The recent news of IBM’s purchase of Red Hat sent a ripple through the global open source community, sparking fear that it will eventually push either entire Red Hat or at least some of its parts to the scrap heap.

But we’re not here to make educated guesses about the future of the beloved Linux distribution. Instead, we’re here to list the top 5 best alternatives to Red Hat Linux that you can try right now to see what other options are out there.

• Arista Extends Its Reach Into Containers

  Networking in containerized environments is really hard to do with a traditional network stack. Virtual machines seem complex, according to many engineers I know, but as the Canadian rock band Bachman-Turner Overdrive used to sing "B-b-b-baby, you ain't seen n-n-nothin yet," as containers take complexity to the next level.

  Containers are unlike anything network professionals have dealt with before. They are highly dynamic, are spun up and down very quickly and often run for just a few seconds. Traditional networking can be used for VMs and physical workloads, which aren't very agile and take a long time to boot. But the dynamic nature of containers makes visibility, connectivity and security much more difficult, as services need to be invoked as soon as the container is spun up and then turned off when the container is shut down. If a live container loses connectivity, bad things happen, so ensuring the network is there and rock solid is critical.

• Arista Networks Showcases Any Cloud Networking at KubeCon NA 2018

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Videos Now Online

  This week's KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 in Seattle was the biggest ever! This sold-out event featured four days of information on Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, OpenTracing, Fluentd, gRPC, containerd, and rkt, along with many other exciting projects and topics.

• How Epic Games Uses Kubernetes to Power Fortnite Application Servers

  "This is my first time in the gaming industry, I didn't know what to expect when I joined, but it turns out that scaling a video game is just like scaling any other successful product," Sharpe said. "Modern game development is actually a whole lot of microservices and other types of technology that are used outside of the gaming industry."

  Sharpe said that Epic Games is already heavily invested in AWS (Amazon Web Services) and has been using Docker containers. He added that moving to Kubernetes is a natural evolution of Epic Games' work, which is all about trying to improve developers lives.

• DevOps lessons: 4 aspects of healthy experiments

  Fast iteration is all the rage. And it’s not just DevOps and software.

  It’s even made its way into distilling bourbon. When Bryan Davis of Lost Spirits distillery talked about accelerated bourbon aging in a recent Gastropod podcast, I expected the win would be about reducing costs; it’s expensive to keep bourbon aging for a decade or more! But no. It’s more about tweaking variables over the course of days, rather than years. “I would never have been able to build up the business to the point where I could take all the failed batches and throw them away. And so what the technology really did for me was make it possible for me to compete,” Davis says.

• 6 best practices for highly available Kubernetes clusters

  Everyone running a Kubernetes cluster in production wants it to be reliable. Many administrators implement a multi-master setup, but often this isn't enough to consider a cluster highly available.

  A highly available microservice requires that the system gracefully handle the failures of its components. If one part of the system fails in any way, the system can recover without significant downtime.

  So how exactly can you achieve a highly available, highly reliable, and multi-master Kubernetes cluster? One way is to run a regional Kubernetes cluster on the Google Kubernetes Engine, a managed version of Kubernetes hosted on the Google Cloud Platform.

• Tigera Looks To Improve Cloud-Native Kubernetes Networking

  The new funding was led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Madrona, NEA, and Wing. Total funding to date for Tigera stands at $53 million. The new fund raise is the second such event for the company in 2018, with a $10 million raise announced back in January. EnterpriseNetworkingPlanethas been following Tigera since the company was first announced in May 2016 at the CoreOS Fest event in Berlin, Germany.

  "Kubernetes is gaining momentum within every progressive enterprise," Ratan Tipirneni president and CEO of Tigera, stated in a media advisory. "These businesses cannot get their applications to production without strong security controls and the ability to prove compliance."

  "As a result, we are being pulled into several hundred projects and will use this funding to meet that demand," Tipirneni added.

• Changes to OpenShift Online Starter Tier

  For some time now, we have offered our OpenShift Online service in a few service tiers. This hosted service has been available since 2011, and to date, well over 4 million applications have been launched on OpenShift Online. One of the key features of this hosted form of Red Hat OpenShift has been our Starter tier, where we have provided free access to our award-winning platform for learning and experimenting.

  This service has helped many users kick the tires on OpenShift, and to build their own proof of concepts, or to port a single application to measure the experience. We’re happy that we have been able to enable so many newcomers to our platform with this free service.

