Once an enterprise Linux specialist, Red Hat is now providing answers to some of the biggest questions being asked of corporate and government IT.

The company’s OpenShift container platform, for instance, was key to the modernisation of New Zealand Customs’ legacy CusMod applications, taking them from a dependence on proprietary hardware into hybrid cloud. 

The fact that Datacom engineered that shift along with Section6 providing modernisation services points to another aspect of the vendor’s strategy — apart from having what country manager Derek Wilson says are a couple of direct customers, Red Hat remains a channel-based business.

Red Hat has two local distributors, Ingram Micro and Tech Data.

Key local partners include Spark, OSS, Enterprise IT, Section 6, Solnet as well as Datacom and a few others.

Global partners include, of course, parent company IBM as well as HP, DXC, Tech Mahindra and some of the big global systems integrators.

“If we look at where partners make money, which I guess is the important thing, firstly we sell a subscription, for instance, initially to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which covers support, documentation, training IP, patches and downloads and so on,” Wilson told Reseller News.

“Our partners can make money from selling subscriptions and they can make some margins on that but where they really differentiate themselves is on services wrapped around our products.” 

These could be Implementation services, transformation services, project services and, in a lot of cases, managed services.

That was certainly part of the mix for Customs, with CusMod now served from Datacom’s Govt.Container platform-as-a-service (PaaS) service.

“It was the first implementation in the region, I think, certainly locally, of a local provider doing OpenShift as a service,” Wilson said.

IBM is a shareholder but also a partner. 

“Red Hat also partner with a lot of IBM competitors, DXC for example,” Wilson said. “We have been very clear about keeping our independence and neutrality and working with all the other partners.”

Red Hat began supplying its flavour of enterprise Linux 25 years ago against some stiff competition. Portfolio changes added virtualisation, middleware and, more recently, the OpenShift and Ansible automation engines.

“What we’ve been doing over the years is growing the portfolio and growing the amount of customers that use that portfolio,” Wilson said.

While still an open source company, Red Hat is no longer just “the Linux company”.

Customers are embracing the power of OpenShift to break down monolithic legacy applications into microservices.

They are also using Ansible for automation and cost savings as they shift to hybrid cloud models.

“We are seeing a big push on the OpenShift products and the Ansible products,” Wilson said.

“We are an open source company so innovation is key to us. We are constantly releasing new versions of software.”

Last year, for instance, Red Hat announced it was including its Insights for Linux proactive monitoring platform in its enterprise Linux subscriptions to help improve customers operating environments. New tools have also been added to OpenShift to speed the development of customer environments.

It has been said that while IBM has bought Red Hat, it was actually Red Hat that had taken over IBM, but Wilson doesn’t go that far.

“We’re not taking over IBM, but they are learning about our culture,” he said. “They were making cultural changes already but we feel they are embracing our culture which is a good thing.”

So, being an enabler of hybrid cloud, what is Red Hat’s take on the much anticipated arrival of Microsoft’s local cloud region in New Zealand?

Short answer, excitement.

“We actually exist in multiple clouds, Revera/CCL, AWS, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba — all have our product in them from buying Red Hat Enterprise Linux to managed OpenShift,” Wilson said.

“We are really excited by it. We think it is a significant advantage. We’ve seen our footprint in Azure grow quite significantly over the last couple of years and with government and private clients it is going to be quite significant.

“From a cloud provider perspective, IBM has its own cloud, but we don’t just work with IBM cloud.”

Red Hat has been equally careful to keep its partner programmes separate from IBM’s, as well as its premises and facilities.

Red Hat has also launched an A/NZ regional innovation lab to help customers improve processes more quickly. Wilson said one process was reduced from six days to five minutes.

ANZ New Zealand was one that used the capability, to transition from routine, repeatable network operations tasks to an approach focused on automation.

There is a cultural aspect to the lab as well, Wilson explained.

“We bring disparate teams together who haven’t worked together before. We try and change the culture for collaboration, short sprints and much more openness.”

