The announcement was made recently, and it’s quite a news item. To put it in context, it’s the most expensive purchase IBM has ever made. In other words, IBM is very serious about being the main reference for hybrid clouds.

Hybrid clouds technology is in growing demand and in market terms is an opportunity for IBM. In short, hybrid clouds are computations by a public cloud and a private cloud, i.e. servers that can be managed by people distant from the company and others that are for the exclusive use of companies but that merge to perform tasks together.

IBM acquires Red Hat: the opportunity to create something great

In a press release, Jim Whitehurst CEO of Red Hat assures that the purchase is an opportunity to create the leading hybrid cloud provider. It also emphasizes that Red Hat’s financial numbers are positive and that software is devouring the world thanks to open source technologies.

“When I joined in January 2008, Red Hat was about 2,200 associates and the first open source software company to earn more than $500 million in revenues. Our portfolio was “just” Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Middleware, and technologies to manage both. Today, there are approximately 12,600 Red Hatters and we have a portfolio that now spans hybrid cloud infrastructure, cloud-native app platforms, and management and automation”, said the Red Hat CEO.

In the release, Jim Whitehurst envisions Red Hat with a great opportunity to grow even further thanks to the resources it will now have at its disposal. He also assures that the essence of Red Hat will be maintained because it will function as a separate unit from IBM.

On this topic, these were his words:

“Joining forces with IBM will provide us with a greater level of scale, resources and capabilities to accelerate the impact of open source as the basis for digital transformation and bring Red Hat to an even wider audience – all while preserving our unique culture and unwavering commitment to open source innovation”

Now what?

There are many questions that accompany this type of transactions within the business world. We will probably notice the first consequences next year. However, Jim tells us that “they will continue to grow in Red Hat culture by belonging to another organization”.

“With IBM, we have the opportunity to accelerate this work at a greater scale and show everyone that open really does unlock the world’s potential”.

So we have to wait to see the consequences of this purchase. Let’s hope it’s for the good of the users and allow open source software to continue growing.

Some data of the acquisition

• The acquisition will be free cash flow and gross margin accretive within 12 months, accelerate revenue growth and support a solid and growing dividend.
• Red Hat to operate as a distinct unit within IBM’s Hybrid Cloud team.
• IBM will pay 190 euros for each Red Hat share in cash. For a total of $34 billion.

Conclusion

The news that IBM acquires Red Hat has taken us all by surprise. However, it enhances the value of open source software in the complex technologies that involve global organizations.

The news will be good or bad depending on what the weather says, but a priori, it seems a win-win for both companies. On the one hand, IBM makes the whole team and Red Hat experience in Hybrid Clouds and Red Hat being part of such a big company will have the resources to grow even more in its segment.

IBM acquires Red Hat…let’s hope it’s good news.

You can also read “Red Hat acquires CoreOS“.

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What Kubernetes is

Before going further, let’s talk about Kubernetes. It’s an open-source platform designed for automated deploying, scaling and operating app containers. Google started Kubernetes project in 2014 based on their experience with their running production workloads and combining the best-of-breed ideas & practices from the community.

What’s an app container? It’s a specialized platform where apps run and perform tasks, regardless of the host OS. The old method required to recode, rebuild & recompile apps according to the host OS. The container is a small & fast, portable solution based on OS-level virtualization rather than hardware virtualization. The container(s) are decoupled from the underlying infrastructure, thus easier to create VMs. One app can be entirely contained in a container, ensuring the app’s maximum portability and best possible performance, regardless of the host system. Using this one-to-one application-to-image relationship, containers provide the max benefits.

Kubernetes allows you to manage containers easily. Kubernetes provides the following features –

• Portability – portable to any server: public, private, multi-cloud, hybrid etc.
• Extensible – hookable, composable, pluggable & modular.
• Self-healing – auto-restart, auto-scaling, auto-placement & auto-replication.

CoreOS & Red Hat – the relationship

CoreOS is a company who serves products like CoreOS, a Linux distro and Tectonic, a container management solution based on the open-source platform Kubernetes container orchestration, originally created by Google.

Red Hat and CoreOS has been the top 2 contributors to Kubernetes followed by Google, ZTE Corporation, IBM, Microsoft, Mirantis, FathomDB, Huawei, and Fujitsu. By working so closely with Kubernetes, CoreOS and Red Hat created a form of the bond. It makes sense for them to share brainpower and customers together. Both companies provided competitive container focused Linux distros – CoreOS Container Linux and Red Hat Atomic.

The future

It’s most likely that the future generation of software is going to be on the hybrid cloud platform – part of it in data centers and other parts in the public cloud. For that age, cloud-native fabric for delivering apps in a single way will be very critical. According to Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s president of products and technologies noted that the combined companies will provide a powerful way to span environments. CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi said that their company helped in the creation of a whole new category of the platform.

CoreOS was very successful all by itself, raising $50 million since its go-off in 2013. The deal is most likely complete in January 2018. With their joint venture, we hope to see a whole new era of cloud computing and web platform.

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Major features

An interesting feature is Wayland support. Wayland is intended as a better and simpler replacement for the widely used X server that’s responsible for the visual interface of Linux. This new replacement is targeting simplicity, easier to develop and maintain. It’s written in C and we can expect that GNOME & KDE, 2 mainstream desktop environment will be ported to it. In RHEL 7.5, Wayland support in GNOME is present as the tech preview. It’s confirmed by the 7.5 release notes.

With this implementation, we’re expecting that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 will offer a GNOME Wayland session by default. However, it’s not too surprising as RHEL is providing the support with several latest releases. The GNOME Wayland experience is continuing further refining but yet to prove as very solid. Red Hat also wishes for supporting Mutter EGLStreams code for NVIDIA Linux driver support.

Alongside other updates, Red Hat Linux Enterprise (RHEL) comes up with initial Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support in the kernel. You can enable the feature with “experimental_hmm=enable”. RHEL 7.5 beta implements “kexec” system call and its fast reboot capability, KASLR address space layout randomization is also in the form of tech review.g

Additional features

Other key features include –

• Security improvements – more securely unlocking Network Bound Disk Encrypted devices during boot.
• Integrated Red Hat Ansible DevOps Automation with OpenSCAP – easier to automate compliance issue remediation. Admins can reliably and efficiently scale policies across servers and clouds.
• Compliance improvements with PTP (Precision Time Protocol) and NTP (Network Time Protocol).
• Easier-to-use admin console Cockpit – easier system management covering almost everything.
• Ability to auto-generate a “know-good” bootable snapshot. This feature allows faster recovery and rollback after patching.
• VDO (Virtual Data Optimizer) to reduce data redundancy through inline compression and deduplication. According to Red Hat, VDO can increase effective capacity by up to 6 times.

These awesome features are in testing phase but expected to come out with the next stable release. The codes are refining and evolving. Feel free to check out the beta. You can download Red Hat Enterprise Linux here. If you’re looking for a personal & powerful Linux distros, check out our top 10 Linux distros.

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