  We have listened to our users, and we’re happy to announce that we will be increasing the resources of this free service by double. Due to the popularity of our platform, we will be introducing time limits on the Starter platform to allow more users to take advantage of this useful resource.

• VMware Paid $550M for Heptio to Boost Its Kubernetes Portfolio

  VMware paid $550 million for its recently closed acquisition of 2-year-old Kubernetes-focused startup Heptio. That amount was a substantial premium over what Heptio had raised from investors and other similar deals in the Kubernetes space.

• KubeCon 2018 Bits

  This week KubeCon took place in Seattle, offering over 8,000 attendees (2,000 on the waiting list didn’t make it) an updated vision on Kubernetes as well as the projects under development and consideration. Thus far three projects have graduated (Kubernetes, Prometheus and Envoy) a dozen or so are incubating and many more are hopeful within the Sandbox. Over 125 event sponsors wanted to be sure the attendees understood their view and involvement in these projects, most of them going way beyond simply offering Kubernetes distributions. Security was a hot topic as well as management and deployment of these projects.

• The co-founder of $725 million cloud startup Mesosphere is stepping aside as CEO to make way for a Symantec veteran

  Earlier this year, cloud startup Mesosphere raised $125 million, bringing its total funding to just shy of $250 million. That deal valued Mesosphere at $725 million, according to Bloomberg, up from $600 million in 2016.

  Now, Mesosphere co-founder Florian Leibert is following through on his previously-announced intention to step aside as CEO, to take a new role focused on strategy and working with customers. Replacing him will be Mike Fey, most recently president and COO of Symantec, in a move that the company says will help it achieve the next stage of growth by going after larger customers.

• Kubernetes vendors target container security, operations and management

  If you were kicking the tires on Kubernetes and other cloud/container services, you found may have found nirvana at this week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 where all manner of new operational software and support from VMware, Arista and others were on display.

  To access the growing popularity of cloud, Kubernetes and containers, the Cloud Foundry Foundation released the results of a new survey that found among other things that 45 percent of companies are doing at least some cloud-native app development, and 40 percent are doing some re-architecting/refactoring of their legacy apps.

• Istio service mesh tradeoffs prompt caution among IT pros

  Some Kubernetes proponents said they believe Istio service mesh is as important to cloud-native infrastructure as container orchestration, but most enterprise IT shops aren't ready to dive in just yet.

  Service mesh, a term coined by the makers of Linkerd in 2016, refers to a microservices networking architecture that consists of a centralized control plane and a pool of sidecar containers deployed in each container cluster pod. The sidecars' proximity to microservices workloads creates detailed visibility into application performance and intricate segmentation of networks for container security. Istio is also backed by IBM and Google, and therefore has the attention of the Kubernetes community, especially since the project reached version 1.0 in July 2018.

  Google and IBM subsidiary Red Hat promoted Istio management products and services at KubeCon here this week, while the project generated buzz in the halls among conference attendees. In the right hands, service mesh can be a vital tool for microservices management, but it comes with daunting complexity for IT pros already challenged to learn container orchestration.

• ​What is the Kubernetes hybrid cloud and why it matters

  Over 8,000 people are at KubeCon in Seattle. Every major tech company and businesses I've never even heard of are here and trumpeting their Kubenetes distros -- about 80 of them. IBM recently bought Red Hat for a cool $34-billion. I, and others, think they did it to get Red Hat's Kubernetes expertise. Why? To answer this question we need to look into the hybrid-cloud model.

• Instaclustr Releases Three Open Source Projects That Facilitate Cassandra-Kubernetes Integration and LDAP/Kerberos Authentication

• Instaclustr Announces Three Open Source Projects That Facilitate Cassandra-Kubernetes Integration and LDAP/Kerberos Authentication

  Instaclustr, the leading provider of completely managed solutions for scalable open source technologies, today announced the availability of three open source projects purpose-built to expand developers’ capabilities using Apache Cassandra and address pain points. These projects include an open source Cassandra operator for more seamlessly running and operating Cassandra within Kubernetes, and open source LDAP and Kerberos authenticator plug-ins for Cassandra.

• Instaclustr expands Apache Cassandra with new open-source software

  Instaclustr Pty Ltd., which sells hosted and managed versions of popular open-source software Apache Cassandra, Spark and Kafka, is giving back to the community with three projects of its own.

