Siemens, IBM and Red Hat today announced a new collaboration that will use a hybrid cloud designed to deliver an open, flexible and more secure solution for manufacturers and plant operators to drive real-time value from operational data. In one month, a single manufacturing site can generate more than 2,200 terabytes of data according to a report by IBM – yet most data goes unanalyzed.

Through the joint initiative, Siemens Digital Industries Software will apply IBM’s open hybrid cloud approach, built on Red Hat OpenShift, to extend the deployment flexibility of MindSphere®, the industrial IoT as a service solution from Siemens. This will enable customers to run MindSphere on-premise, unlocking speed and agility in factory and plant operations, as well as through the cloud for seamless product support, updates and enterprise connectivity.

While enterprises believe open source software provides benefits including higher quality software and innovations, they also perceive barriers to adoption including levels of support and compatibility, according to a Red Hat report assessing enterprise open source usage.

Curiously, security shows up as both a positive and negative in the report, with open source seen as offering better security but the security of the code seen as a barrier. Released on March 2, the 2021 State of Enterprise Open Source report covers data collected from interviews with 1,250 IT leaders worldwide, who were not necessarily Red Hat customers, Red Hat said.

You've probably been hearing a lot about Kubernetes Operators, but if you don't work directly with Red Hat OpenShift or another Kubernetes distribution you may not know precisely what an Operator is. In this post, we'll explain what Operators are and why they're important.

To better understand the "what" and the "how" about Kubernetes Operators, we need to understand the problem(s) that motivated the need for Kubernetes Operators.

Kubernetes is notorious in its ability to integrate and facilitate declarative configuration and automation. This was out-of-the-box manageable for most stateless applications. However, for stateful applications this was a bit problematic. How do you manage and persist the state of your application and it’s dependencies? How do you keep the rest of your application going when you add or remove dependencies? Of course, much of this management was done manually and/or required additional personnel resources to help manage (i.e., DevOps) and, in general, required more of your attention.

Much of these pains, boiled down to one ultimate question at hand: How do you effectively automate stateful applications on Kubernetes?

That answer came in the form of what we call Kubernetes Operators.

Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)! The Beta freeze is underway. The Fedora Linux 34 Beta Go/No-Go meeting is Thursday.

I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.

Every weekday for many years now I’ve woken up, dropped my kids off at school, then grabbed a coffee and sat down at my computer to work on OpenShift and Fedora+RHEL.

Doing this for so long, over time I’ve thought about and refined the why I do this, and I want to write it down so that I can refer to this in various places. Some of this is a more condensed/rephrased variant of this blog post.

I was inspired to be here originally (over 20 years ago) by the Free Software movement – one thing in particular I remember is seeing the Emacs start screen linking to the FSF website on our school’s Solaris workstations (In app advertisement worked!). Along with that, one thing I always found fascinating about software in general is the feeling of "the power of creation" – I can type something and make it happen.

Since then, software has become much, much more foundational to our society (in some cases, probably too much re: social media, etc). In particular here the rise of software-as-a-service and the public clouds. And while we say "public" which has connotations of "openness" – these are all very proprietary clouds.