABI) compatibility.

The move follows Oracle’s announcement of a way forward for its own distribution which, while critical of IBM and Red Hat’s decision to restrict access to RHEL source code, will also result in a loss of binary compatibility.

The company insisted that the decision would mean “very little change in [customers’] use of AlmaLinux”. 

It also said that Red Hat-compatible applications would continue to run and the security updates would continue to flow.

However, by dropping the binary compatible aim it is difficult to see how a guarantee of all compatible applications continuing to run can be made, even with the ABI promise. 

AlmaLinux also noted that users might also encounter bugs not in Red Hat, but not being bound to Red Hat’s release cycle means the distro can release fixes as expeditiously as it needs to.

What is application binary interface compatibility?

While 1:1 binary compatibility of the operating system is achieved through use of the source code - something Red Hat is discouraging through its restrictions - ABI refers to how an application works with the underlying operating environment.

Red Hat defines ABI as “a set of runtime conventions that interact with a compiled binary representation of a program”.

Applications that are ABI-compatible should therefore continue to work on AlmaLinux. However, applications that are not - or make use of features outside of the ABI - might not function correctly. 

It is also worth noting that at this point, ABI compatibility is presently an aim. As AlmaLinux says itself: “ABI compatibility in our case means working to ensure that applications built to run on RHEL - or RHEL clones - can run without issue on AlmaLinux”.

What does this mean for customers?

The fate of RHEL clones such as AlmaLinux has been in the balance since Red Hat’s decision to restrict access to the RHEL source. 

Today’s announcement by AlmaLinux, and the earlier Oracle post, is an indicator that if a customer needs full RHEL binary compatibility, then a Red Hat subscription will likely be required.

Alternatives, such as Rocky Linux, still exist and intend to make use of UBI container images and leverage pay-per-use cloud instances in order to obtain the source and maintain 1:1 compatibility. 

However, observers such as Matt Yonkovit, head of open source strategy at Scarf, told ITPro that Red Hat would likely find a way to close the loophole being exploited by Rocky Linux.

What has the reaction been?

The user community has mostly reacted positively to the news, mainly due to the removal of uncertainty over what AlmaLinux would do to deal with Red Hat’s decision. However, while there is empathy for AlmaLinux’s position, some users regarded the dropping of 1:1 compatibility as a “blow”.

“As much as I like Alma, the whole point of installing it for me was to be 1:1 with the RHEL I support at work. Warts and all.”

Another described AlmaLinux’s decision as “a very well thought out response to the changes”.

The furor surrounding Red Hat’s decision to restrict access to RHEL sources is set to continue despite the clarification given by AlmaLinux thanks to the differing approaches taken by distributions seeking to fill the space left by CentOS.

Oracle has waded into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code furor in a stunning turn of events, claiming it’s “committed to Linux freedom”. 

Oracle’s words will doubtless cause users who remember OpenSolaris to raise an eyebrow or two. Organizations dealing with the pain arising from Oracle’s changes around Java licensing – the introduction of the Java SE Universal Subscription – will also be taken aback by the company’s championing of open and free principles. 

Still, as far as Linux is concerned, Oracle’s intervention comes in the form of a blog post headlined “Keep Linux Open and Free”. It’s reaffirmed, over the last quarter of a century, its goal has been to “help make Linux the best server operating system for everyone, freely available to all, with high-quality, low-cost support provided to those who need it”. 

In fact, Oracle’s principal goal over the last 25 years has been driving shareholder value. Oracle Linux – itself derived from RHEL – exists only to drive revenues. Furthermore, seeing the words “low-cost” and “Oracle” in the same paragraph will come as a novelty to users faced with calculating the cost of their licenses. 

Like other RHEL-compatible distributions, such as Rocky Linux and Alma Linux, Oracle Linux has been affected by Red Hat’s decision to stop publicly releasing the RHEL source code.  

While both the former distributions have devised ways to remain compatible, Oracle has cast doubt on where its own distribution stands, saying Oracle Linux “will continue to be RHEL-compatible to the extent we can make it so”. It also warned after version 9.2, there may be “a greater chance for compatibility issues to arise”. 

Paying developers and supporting coders 

Oracle was quick to blame Red Hat’s owner, IBM, for the current debacle and pointed out the excuse for not releasing source code – somebody has to pay RHEL developers – did not really hold water. After all, Red Hat had managed to do so for many years before IBM’s $34 billion acquisition. 

However, Oracle has a chequered history when it comes to supporting developers and it’s difficult not to consider the company’s behavior with regard to Java.

In 2010, Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems and, over the following decade, introduced paid licensing options. In 2019 it declared that security updates for Java 8 couldn’t be downloaded without a subscription. 

This year saw the firm introduce the controversial Oracle Java SE Universal Subscription. It could result in an organization having to purchase a license for the entire employee population, even if Java is only required for a single user or server.  

As such, Oracle’s critique, particularly the line about “more revenue opportunity for IBM”, is a little on the nose considering its own revenue-raising moves. One must also consider the fate of OpenSolaris. After it acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010, the firm discontinued in-house development of the open source OpenSolaris operating system – although a fork, OpenIndiana, continued. Oracle instead focused its efforts on the proprietary Oracle Solaris. 

Oracle’s “Keep Linux Open and Free” line is all the more of an about-face. 

What about the competition? 

Alongside Oracle’s pronouncements, the veteran Linux distribution SUSE has thrown its chameleon into the ring. Unlike Oracle’s blustering, SUSE has come up with some concrete proposals: fork RHEL, maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution without restrictions, and invest $10 million into the project. 

SUSE introduced Liberty Linux last year, aimed at customers needing CentOS and RHEL support, but insisted it remained fully committed to SUSE Linux Enterprise, the Adaptable Linux Platform, and openSUSE. “Becoming more proprietary should not be the basis for competition between open source companies,” CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen said. 

SUSE’s move has been welcomed by Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ and founder of Rocky Linux, with Kurtzer saying SUSE “has embodied the core principles and spirit of open source”. He went on to commend the collaboration opportunities afforded by SUSE’s move. 

Oracle, on the other hand, has been quick to criticize IBM and Red Hat’s actions while painting itself as one of the custodians of Linux freedom. Developers who remember its history, and recent activities, will find the company’s newfound fervor around open source operating systems hard to take. 

Customers wondering where to go next for their RHEL-compatible needs must also pay attention to the lack of detail in Oracle’s post beyond the fact its software will continue to be developed and tested on Oracle Linux, not RHEL. 