  The company says it’s open-sourcing three “purpose-built” projects aimed at addressing pain points and expanding the capabilities of the Apache Cassandra database. Apache Cassandra is a distributed database that’s used to manage large amounts of structured data while providing continuous availability with no single point of failure.

• Kubernetes open-source project matures as commercialization accelerates

  This week, the annual KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 event taking place in Seattle will give the cloud computing industry a chance to take stock of how far Kubernetes has come.

  On the flip side, the show also will work through the issues that may be preventing this open-source container orchestration platform from achieving its full potential.

  Kubernetes has been a banner story in high tech throughout 2018, and the technology looks like it will continue its momentum toward ubiquitous adoption in coming years. The Kubernetes ecosystem has become amazingly vibrant, though that’s a double-edged sword.

• Kubernetes caretaker auditions for Hoarders; takes in another open source project

  At the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's (CNCF) KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 meetup on Tuesday, the CNCF revealed it will adopt, shelter and nourish an itinerant jumble of letters known on the street as "etcd."

  Pronounced "et-cee-dee" among those who dare speak its name, etcd is a distributed key-value store. It hails from the Linux /etc/ directory, which lives in the root folder and stores configuration files and related subdirectories.

• Kubernetes and serverless are getting chummy in open source

  But the Cloud Native Computing Foundation — home to Kubernetes, the popular open-source container orchestration platform — wants everyone to know it’s not partial to either containers or serverless, and there’s room for both, and others, in next-generation enterprise technology.

  “We love serverless in CNCF,” said Chris Aniszczyk (pictured), chief technology officer and chief operating officer of CNCF. “We just view it as another kind of programmatic model that eventually runs on some type of containerized stack.”

• Atomist Announces Delivery to Kubernetes With Its Open Source SDM, adds GitLab Support

  Atomist, the software delivery automation company, today announced the ability for developers to now deliver to Kubernetes using the open source Software Delivery Machine (SDM) in local mode. SDM local is completely open source and now supports delivery to Kubernetes, whether a single-node cluster on a laptop using minikube or a fully-managed Kubernetes service.

• Why Kubernetes Is Successful and Boring

  Google has had a common message throughout 2018 about Kubernetes, and the message is simple: Kubernetes is boring.

  At the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2018 event here, Google engineer and conference co-chair Janet Kuo echoed comments made by her peer Aparna Sinha, group product manager at Google, at the Kubecon and CloudNativecon Europe 2018 keynotes in May, which is simply that Kubernetes is boring, and boring is good.

  Kuo said in the early days of Kubernetes the focus was on building fast and adding new features. By 2015, a focus was added to make it easier for users and administrators to build, deploy and use Kubernetes. At this point in the maturity cycle of Kubernetes, Kuo commented that adoption has moved from the early stage of adopters to more mainstream deployments.

  "Kubernetes is now getting so solid and so mature and so great, that it is very, very boring," Kuo said during her keynote. "Boring is good; it means that lots of companies are already using it, and it just works."

  Kuo added that being boring means organizations can just focus on delivering business value, rather than spending time on making Kubernetes usable.

• Kubernetes Federation Evolution

  Deploying applications to a kubernetes cluster is well defined and can in some cases be as simple as kubectl create -f app.yaml. The user’s story to deploy apps across multiple clusters has not been that simple. How should an app workload be distributed? Should the app resources be replicated into all clusters, or replicated into selected clusters or partitioned into clusters? How is the access to clusters managed? What happens if some of the resources, which user wants to distribute pre-exist in all or fewer clusters in some form.

  In SIG multicluster, our journey has revealed that there are multiple possible models to solve these problems and there probably is no single best fit all scenario solution. Federation however is the single biggest kubernetes open source sub project which has seen maximum interest and contribution from the community in this problem space. The project initially reused the k8s API to do away with any added usage complexity for an existing k8s user. This became non-viable because of problems best discussed in this community update.

• [Red Hat] Men: Step out of your bubble to champion gender diversity

  According to Catalyst Canada, men represent more than 95 per cent of the CEO positions in Canada’s 100 largest publicly traded companies. With such a big divide, those who are leaders must help define the role those with power and privilege play. Many men want to get more involved, but we must go about it the right way. We want to respect the successful work that has already been done, find the right fit for our skills and learn from our female leaders who have the deep knowledge of this issue. As Tanya van Biesen, executive director of Catalyst Canada, has said: “The path to gender equity is a journey. There is no silver bullet – only commitment and action.”

