Displaying items by tag: open source

For the past several years, Red Hat and Microsoft have worked together to co-develop hybrid cloud solutions intended to enable greater customer innovation.

Last year, at Red Hat Summit 2019, Red Hat and Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s first jointly-engineered, managed and supported OpenShift service on a leading public cloud.

Further extending their work together in the hybrid cloud, at the Red Hat Summit virtual experience, Microsoft and Red Hat announced the general availability of Azure Red Hat OpenShift on OpenShift 4.

Sathish Balakrishnan, vice president, hosted platforms at Red Hat said, “Azure Red Hat OpenShift enables you to create clusters in minutes, in a self-service fashion. Because this is a fully managed service, there are no VMs for you to manage. Patching, upgrading, repair, and disaster recovery are all handled for you as part of the service with best in class proactive 24/7 management and support from both Microsoft and Red Hat.”

With this release, Red Hat is adding new key features to Azure Red Hat OpenShift.

Cluster-admin support

This feature enables the cluster-admin role on Azure Red Hat OpenShift clusters, enabling full cluster customization capabilities, such as running privileged containers and installing Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs).

Cluster autoscaling

The ClusterAutoscaler and MachineAutoscalers automatically adjusts the size of your cluster to meet current demand. Mix and match virtual machine sizes to your workloads.

Multi-availability zones clusters

To deliver high levels of resiliency, cluster components are now deployed across 3 Azure Availability Zones in supported Azure regions to maintain high availability for your most demanding mission-critical applications and data. Azure Red Hat OpenShift has a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.9%.

Industry compliance certifications

To help customers reach compliance obligations across regulated industries and markets worldwide, Azure Red Hat OpenShift is now PCI DSS, FedRAMP High and HITRUST certified.

Azure maintains a large compliance portfolio both in terms of total number of offerings, as well as number of customer-facing services in assessment scope.

In addition to supporting authentication and authorization using Azure Active Directory, customers can now connect their supported identity providers, for example using OpenID Connect.

Private API and ingress endpoints

Customers will be able to choose between public and private cluster management (API) and ingress endpoints. With private endpoints and Azure Express Route support Red Hat is enabling private hybrid clusters, allowing our mutual customers to extend their on-premises solutions to Azure.

OpenShift 4 is the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, driven by the innovation of Kubernetes Operators to deliver full-stack automation from top to bottom. From Kubernetes to the core services that support OpenShift clusters to the application services deployed by end users; everything is managed with Operators.

This release also brings key innovations from Red Hat OpenShift 4 to Azure Red Hat OpenShift.

Kubernetes 1.16 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS

RHEL CoreOS provides a fully immutable, container optimized, operating system built from the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, delivered and installed as a component of OpenShift.

OperatorHub.io

Red Hat launched OperatorHub.io to provide a registry where users can find curated Kubernetes Operators. Users can now access the Operator Hub through the Azure Red Hat OpenShift console, which includes community as well as Red Hat OpenShift Certified Operators.

OpenShift service mesh

Based on the Istio, Jaeger and Kali projects, OpenShift Service Mesh provides an integrated service mesh for enhanced security and network segmentation of microservices applications.

This enables developers to focus on building business logic while letting the service mesh manage policy-defined microservice communications. They can also use integrated tracing and visualization capabilities to debug issues when they occur.

OpenShift serverless

Built on the Knative framework, OpenShift Serverless enables developers to build functions based applications that have the ability to scale to zero, and only consume compute resources when functions execute.

A survey of 455 CIOs and senior IT decision-makers from nine countries in Asia Pacific, undertaken for Red Hat and Intel by Forrester Consulting, found enterprises in the region turning to open source vendors to innovate, reduce vendor lock-in, and get past the obstacles of security concerns that have been associated with it.

IT decision-makers were surveyed in Australia, China, Indonesia, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. Forrester says the study revealed that, among CIOs and senior IT decision makers, open source is not just a cost-saving option; it is also a strategic investment that can lead to digital innovation.

“[the survey] indicates open source usage is moving from community freeware to enterprise-grade solutions,” Forrester said. “Asia Pacific IT leaders view open source as improving the evolution of technologies that are key to digital transformation, including cloud, DevOps, mobility, and big data.”

According to Forrester, “In total, 52 percent of technology leaders in Asia Pacific have already implemented or are embracing OSS.” (This statement however is an extrapolation from the results of its survey – clearly it cannot definitively assess open source adoption across the region).

“OSS are powering the rapid creation of new customer-facing services, software, and digitized processes. Organizations are able to deliver on customer demands promptly, by removing the heavy lifting and upfront investment needed with traditional licensed technology and/or software.”

According to Forrester “Asia Pacific IT leaders have clearly translated business objectives into IT initiatives as they focus on integrating back-end systems/applications (65 percent), empowering workforce through mobility (60 percent), consolidating-customer facing applications (58 percent), and modernizing legacy applications (51 percent) to better respond to changing customer needs.”

However priorities differed across countries. “Integrating the back and front end of systems was identified as a top IT priority in Singapore (76 percent). Mobility for workforce efficiency was at the top for Korea (68 percent). Consolidating systems to create a single customer view was seen at the top for Australia (59 percent), India (67 percent), and Taiwan (68 percent), while updating legacy applications was at the top for Malaysia (68 percent).”

On July 6, Facebook officially announced that it had designed and tested an open source and cost-effective, software-defined wireless access platform aimed to improve connectivity in remote regions. The platform is designed to improve connectivity since it can be deployed to support a range of communication options, from a network in a box to an access point, supporting everything from 2G to LTE.

OpenCellular is composed of two main subsystems: general-purpose and base-band computing (GBC) with integrated power and housekeeping system, and radio frequency (RF) with integrated analog front-end. Facebook plans to open-source the hardware design, along with necessary firmware and control software, to enable telecom operators, entrepreneurs, OEMs, and researchers to locally build, implement, deploy, and operate wireless infrastructure based on the platform.

Facebook intends to work with Telecom Infra Project (TIP) members to build an active open source community around cellular access technology development and to select trial locations for further validation of technical, functional and operational aspects of the platform.

“Today we are announcing the OpenCellular access platform, and over time, we will be open-sourcing the design,” Facebook said in a statement. “We will also work on other elements like the software management system, hardware design, baseband, amplifier, filter, mounting device, and antennas.”

The statement added: “One of the reasons the expansion of cellular networks has stalled is that the ecosystem is constrained. Traditional cellular infrastructure can be very expensive, making it difficult for operators to deploy it everywhere and for smaller organizations or individuals to solve hyperlocal connectivity challenges. It's often unaffordable for them to attempt to extend network access in both rural and developed communities.

“In many cellular network deployments, the cost of the civil and supporting infrastructure (land, tower, security, power, and backhaul) is often much greater than the cost of the cellular access point itself. One of our goals was to make architectural and design improvements that would result in lower costs, associated with the civil and supporting infrastructure.

“With OpenCellular, we want to develop affordable new technology that can expand capacity and make it more cost-effective for operators to deploy networks in places where coverage is scarce. By open-sourcing the hardware and software designs for this technology, we expect costs to decrease for operators and to make it accessible to new participants.”

Facebook is currently testing the system in its labs at the Facebook HQ and is working with OEM and ODM partners to make the Open Cellular platform widely available. So far the Facebook team has been able to send and receive SMS messages, make voice calls, and use basic data connectivity, using 2G implementation on its platform.

Click here for more details.