Oracle has warned that compatibility issues might arise, but it’s also laid the blame for problems at the door of IBM and Red Hat. And, of course, its own software will carry on working anyway. Regardless of how noble Oracle’s intervention may be, it will always have its own revenues to worry about.  

Red Hat has told vendors of distros that it expects its enterprise agreements to be honored after development teams announced workarounds to new source code restrictions.

Some distro development teams have questioned whether they can continue to provide source code to recipients, a requirement under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Red Hat has said that its enterprise agreement and new restrictions ‘do not supersede the GPL and instead act in parallel with it’.

Following Red Hat’s announcement of source code restrictions around RHEL last week, vendors of binary-compatible distros have been investigating alternative means of ensuring that updates and fixes continue to flow.

Rocky Linux has announced plans to use Universal Base Images (UBI) and pay-per-use cloud instances to deal with Red Hat’s restrictive new source code policy.

Alma Linux, which was also affected by Red Hat’s policy change, has so far taken a more cautious approach. 

The team said that re-distributing Red Hat software would be a violation of the Red Hat subscription agreement, and that it would be taking a more labor-intensive approach in the short term.

“From a security and update perspective, this makes our job more difficult, but by no means impossible,” it added.

What has Red Hat said?

Red Hat has responded to Rocky Linux’s plans and its preference for pay-per-use cloud instances.

“This is the easiest for us to scale as we can do all of this through CI pipelines, spinning up cloud images to obtain the sources via DNF, and post to our Git repositories automatically,” the Rocky Linux team said.

Rocky Linux has also received reassurance from its legal advisors that it has “the right to obtain the source to any binaries [it] receives”.

Gunnar Hellekson, vice president and general manager, RHEL at Red Hat, said to ITPro: “Red Hat remains fully committed to honoring our open source license obligations and delivering, openly and transparently, the source code that we use to build all of our products”. 

Hellekson added that the code was available in multiple places, including CentOS Stream. 

However, CentOS Stream is not a simple substitute for the RHEL sources for both Rocky Linux and Alma Linux due to its developmental nature.

“We also deliver many RHEL sources through Red Hat Universal Base Image, which includes the dependencies and packages needed to build a containerized application that will run on RHEL but can also be distributed however and wherever the developer wants,” said Hellekson.

Red Hat furor explained

The current issues can be traced back to Red Hat’s decision to end CentOS, effectively a free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in favor of CentOS Stream in 2020. 

The decision spawned Rocky Linux, the CEO of which - Gregory Kurtzer - was a founder of CentOS, and Alma Linux, both of which made use of repositories published to git.centos.org in order to track RHEL updates.

In June 2023, Red Hat announced it would stop publishing source code for RHEL to this location. 

The move has meant that Rocky Linux and Alma Linux have had to look for alternative methods in order to maintain compatibility with RHEL.

The legal question

GPL is a popular open-source licensing system. In this context, distributors must provide the source code for software licensed under GPL to recipients of that software. 

Red Hat’s decision therefore does not violate the GPL. It is required to provide the source code to whoever it has provided the software to, and will continue to do so. 

However, the company is not obliged to continue providing software and source to customers that break its subscription agreement. It is also not obliged to provide the source to anyone other than the entity to whom it has provided the software.

“Red Hat's change does not violate the GPL, and the source code will remain [available] via the customer portal,“ said Matt Yonkovit, head of open source strategy at Scarf, to ITPro.

“The shift here to hide RHEL source is not surprising, but it is sad. I think this is yet another example of an increasing trend of choosing exclusion and protectionism over more open access in the community.”

Rocky Linux firmly believes that Red Hat’s decision violates “the spirit and purpose of open source”. 

It, therefore, intends to obtain what it needs “through channels that adhere to [its] principles and uphold [its] rights”.

The end result is continued uncertainty for former CentOS customers left concerned by Red Hat’s decision and the response it has generated. Rocky Linux appears to have decided on a way forward, after taking legal advice. 

Of the Rocky Linux approach, Yonkovit said "I think Red Hat will try and close that loop hole honestly". 

Author, software developer, and one-time technical consultant for Ansible by Red Hat, Jeff Geerling, said “that in this entire debacle, there are no winners”.

Except “somehow, lawyers, they always come out ahead”.

Linux vendor Red Hat has announced up to four years of extended support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, further prolonging the usability for customers that are unable to upgrade.

Red Hat releases usually follow a ten-year life cycle. During the first five years, customers receive full support “including bug fixes, security patches, software enhancements, hardware enablement and backports”.

The second five years is maintenance support, which means patches and bug fixes are released on an as-needed basis.

If, after ten years, an organization wishes to remain on that major release it is possible to pay for Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS). This had ensured security and bug fixes were received for two more years. 

Red Hat has now doubled this to four years - so long as the organization is on RHEL 7.9.

“Compared to previous major releases, ELS for RHEL 7 (RHEL 7.9) expands the scope of security fixes by including updates that address Important CVEs,” said Red Hat.

The support also includes maintenance for Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions and Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability and Resilient Storage add-ons.

The company has also extended the ELS for RHEL 8 and 9 by three years. Both are currently fully supported - although the end of full support for RHEL 8 is due in 2024, with maintenance support ending in 2029.

Who is still using RHEL 7? 

A Red Hat spokesperson said: “RHEL subscriptions aren't tied to a version number (when you buy a sub, you can choose any number of supported versions at install)”. As such, a definitive number is difficult to ascertain.

However, the company’s move indicates that there is sufficient demand to justify extending ELS for RHEL 7. 

Enterprises using the operating system will often be reluctant to go through the upgrade and revalidation process unless there is a clear business case for doing so.

“Some IT shops may have mission-critical systems running RHEL 7 that simply cannot risk downtime for whatever reason, which makes any kind of upgrade too risky for them,” said Red Hat’s spokesperson.

"Others may have third-party or internal dependencies, like an application or service, that is only certified for or requires specific packages from a RHEL 7 version.

“Generally it's likely some combination of these factors that would lead an organization to not upgrade and instead opt for ELS.”

In addition, going through such an upgrade raises the possibility of customers considering alternative vendors.

One observer wrote that “while I’m not enthused about keeping RHEL 7 in prod for 14 years, at least we’ll get security fixes”.

Red Hat’s original support period could have been regarded as a little short by some onlookers. 

Rival SUSE also has a ten-year product life cycle for recent versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise, followed by three years of Long Term Service Pack Support (LTSS).