ANZ Bank, for instance, sought to support its commitment to talent acquisition and retention. To support these, the bank’s teams needed guidance on adopting agile development approaches and Ansible community-developed automation technology.

It was a similar story at Queensland’s Heritage Bank, where the goal was speeded development cycles. The teams there brought in a new payments system 10 months early. 

“It was about bringing groups of people together, in their case including the CEO as well.”

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A push to reinvent the way developers create applications for the internet has gathered significant momentum, catching even some of its most ardent supporters by surprise.

But even as the popularity of infrastructure based on the Kubernetes platform and microservices surges, the adoption has inevitably brought to light the massive challenges big businesses and large organizations face in overhauling unwieldy infrastructure. To help IT managers navigate this transition, products and services that enable simultaneous management of legacy and new systems are gaining in popularity.

Such “hybrid” products will be one of the main themes of the Red Hat Summit that runs today and Wednesday, a recognition of how critical this area has become to companies trying to modernize their cloud-based infrastructure. Speaking on the eve of the event, Red Hat’s Joe Fernandes said he’s among those excited by the progress being made by microservices, but he remains realistic about the challenges such a shift presents.

“This evolution is happening even faster than I expected,” said the vice president of Red Hat’s Core Cloud Platforms. “If you look at the adoption of containers, or Kubernetes, compared to past innovations, like virtualization back in the early 2000s, it’s really grown tremendously fast just over the last five years.”

So-called microservices, aka cloud native computing, break applications into smaller, self-contained units or “containers,” which can significantly reduce costs and time needed to write, deploy, and manage each one. Proponents say such an approach to web development is faster, more stable, more open, and makes it easier for users to change cloud platforms.

Kubernetes, originally a Google project and now an open source service managed by the Linux Foundation’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation, has become one of the most popular tools for managing containers. Born of the open source movement, Red Hat was one of the earliest supporters of Kubernetes.

In 2015, Red Hat released the first version of its OpenShift Container Platform, which incorporates that hybrid approach to manage web infrastructure. At today’s summit, the company announced OpenShift 4.4, which includes new metric and monitoring tools that centralize reporting across multiple cloud operations. The company also unveiled Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, which aims to simplify deploying and managing clusters of Kubernetes-based applications that are running across several cloud services.

Fernandes said that as tools like Kubernetes and microservices become more prevalent, companies are more comfortable running applications across different services such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services. While that helps them avoid becoming overly reliant on a single partner, it also creates challenges in continuing to manage the multi-cloud approach.

“The new challenge becomes how to manage all of these environments,” Fernandes said. “Now from a single management console you can import or inventory all these different clusters.”

OpenShift will also begin offering a preview of a new virtualization feature that’s designed to help companies ease the transition from apps running on virtual machines to Kubernetes.

“Companies have been adopting containers over the last several years and moving apps that were previously running in virtual machines to containers,” Fernandes said. “But virtual machines aren’t going away. So what we wanted to do is explore how you could use Kubernetes to manage both types of workloads. And this allows them to migrate VM-based apps to containers over time.”

As quickly as things are moving, Fernandes said it’s important to recognize that overhauling a company’s web development infrastructure is a massive undertaking that will take years even in the most motivated enterprises. And that means the hybrid approach will by necessity be the default for the foreseeable future.

“These large organizations have tens of thousands of applications right now,” he said. “They can’t turn over their application portfolio overnight. They end up with a hybrid collection of applications that span from very traditional to very modern and cloud native. And they need to be able to manage both for now, and we see that being the case for a long time.”

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As of January 1st, 2020, Python 2.7 has officially reached the end of life and will no longer receive security updates, bug fixes, or other improvements going forward.

Released in 2000, Python 2.7 has been used by developers, administrators, and security professionals for 20 years.  While Python 3 was released in 2006, due to the number of users continuing to use 2.7, the Python team decided to support both development branches.

Originally slated to be retired in 2015, the development team pushed the sunset of Python 2.7 to 2020.