This means that SLES 12, launched in 2014 - the same year as RHEL 7 - will receive support and maintenance until 2027. 

Enterprises preferring to stay with legacy operating systems and applications has long been an issue for vendors. 

Microsoft called a halt to Enterprise Security Updates (ESU) for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 after three years in 2023, although workloads hosted on Azure virtual machines have until 2024. 

Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 have three years of extended security updates, ending in 2026 regardless of location.

CentOS 7 reaches end of life in 2024

“This does not apply to CentOS Linux 7 - ELS is purely for RHEL 7 customers,” said the spokesperson. 

ELS source is not usually published after the EOL date for RHEL versions, meaning that a year of support - until 30 June 2024 - remains for CentOS 7. 

Once this point is reached, users will need to migrate to either CentOS Stream or consider an alternative distribution.

Red Hat's source code restrictions have been announced and will take the form of limiting public access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source to CentOS Stream.

The change makes CentOS Stream the sole repository for future public RHEL-related source code releases, according to the company. 

Paying customers will still have access to source code via the Red Hat Customer Portal.

Previously, public sources for RHEL were pushed to git.centos.org by Red Hat. This was maintained even after the focus of the CentOS project was shifted to CentOS Stream. This will now no longer be the case. 

“The engagement around CentOS Stream,” said Red Hat, “the engineering levels of investment, and the new priorities we’re addressing for customers and partners now make maintaining separate, redundant, repositories inefficient”.

The announcement is the latest in a succession regarded by many in the community as hostile. Two years ago, the decision was made to move from CentOS - which was effectively a free version of RHEL - to CentOS Stream, the development branch.

That change caused anguish for several in the user community who were accustomed to having access to a free version of RHEL and its source code, albeit without Red Hat support.

Before being axed, CentOS tracked RHEL closely. CentOS Stream, on the other hand, is development code and so not necessarily suited to production workloads.

The dropping of CentOS also spawned a number of distributions. For example, Alma Linux and Rocky Linux, both of which aimed for complete compatibility with RHEL thanks to the availability of the source code.

The removal of public access to the RHEL source as per Red Hat’s announcement will make maintaining these distributions challenging.

What is the reaction of the RHEL community?

The move to CentOS Stream and the axing of CentOS left some shaken. The latest move to restrict access to RHEL source has only intensified the anguish among some in the community.

Customers paying for RHEL are unaffected. The move has, however, triggered the creation of the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA) as competitors have united in the face of a perceived threat from Red Hat and its parent, IBM.

OpenELA is made up of Oracle, SUSE and CIQ - the company behind RHEL-compatible distribution Rocky Linux - and is planned to be a repository of source code compatible at an API and ABI layer with RHEL.

Not part of OpenELA is Alma Linux, another RHEL-compatible distribution,  which intends to continue working on compatibility while not being held to bug-for-bug compatibility.

Acquiring a license to RHEL does give access to the source code, an essential for maintaining binary compatibility. However, as Alma Linux noted at the time, license restrictions prevent rebuilding using the source.

Rocky Linux had initially suggested a pay-per-use approach or making use of UBI container images to maintain compatibility before signing up to OpenELA.

SUSE's involvement is particularly interesting. The company initially planned a $10 million multi-year investment into a RHEL fork, but has since formalized things with OpenELA. It does, however, already have an enterprise Linux distribution in the form of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server - a platform to which the company insists it is committed. Some analysts have questioned how SUSE will maintain two enterprise distributions going forwards.

Why is Red Hat's stance a problem?

In a word, compatibility. Distributions that are binary compatible with RHEL must use of RHEL source.

While much of the content of CentOS Stream will, by design, make its way into future versions of RHEL, maintaining 1:1 binary compatibility with existing releases without access to the source used will present a challenge.

OpenELA's approach - shared by Oracle, SUSE and Rocky Linux - is to ensure the its source works with applications that target RHEL by maintaining ABI and API compatibility, although Oracle has acknowledged that "there may be a greater chance for a compatibility issue to arise".

What has Red Hat said about the change?

The company has since responded to criticism of its plans in a lengthy and somewhat defensive post.

Vice president of Core Platforms Engineering at Red Hat, Mike McGrath, insisted that the company would always use an open source development model.

“I feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream sources comes from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit,” said McGrath, in a statement.

“This demand for RHEL code is disingenuous.”

I’m an enterprise customer, should this worry me?

It all depends on if you are a paying RHEL customer or not. If you have opted to use one of the compatible distributions to replace CentOS then yes, things could change in the future as the RHEL-compatible distributions get to grips with the change.

However, even after all the furor over recent years, CentOS 7 - which is based on RHEL 7 - continues to be maintained and has over a year of support remaining.

But what about licensing? 

RHEL is licensed under several open source licenses, including the GNU General Public License. 

However, Red Hat’s change does not violate the GPL and the source code will remain available via the customer portal.

Where do we go from here?

It is difficult to see this change as anything other than an attempt by Red Hat to make life more difficult for the RHEL clones, although the company itself said “we want to sharpen our focus on CentOS Stream as the backbone of enterprise Linux innovation”.

“We are continuing our investment in and increasing our commitment to CentOS Stream.”

This week’s Red Hat Summit 2023 focused on a lot of things the company is doing to make life better and/or easier for developers, IT professionals and enterprise organizations as a whole. 

But, the value of others being involved is not lost on the company’s CEO Matt Hicks, as ITPro discovered during a press Q&A session. 

“It’s about knowing your swim lane, knowing your lane and where you add value. Where do we really provide value at distribution etc.? There is a lot of cool stuff in IoT [for example], but it’s not [necessarily all ] enterprise use cases or commercially viable,” Hicks said. 

While the company acknowledged potential in a number of areas, it has also been keep to put emphasis where it is needed rather than jumping on all bandwagons for the sake of it. 

Importantly, and in the spirit of open source and the community element, Hicks - and the accompanying keynotes - shouted loud and clear about how much of a team effort things should and needed to be. 

“We are a platform company. Being a platform company means you’re not the total solution. You are combined with an application. There are other pieces. You are not the end thing,” Hicks stressed. 

“You’re always working with someone else. In some cases, it could be a customer building their own application, but in the vast majority of cases it is ISVs and SIs [involved]. And there is an entire ecosystem that innovatives around that.”

Red Hat has many different partners of different sizes, in many industries and there was definitely fair representation at the Summit itself in terms of airtime. 

However, some of the biggest partnerships perhaps gained more attention due to the focus organizations have on these technologies, right now. Microsoft being a case in point. 

Microsoft and Red Hat have partnered to deliver on the business and IT requirements of Yes Bank in India, for example. 

The bank is working with both forms to deploy Azure Red Hat OpenShift to revitalize mobile operations and boost customer experience and satisfaction among other things. 

“In today’s digitally-driven world, agility is paramount. With Azure Red Hat OpenShift, we can promptly respond to customer demands while also having the assurance that our platform is constructed on cutting-edge cloud and cloud-native infrastructure,” said Mahesh Ramamoothy, CIO, YES BANK.

“This provides us with a security-focused, robust, and scalable foundation that we require to lead the charge of digital-native banking in India.”

The YES BANK partnership is a long-standing one that has evolved over the years. 

Jeremy Winter, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President, Azure Cloud Native and Hybrid, added: “It’s fantastic to see the customer collaboration we have done and the value we have brought over the last four years. It’s exciting to see these joint solutions we’ve been working on gain momentum. 

“Our long standing track record as being there as a partner for our enterprise customers really is the foundation of this [overall] eight-plus year collaboration.” 

Hicks also talked about the multitude of partnership opportunities on the table and how it would be easy to go after everything, everywhere all at once. 

“Sometimes, for me, it’s hard to hold that discipline. We have to understand that we are not the end solution,” he said. “And you have to be strong with who you are partnering with… Whether it’s customers directly or in a really complicated route or chain in automotive etc.”

Red Hat has unveiled its Red Hat Developer Hub as a fully-fledged portal to ‘supercharge’ the developer experience.

The product is a former open source project from Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), called Backstage.io, and is now the first standalone, enterprise-grade version of it.

Red Hat Developer Hub, according to the open source software firm, unifies and standardizes the developer experience, maximizes productivity, and enables individuals and organizations to make the most of existing investments and skill sets. 

The new portal - unveiled at this week’s Red Hat Summit in Boston - is unified and open, and essentially offers developers an internally curated and managed toolset to ensure they can quickly and easily turn their software visions into successful reality.

It’s all about maximizing what enterprises have already invested in at a knowledge and financial level as well as increasing velocity and reducing friction, the company claimed. 

“Red Hat Developer Hub adds support for key Red Hat developer plug-ins to drive a more consistent user experience without compromising on that application velocity. The platform also contains validated templates," said Chris Wright, CTO at Red Hat.

"These provide opinionated, pre-architected approaches to building and deploying software from creation to production.

“Developer Hub gives IT organizations a developer platform built on open source innovation with that stability, that support, that reliability that you’ve come to expect from our hybrid cloud technologies. Developer Hub also builds on skills that  IT organizations have already through integration with Red Hat OpenShift.

“That’s the best news. It’s building on skills and technologies that you already have. This maximizes what you know without having to sacrifice application innovation to maintain operations.”

Wright also cited Salesforce’s 2022 ‘Great Resignation’ research, which revealed the majority (76%) of firms feel the cognitive load needed to get to grips with new software architectures is just too high. 

As a result, productivity and sense of achievement decrease rather than increase. 

Developer Hub aims to redress the balance here, according to Wright. 

“As IT resources grow ever more scant and demand for new applications just keeps growing, these platforms grow more daunting. If these platforms aren’t maintained at the speed of development, then CIOs can look forward to fragmentation, complexity, and worse. The use of unverified code that can find its way into production…

“Adding a net new platform all but guarantees a  new learning curve, which equates to hours lost in training that you really don’t have.” 

With a view to removing barriers and accelerating innovation and results-driven performance, the Red Hat Developer Hub:

• Offers a single view of all the tools and resources available for developers as they look to boost productivity.
• Enables users to self-serve and ensure best practice across the board.  
• Maintains the proper levels of security and governance. 

Wright said that the focus was on taking “differentiated applications to market as quickly and as painlessly as you can".

What’s more, Wright acknowledged the unsung IT heroes outside of the developer world, saying it was those people that kept “developer workflows rolling smoothly, with the right tools, the validated environments, and on-demand services".

Ultimately, Developer Hub should free up developer bandwidth in a number of ways. 

“This helps developers focus on crafting beautiful code and not the plumbing underneath,” Wright added. 

Red Hat CEO and president Matt Hicks has said enterprises operating in the current business environment shouldn’t have to adopt an either-or approach toward keeping the lights on and driving innovation. 

The message was delivered during the opening keynote of the open source leader's annual conference in Boston on Tuesday.

Hicks used his introductory session to re-energize conference delegates, acknowledging their key challenges and pain points, while talking about how Red Hat has responded and continues to work for its customers. 

“AI has moved from the obscurity of academia to the ubiquity of ChatGPT. But it’s also moved from the power of a few to the power of many,” he said. 

“We are watching the impact and potential of open source that played out all those years ago - with operating systems and programming languages - now playing out with AI. 

We’re watching creativity on a global scale make its way through AI to an open source revolution. It’s the time to dream about the potential for your business, your industry and to be the driver of change for the better.”

Many times in history, people have seen the potential of different technologies and acted on them, helping them become what they are today, according to Hicks. 

AI, in particular, he said has “moved from the obscurity of academia to the ubiquity of ChatGPT. It’s also moved from the power of a few to the power of many.”

While Hicks clearly sees much potential for enterprise in AI, he was also keen to communicate how the technology is still in its infancy and highlight the barriers businesses continue to face. 

“As excited as I am to be here on this stage in this moment, I also deeply appreciate the realities that can get in the way of realizing that journey,” he said. 

"The realities that jolt us awake and hold us back is what we are going to focus this year’s summit on - how to manage those realities. Because if we can manage the realities that we’re living in today, the potential of AI gives us the license to dream."

Hicks promised a slew of announcements from Red Hat over the next few days as the company continued to marry methodology and technology to help turn company visions into realities. 

Some of the big unveils from today include:

• The launch of the Red Hat Developer Hub, designed to turbocharge developer productivity.
• New and enhanced management capabilities for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) offered as part of Insights.
• Ansible Lightspeed, which focuses on AI-driven automation to ensure organization-wide accessibility across myriad skill levels. 
• Event-driven Ansible to put automation front and center to derive the most from existing resources and investments.
• Catapulting Kubernetes-native security features into a Red Hat-managed offering in the form of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service. 
• A focus on supply chain vulnerability detection and management in the form of the Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain solution.

“Today we’re going to focus on the reality of needing to do more with less. These challenges won’t be a surprise to you because you all are living them every day,” Hicks added. 