To focus on Python 3 and increase the speed of its development and bug fixes, the development team has now sunset Python 2.7 and the team recommends that all users upgrade to Python 3 to continue receiving important updates.

“We are volunteers who make and take care of the Python programming language. We have decided that January 1, 2020, will be the day that we sunset Python 2. That means that we will not improve it anymore after that day, even if someone finds a security problem in it. You should upgrade to Python 3 as soon as you can.”

Python does plan on releasing one more version of Python 2.7 in April 2020, which will be its final release. This release will include bug and security fixes that were developed in 2019, and possibly later ones as determined by the release manager, to ensure the stability of the final release.

For those who require Python 2.7 and do not wish to upgrade their scripts or applications, they can switch to PyPy, which will continue to support Python 2.7 after 2020. This, though, may not be fully compatible as third-party developers update their libraries to support Python 3.

Linux distributions and the sunset of Python 2.7

As Python 2.7 reaches the end of life, Linux distributions are also changing how they will continue to support the legacy version of Python.

Most of the distributions are following the same practice of adding upgraded packages for dependencies and libraries that support Python 3.x with the eventual goal of switching to Python 3 as the default version.

This process will take quite some time, so Python 2.7 will continue to be offered.

Red Hat

Red Hat has stated that even though the Python Software Foundation (PSF) has retired Python 2.7, they will continue to support it through the normal RHEL lifecycle.

“Just because the PSF consider Python 2 “unsupported” does not mean that Python 2 is “unsupported” within RHEL.”

For Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, the Python 2.7 package will be supported until June 2024. After this date, Red Hat will recommend that users upgrade to Python 3, but customers may continue to use 2.7 in a self-supported manner.

“After this date, customers are encouraged to upgrade to a later Python release such as Python 3. Customers may also continue with Python 2.7 as self-supported without official Red Hat Support.”

Debian and Ubuntu

Both Debian and Ubuntu have started updating Python 2 libraries to their Python 3 equivalents in the preparation of the sunset of Python 2.7.

As of Debian Buster (10x) and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Python 3 is the default version, but Python 2.7 will still be available for those wishing to install it.

Fedora

Like the other distributions, Fedora has been updating Python 2 packages to the Python 3 equivalents.

In the current release of Fedora 31, Python 3.6 is the default version installed, though. 

Python 2.7 is still available as an installable package.

Kali Linux

Like Ubuntu, Kali Linux is following Debian’s lead and has begun adding support for packages upgraded to Python 3.

Once all packages and dependencies are upgraded to Python 3, Kali will eventually remove Python 2.x.

The post Python 2.7 Reaches End of Life After 20 Years of Development appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.

The history of computing is punctuated by a set of seismic shifts in enterprise IT architectures.  

Monolithic, highly integrated applications moved to integrated software stacks and N-tier architectures. Distributed computing has also gone through several incarnations. There have been multiple attempts at standardising inter-application communications, such as remote procedure calls on Unix, distributed object model, common object request broker architecture and web services. All have tried to promote code reuse, and publish and share application programming interfaces (APIs) in a bid to avoid programmers having to “reinvent the wheel”. 

Since the mid 2000s, thanks to the growth of JavaScript on servers and Java application servers, service-oriented architecture (SOA) emerged as the new enterprise integration champion. Like its predecessors, this blueprint for distributed computing was engineered before the era of cloud-native computing. Companies built in the cloud have taken a very different approach, based around the idea of containers and loosely coupled microservices. 

Now, thanks to the success of Docker and Kubernetes, more businesses are looking at deploying containers. The reason for the popularity of this approach is that it helps businesses develop cloud-native applications, which can be delivered quickly to power digital transformation initiatives.  

Forrester’s Now tech: enterprise container platforms, Q2 2018 report notes: “Container-centric, microservice-oriented, dynamically orchestrated cloud-native technologies help firms create highly differentiated apps and services that create compelling customer experiences. They’ve quickly become important elements of digital business transformation as they promise to speed software delivery and improve scale, resiliency, flexibility and implementation.” 

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