“We’ll help you manage the pressure of making the most of what you have while at the same time cultivating the skills you need, and the pressure of finding new ways to deliver more, faster. 

“If there’s one thread to remember from today it’s that doing more with less doesn’t have to be a constraint. It’s a reality to manage today to unlock your innovation in this unique moment. Today, you manage your realities, tomorrow you’ll thrive with them.”

More than two-thirds (67%) of DevOps professionals have actively “slowed down” cloud native adoption due to lingering security concerns, according to a study from Red Hat. 

The report from Red Hat, based on a survey of 600 DevOps, engineering, and security professionals globally, highlighted security-related concerns as a key barrier to the adoption of cloud native technologies such as Kubernetes. 

More than one-third (38%) of respondents said that they don’t believe cloud native security is “taken seriously” enough and that security investment is inadequate. 

These security concerns represent a long-running theme in the cloud native space, Red Hat’s report noted. 

Over the past several years, adoption rates have grown rapidly amid a marked increase in cloud native technologies and heightened interest among large enterprises. 

But this growth rate is a key factor in why security concerns continue to loom heavy on the minds of engineers and security professionals, according to Fevzi Konduk, head of ecosystem market incubation at Red Hat. 

Speaking to ITPro at KubeCon in Amsterdam, Konduk said that the rapid evolution of cloud native technologies and the relative immaturity in the space are proving a key barrier to operational alignment and presenting dynamic security considerations.  

“Because the technology is evolving so fast, especially around cloud native workloads and the architecture and technology that drives that, behaviors change quite drastically,” he said. 

“This is not a saturated market, or a market that’s reached complete maturity yet,” Konduk added. “It’s still evolving and this is an underlying reason why there are significant security issues.”

Rapid development causing security headaches

A main driver of the uptake in cloud native technologies is the agility it provides to enterprises, the Red Hat study noted. 

“Faster time to market, adaptability, and reliability are all benefits of cloud native technologies and key drivers for enterprises to digitally transform their IT infrastructure,” the report said. 

However, Konduk said that because developers “are full speed ahead”, other functions within the enterprise are struggling to understand or accommodate for rapid rollout of cloud native technologies.

“The developers want to develop as fast as possible and have flexibility, but operations can’t always come up to speed and fully understand what they’re operating or consider potential security issues,” he said. 

“That’s why we talk about DevOps to try and bring this together. But it also means a major fundamental change in the process of how you do development and handle potential security scenarios,” he added. 

Greater engagement between DevOps teams and the security function was highlighted as a key necessity for organizations continuing to steam ahead with cloud native technology development, Konduk said. 

Recent research from Palo Alto Networks found that this closer relationship between vital functions is improving somewhat. 

Its 2023 State of Cloud Native Security report found that many companies are “encouraging a deeper level of engagement between application developers and security tools and teams”. 

81% of respondents said that they have embedded security professionals within their DevOps teams and have witnessed a marked improvement in their ability to identify security issues that might have previously gone unnoticed. 

Security failures cause significant business impact

Failing to adequately address potential security concerns can have a significant impact on businesses, the study found. 

37% of respondents identified revenue and/or customer loss due to a container or Kubernetes security incident. 

“These incidents could result in the delay of critical projects or product releases, as businesses must prioritize security efforts to address the vulnerabilities that were missed in the development stage,” the report said. 

This delay could have a major long-term “ripple effect” on the business, resulting in further lost revenue, customer dissatisfaction or potential loss of market share to competitors. 

“Those types of occurrences can also erode customer trust,” the study added.

Red Hat and aerospace and arms firm Lockheed Martin are collaborating to bring artificial intelligence (AI) to military platforms.

Lockheed Martin is set to adopt Red Hat’s technology which will help the firm support US national security missions by applying and standardising AI technologies in geographically constrained environments, the companies announced.

Lockheed Martin will use Red Hat Device Edge, which supports MicroShift, a lightweight Kubernetes orchestration product built from the edge capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift, along with an operating system built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The latest product also allows an organisation’s architecture to evolve as its workload strategy changes.

Through Red Hat Device Edge, the tech company will equip US military platforms with advanced software that was previously too large and complex for these systems. It said it will enable small platforms to handle large AI workloads, increasing their capability in the field, and drive faster, data-backed decision-making.

“With Red Hat Device Edge Lockheed Martin is leading the infusion of cutting-edge commercial technology into military capabilities that deliver advanced solutions to our customers,” said Justin Taylor, vice president of AI at Lockheed Martin.

“Unlocking these AI technologies can help national security decision-makers stay ahead of adversaries, enabling a safer and more secure world.”

As an example, Lockheed Martin used Red Hat Device Edge on a Stalker unmanned aerial system (UAS) to demonstrate how AI-enhanced sensing can advance Joint All-Domain Operations. The Stalker used onboard sensors and AI to adapt in real time to a threat environment.

The Stalker flew an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) mission to detect a simulated military target. Once the Stalker detected the target emitter, project engineers used Red Hat Device Edge to update the Stalker’s software mid flight.

The new software – now managed on-platform by Red Hat Device Edge – enabled the Stalker to deploy updated AI-based computer vision capabilities, also known as automated target recognition capabilities.

As a result, Stalker was able to more accurately classify the military target, providing more useful ISR data and enhancing the situational awareness of the threat environment for US military decision-makers, said the companies.

Lockheed Martin plans to continue to innovate using Red Hat Device Edge and edge Kubernetes capabilities for a broader range of applications across all domains: land, sea, air, space, and cyber.

The use of AI in weapons has been long debated considering the ethical implications around the subject. In 2015, more than 1,000 AI experts and researchers called for AI weapons to be banned, stating it could kickstart a military arms race to produce autonomous weapons.

The letter stated that the stakes are high, with the new weaponry being the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

"The endpoint of this technology trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow,” the letter read. “The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting."

This was followed in 2018 by another letter signed by more than 100 of the world’s leading AI firms and research institutions pledging that AI should never be allowed to take a decision to end a human life.

The signatories also called on the government to establish a set of concrete laws against autonomous weapons.

This didn’t stop MI5 and The Alan Turing Institute revealing in August 2022 that they maintain an ongoing partnership which focuses on applying AI research to confront national security challenges.

Part of the collaboration supports MI5 in keeping up-to-date with state-of-the-art approaches in AI that can be used to respond to threats against UK national security more quickly and flexibly.

Samsung and Red Hat have announced partnership that will see the two companies jointly develop software for next-generation memory hardware.

The landmark partnership - a first for Samsung - will see the two companies work on both new and existing hardware such as NVMe SSDs, CXL memory, and smart SSDs, and will aim to build “an expansive ecosystem” to integrate hardware and software.

Samsung said it has never partnered with any company in the open source space, but the Red Hat deal is poised to “foster engagements across the IT marketplace”, suggesting similar deals in the future.

Emerging applications such as the metaverse and existing technology still under rapid development, like artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR), are the driving force behind the disruptive changes to memory designs currently in use, Samsung said.

“In the upcoming data-centric era, the integration of memory-centric hardware and software architectures will become increasingly essential, and for this purpose, Red Hat is happy to participate in the joint undertaking with Samsung,” added Marjet Andriesse, Senior Vice President and Head of Red Hat Asia Pacific.

Both Samsung and Red Hat will collaborate on their research and new memory designs via the to-be-launched Samsung Memory Research Cloud (SMRC) - a “collaboration hub” through which both companies can develop new memory software to function across a range of server environments.

The SMRC will eventually be opened up to customers and other partners, the pair said, allowing for opportunities to test software developments and help to fine-tune the software’s configurations so that it performs optimally across different types of memory hardware.

In addition to developing new memory software, the companies will be working with the Linux community and feeding their findings into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as well as other, unnamed, open source software stacks.

“Samsung and Red Hat will make a concerted effort to define and standardise memory software solutions that embrace evolving server and memory hardware, while building a more robust memory ecosystem,” said Yongcheol Bae, Executive Vice President and Head of the Memory Application Engineering Team at Samsung Electronics.

“We will invite partners from across the IT industry to join us in expanding the software-hardware memory ecosystem to create greater customer value.”

The companies say the SMRC platform is not just a purpose-built collaboration system for this specific project. They claim that it will be instead designed in a way that allows it to be re-used for future IT innovations, following its launch in the second half of the year.

Red Hat has announced it will be opening its Training and Certification courses to its partners for no extra cost.

The open source software vendor said it recognises the need for hybrid cloud skills at the partner level so will be offering its self-paced online courses for free to help build knowledge around technologies such as cloud computing, containers, virtualisation, and automation.

The curriculum consists of 17 courses that are available in eight languages and can provide the foundational knowledge needed to develop skills in hybrid cloud computing. These can then be used to pursue further accreditation and certification away from Red Hat.

Courses cover areas including Red Hat system administration, Red Hat OpenShift administration, Red Hat Enterprise Linux automation with Ansible, and cloud-native microservices development with Quarkus.

Red Hat said it previously commissioned an IDC study that found the company’s training courses led to a three-year return on investment of 365%.

The IBM-owned company also plans to release additional courses throughout the year. Partners can also purchase instructor-led training alongside the self-paced courses should they wish.

“Partners play a critical role in Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud vision and customer success,” said Ken Goetz, vice president of enterprise customer success and business management at Red Hat.

“By expanding partner enablement offerings and Red Hat Training opportunities, we are empowering partners to deepen their abilities in delivering impactful customer solutions to unlock the open hybrid cloud with Red Hat technologies.”

Leaders at some of the biggest companies in the world have said the cloud skills shortage still affects them today. CISOs at TikTok and Euromoney, for example, detailed the difficulties they both faced when trying to recruit top talent in cloud technology, which ultimately led them to realise upskilling existing employees was the best method of filling their skills gaps.

Speaking at CPX360 last month, Martyn Booth, CISO at Euromoney, said the key to developing talent from within was having eager staff wanting to expand their skillset.

“We took the decision to train people internally, and those people now will probably consider themselves, and I would consider them as, cloud security experts,” he said. “Before, we had a very limited ability to manage that internally.”

Maya Horowitz, VP of research at Check Point, previously told IT Pro that veritable cloud experts are particularly rare in the market, and the ones that are experts often go to work for the cloud platforms themselves, leaving little talent available for other companies, such as IT service providers.

Red Hat has launched its eponymous Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 beta and promised admin and IT ops people there will be less of a need for them to learn new ways of doing things.

Red Hat said the latest beta is based on upstream kernel version 5.14 and provides a preview of the next major update of RHEL. It punted the new version as being designed for “demanding hybrid multi-cloud deployments that range from physical, on-premises, public cloud to edge”.

It also said the beta was a departure from previous major releases of RHEL. While it contains many improvements and enhancements customers asked for, it has fewer changes that require admins and IT Ops to learn new ways of doing things, said the firm. It added that anyone familiar with RHEL 8 should find RHEL 9 easy to pick up.

Among the new features are enhanced web console performance metrics that allow access to additional information that will allow admins to better identify the potential causes of performance bottlenecks. It is also now easier to export these data to analysis and reporting tools such as Grafana.

There is also kernel live patching via the web console and streamlined image building that includes the ability to build RHEL 8 and RHEL 9 images via a single build node. It also features better support for customized file systems (non-LVM mount points) and bare-metal deployments.

There are also several enhancements for security and compliance.

Users can use smart card authentication to access remote hosts through the RHEL web console (Sudo, SSH, etc.).

Red Hat also added more security profiles to help achieve compliance with standards like PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and others. When coupled with intelligence gathering and remediation services such as Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Satellite, customers now have access to powerful tools to rapidly resolve compliance issues at scale.

SSSD, the built-in enterprise single sign-on (SSO) framework, now adds more detail for events such as time to complete tasks, errors, the authentication flow, and more. New search capabilities provide admins the ability to analyze performance and configuration issues.

The OS has also integrated new OpenSSL 3 cryptographic frameworks. Built-in RHEL utilities have been recompiled to utilize OpenSSL 3 to provide organizations with new security ciphers for encrypting and protecting data.

RHEL 9 Beta also ships with cgroup2 by default and a recent release of Podman with new defaults for RHEL 9. Users will get signature and short-name (e.g.: ubi8 instead of registry.access.redhat.com/ubi8/ubi) validation by default when pulling container images. This will enable organizations to test container-based applications with the "out-of-the-box" configuration planned for RHEL 9.

RHEL 9 Beta is available for Intel/AMD64 (x86_64), ARM 64-bit (aarch64), IBM Power LE (ppc64le), and IBM Z (s390x) hardware platforms

Red Hat has unveiled the latest version of its Kubernetes management offering that it claimed would provide greater flexibility for managing and scaling hybrid and multi-cloud environments in a unified and automated way.

Its Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.3 includes additional support for importing managed Kubernetes clusters for Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA), as well as OpenShift clusters on IBM Power systems.

Red Hat said this builds on supported managed Kubernetes clusters for Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud (ROKS), Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO), Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated (OSD) and IBM Z.

There is also support for the provision of on-premises Red Hat OpenShift clusters on Red Hat OpenStack directly from Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management. It added that customers could also manage clusters more effectively by discovering and importing clusters from cloud.redhat.com, which would help manage more advanced features and alleviate the manual effort of importing clusters individually.

Red Hat said that with cluster hibernation, customers can also schedule clusters that are not in use to go into hibernation mode to preserve resources and better manage cloud costs.

There is also better integration between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, which Red Hat claimed would accelerate the automation and cohesion between cloud-native clusters, virtual machines, and traditional infrastructure with streamlined tooling and coordination.

When containerized environments need to connect with traditional IT environments, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management can automatically trigger Ansible Playbooks before or after key lifecycle actions, such as application and cluster creation.

The company said this would make it easier to automate tasks like configuring networking, connecting applications to databases, constructing load balancers and firewalls, and updating IT service management (ITSM) ticketing systems.

Dave Lindquist, general manager and vice president, software engineering, advanced Kubernetes management at Red Hat, said cloud-native applications and services are not an island.

“We need to meet organizations where they are to bridge the divide between traditional IT infrastructure and cloud-native development so that IT teams can focus on innovation rather than trying to get disparate technologies to work together,” Lindquist said.

Tim Grieser, research vice president, enterprise system management software at IDC, said IT executives see IT automation and configuration management tools as ways to embed the competitive advantages of speed and quality. As such, investments continue to address traditional IT environments and modern application architectures.

“The reality is that both environments are critical to business success. The automation of technology processes and the orchestration of multiple processes are critical and increasingly required to enable scale for I&O teams as software delivery cycles increase,” Grieser added.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.3 will be generally available in the coming weeks.

Red Hat has unveiled the latest version of its OpenShift Kubernetes platform with a series of enhancements and new features.

The firm said Kubernetes-powered cloud platforms must span all hybrid cloud infrastructure and the variety of workloads and applications running on the platform, hence the new functionality. It added that the latest version would provide “a common foundation to more consistently develop, deploy and run a hybrid mix of applications and services.”

OpenShift 4.8 now features IPv6/IPv4 dual-stack and IPv6 single stack support to provide applications with interoperability and communications for environments using IPv6 in addition to IPv4, such as in cloud-native network functions for telecommunications and government agencies worldwide that require IPv6 support. Red Hat said this capability provides additional security for applications, including regulatory compliance.

The platform's Pipelines will let users define, version, and track changes to their application delivery pipelines alongside their application source code in Git repositories.

Red Hat said developers can now rely on the Git workflow to automate the deployment of their CI/CD pipelines. This would also leave an audit trail as Git commits as the pipelines are collaboratively updated throughout their lifecycle.

There are also enhancements to the OpenShift console, such as the ability for Spring Boot developers to code and test locally before sharing the code more broadly. Additionally, to further improve development with Serverless, Red Hat OpenShift 4.8 enables advanced scaling options for the developer console.

New OpenShift Serverless functions capability will also allow developers to create and run functions on-demand on OpenShift. Red Hat said this is currently available as a technology preview and would remove the burden of manual infrastructure provisioning and scaling.

Also debuting are OpenShift sandboxed containers. These are based on the Kata Containers open source project and provide a more secure container runtime using lightweight virtual machines.

Joe Fernandes, vice president and general manager of Cloud Platforms at Red Hat said with the latest OpenShift version, organizations would be able to run a “diverse mix of workloads from data driven intelligent applications to the mission critical traditional applications that teams are working to modernize."

Red Hat OpenShift 4.8 is expected to be available in July, including the ability to try it on the Developer Sandbox for Red Hat Openshift.

Red Hat has launched the latest in a series of migration toolkits to help customers move their infrastructure onto its OpenShift cloud environment.

The latest is a virtualization migration toolkit that helps transport virtual machines to its platform at scale, providing customers with an easy way to transfer their virtualized infrastructure.

Customers begin by entering the access credentials for their source and destination environments into the tool and mapping the source and destination infrastructure. The tool lets them filter the virtual machines on the source infrastructure by criteria, including names and folders, to find those serving specific applications. Customers then define a migration plan for the virtual machines.

Before setting the scripted migration in motion, customers can use a built-in migration analytics tool that spots potential migration issues with specific virtual machines and offers recommendations to solve migration problems.

OpenShift is the IBM-owned company's container orchestration system. It offers a layer of extra functionality over the commonly used Kubernetes container management platform, including more graphical user interface and security features.

Containers are an evolution of virtual machine technology that uses a single virtual server operating system to host a range of pared-down containers that share a single kernel. This makes containers smaller and more agile than virtual machines.

Although OpenShift targets containers, Red Hat launched OpenShift Virtualization technology in August 2020 to cover virtual machines. Based on the open source KubeVirt project, OpenShift Virtualization allows companies to run virtual machines, containers, and serverless applications alongside each other on the same platform.

This new migration toolkit joins several others from Red Hat, including its migration toolkit for applications, which handles large-scale application modernization and migration and handles platform upgrades and cloud deployments.

Red Hat also offers a migration toolkit for containers that migrates applications between container clusters, allowing customers to move container applications between OpenShift platforms.

Red Hat has announced the general availability of its Developer Sandbox for Red Hat OpenShift, a zero-cost development environment for building Kubernetes-based applications.

Red Hat’s new sandbox will help ease application development thanks to its pre-configured set of developer tools. The service also includes a private OpenShift environment within a shared, multi-tenant OpenShift cluster.

According to Red Hat, its new OpenShift sandbox’s tightly integrated infrastructure and tools offer a safe environment for developers to build new applications, add new services, create containers from source code or Dockerfiles, and more.

“Much of our work around Red Hat OpenShift has been focused on maximizing developer productivity and enabling developers to take full advantage of the power of Kubernetes, said Mithun Dhar, vice president and general manager of developer tools and programs at Red Hat.

“We do this by abstracting the underlying complexity and offering a powerful platform and ecosystem built around it. With the OpenShift sandbox and latest update to our developer tools, we are taking steps to make it even easier for developers to get started building for Kubernetes.”

Red Hat has also unveiled several updates to its developer tools. For example, Red Hat OpenShift 4.7 web console developer perspective now includes a quick add feature in the topology view for adding new components and services. Odo 2.1 helps extend the declarative developer workspace (devfile), making it easier to build and debug applications.

Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces 2.8 features a new dashboard to support OpenShift OAuth flow for factories from private repositories. Red Hat CodeReady Studio 12.19 makes it possible to bootstrap and log into a developer sandbox or add, remove, and edit devfile registries. The update also adds Python support.

What’s more, Visual Studio Code Tools for Red Hat OpenShift Application Services now supports clusters from Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka. Red Hat CodeReady Dependency Analytics 0.3.2 is compatible with the Go programming language. Also included in the latest version is a new command-line interface for easy integration.

Red Hat CodeReady Containers 1.25 will enable developers to create microservices and run them in Kubernetes-hosted containers. Eclipse JKube 1.2 brings improvements around Helm chart generation for the easy redeployment of applications. Lastly, GitHub Actions for Red Hat OpenShift and Enterprise Linux now supports standalone containers with Buildah and Podman, pushing images to the registry, and deploying to OpenShift.

IBM, Red Hat, and Cobuilder are teaming up to develop a new platform to connect fragmented supply chains in the construction industry.

Using the new platform called OpenBuilt, construction companies can securely integrate their digital solutions with their supply chain partners, suppliers, and subcontractors through a single integration hub.

The OpenBuilt development process will also see participation from five cross-industry partners, including Cemex, EDIN Network, Backe, Sol Services, and Element.

"In pursuing the broad goal of construction industry transformation, there is a critical need to break down the deep silos and fragmentation that exists in how we organise and operate design, manufacture, construction and operation processes,” said Mark Farmer, Cast Consultancy’s CEO.

OpenBuilt’s collaborative development will initially focus on three key areas: establishing OpenBuilt using Red Hat OpenShift running on IBM Cloud to enable construction companies to seamlessly connect their supply chains via the hybrid cloud; integrating IBM solutions and Salesforce’s open APIs into the platform; and creating new flagship applications for searching, filtering, and sorting of technical building data.

Define, Cobuilder's data dictionary solution, will establish a common language within OpenBuilt's flagship applications. Additionally, OpenBuilt will leverage Cobuilder's template-based data structure to make all data machine-readable and interoperable with existing and future systems.

Users can also build and deploy intelligent workflows via an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, said IBM.

"The global construction landscape is evolving and requires a new approach towards industry-wide technology platforms with new levels of openness, innovation and collaboration,” comments Jon O'Donnell, managing partner, IBM Global Business Services EMEA.

“Together with our partners we are creating OpenBuilt to empower the construction industry to break down its silos with intelligent workflows and play an active role in designing and driving its own transformation. Successful companies across the construction supply chain are coming together to embrace a digital future, harnessing the power of an open hybrid cloud approach and adopting new technologies to gain a real competitive advantage. We want to inspire other companies to join us and accelerate the march towards a truly digital construction industry."

Software company Xinuos is suing IBM and Red Hat, claiming they stole the Linux source code and pushed its own products out of the market. The move rekindles a legal spat over ownership of the original Unix source.

Xinuos, which is based in the US Virgin Islands, sells server operating systems to commercial customers. The lawsuit, filed in the US Court of the Virgin Islands, accuses IBM and Red Hat of using wrongfully copied software code and engaging in anti-competitive misconduct to corner the market in Unix and Linux server operating systems.

The complaint claims IBM stole Xinuos' intellectual property and misled the public in its SEC statements by saying a third party that owned all of the Unix and UnixWare copyrights had waived all infringement claims against it.

"Thereafter, IBM and Red Hat divided the market for enterprise clients to protect IBM's precious high-end server, software, and services business, they promoted each other's operating system products, and they granted each other special technical access and abilities that were not made generally available and from which Xinuos and others were specifically excluded," the complaint continues. "These bad acts continue to this day."

Unix has a stormy legal history. Novell purchased the rights to the program's source code in 1993, subsequently agreeing to transfer some rights surrounding Unix (including UnixWare, Novell's version of Unix) to the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). In 2000, Caldera bought UnixWare from SCO, changing its name to the SCO Group two years later.

The SCO Group then sued IBM for infringing on its copyright by including Unix source code in Linux. Novell responded by claiming it was still the legal owner of Linux, sparking a legal response from the SCO Group, which lost its case against Novell in 2007. SCO Group then filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy while it pursued an ultimately unsuccessful appeal.

A group of equity investors partnered to create UnXis, which purchased SCO Group's server operating system products, OpenServer and UnixWare, in 2011. At the time, the new company stated there was "no place for litigation in our vision or plan." In 2013, it changed its name to Xinuos and released OpenServer X based on FreeBSD while providing a migration path from the former SCO products.

Process mining software firm Celonis has entered a strategic partnership with IBM and Red Hat to help enterprises digitally transform their business operations.

Designed to eliminate process constraints, Celonis’s Execution Management System (EMS) sits on top of core enterprise systems, such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management. The platform leverages process mining to pull real-time data from underlying systems and applies intelligence to identify and measure execution capacity across a business.

As part of their partnership, IBM Global Business Services (GBS) will integrate Celonis EMS as part of its methodology, alongside IBM data and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions.

Celonis-IBM GBS partnership will also focus on end-to-end consulting support for supply chain, finance, procurement, HR and customer experience companies; intelligent workflows for critical processes; and business process outsourcing from IBM GBS to Celonis to drive better outcomes for clients.

According to reports, IBM GBS will also build applications and assets for its partners on Celonis EMS, particularly for regulated industries.

"Working with IBM Global Business Services, we have analyzed our procure to pay processes across several countries in Europe and Africa by applying Celonis process mining tools to uncover and fix inefficiencies,” said Jens Knoblauch, executive director of digital business services at Linde.

“Our finance business processes have benefitted from greater transparency and the identification of tangible improvement areas. We will need to further develop our operational excellence and can benchmark best practices across all our countries to help each perform their best."

Additionally, Celonis will channel Red Hat OpenShift technology to deliver more flexibility and choice in how customers deploy its software. Businesses can choose to operate Celonis EMS on public or private cloud data centers, on-premises servers, and mainframe computers.

"Through the strategic partnership with IBM and Red Hat, we plan to help power the shift from analog to intelligent business execution, helping many of the world's largest companies with their transactional systems, boosting their business performance," comments Miguel Milano, chief revenue officer and co-owner of Celonis.

"It's incredibly powerful for our customers to be able to combine the Celonis Execution Management System with Red Hat OpenShift's hybrid cloud approach and IBM Global Business Services' expertise."