  As leaders, our self-worth is often measured by meeting hard targets and achieving financial goals. Stepping forward to become an advocate for gender diversity is uncharted territory for many of us. Yet, it is a business imperative with a body of evidence demonstrating a positive effect on the bottom line.

• IBM's $34 billion Red Hat acquisition came after deal talks with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, sources say

  When IBM announced its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat on October 28, the tech word was struck by the huge price tag, as well as its potential to revive IBM's struggling cloud business. But as it turns out, things could have gone a lot differently.

  Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all engaged in deal discussions with Red Hat and looked closely into an acquisition in the months and weeks before Red Hat struck a deal with IBM, according to sources familiar with the deal.

  As an open-source software company, Red Hat is strategic because of its popularity with developers. It's also is the largest commercial maker of the Linux operating system. IBM wanted the technology to enhance its hybrid-cloud project and to give its portfolio an edge.

  Red Hat indicated in a public filing on November 30 that three unnamed companies considered making bids in addition to IBM. CNBC reported in October that Google had looked into buying Red Hat. But Microsoft and Amazon's deal talks with Red Hat have not been previously reported.

• IBM goes hard in open source so enterprises can take it easy

  IBM’s investment in open source goes back years. Big Blue went all-in on Kubernetes, the popular open-source container orchestration platform about two years ago, according to Chris Rosen (pictured), program director, offering management, IBM Container Service and IBM Container Registry. The company contributes to the open-source Cloud Native Computing Foundation upstream and then simplifies the technology for end users.

• Arista EOS containers integrated with Red Hat, Tigera products

  Arista has integrated the containerized version of its network operating system with Red Hat and Tigera software to support containers running on public, private and hybrid clouds.

  Arista released this week a technology preview of the integration of containerized Arista EOS with Tigera Calico, the open source control plane the company developed to distribute security policy rules across containers and virtual machines running on cloud environments. Arista plans to make the integration generally available in 2019 within the Tigera Secure Enterprise Edition product.

• Contrail, Red Hat treat multicloud-network headache with Kubernetes

  A number of computing customers lately are asking for a smarter network. This might mean programmability, transparency, multiple lanes for prioritized web traffic, etc. The question is, will software developers and administrators need to get smarter in order to use such networks? Don’t they have their hands full already refactoring applications and managing distributed cloud environments?

  Developers these days simply want to consume the network in the same way they consume compute and storage. They don’t want the job of configuring it — at least not if that entails plunging deep below the application layer.

  “The app is the thing that’s going to consume these things, and the app developer doesn’t necessarily want to worry about IP address and port numbers and firewall rules and things like that,” said Scott Sneddon (pictured, left), senior director and chief evangelist of cloud at Juniper Networks Inc.

• Open Source Is the Future, So Where Does IBM i Fit In?

  The IBM i server reached a milestone this year when it turned 30 years old, an amazing feat for a remarkable system that continues to provide computational value to tens of thousands of organizations around the world. But another birthday was celebrated this year that the IBM i community should take note of: The 20th anniversary of the beginning of the open source movement.

  Now, this birthday is a little bit questionable because open source software existed before 1998, of course. But the time is worth marking because an important meeting took place in Palo Alto, California, where the phrase “open source” was deliberately created by a group of industry leaders.

  That meeting, which was spurred by the release of the source code to the Netscape Web browser, would set into motion a movement that would change the entire IT industry. The concept of freely sharing the guts of software, rather than treating it as private property, started slowly, but it would eventually build into an insurmountable force.

  [...]

  There’s no reason why both approaches can’t co-exist. IBM can bring machine learning tools like Scikit-Learn and Numpy to the platform via PASE, while others in the IBM i community can develop native open source software, including an ERP package. There will be tradeoffs in performance and usability, of course, but having choices is part of the joy of having a healthy, robust community – and there’s even a place for proprietary software too.

  In the end, the momentum behind the open source software movement is just too great to ignore. Where IBM i sits in 2028, when it celebrates its 40th birthday, will largely depend on how welcoming IBM and the IBM i community are to open source software and modern software development methodologies. The future literally depends on it.

• Oracle shows up at KubeCon bearing ‘comprehensive cloud native framework’

  Oracle crashed the party at KubeCon today, promising to free developers from vendor lock-in with what it claims is the “most comprehensive cloud native framework”.

  The veteran enterprise software vendor said its Oracle Cloud Native Framework “arms” developers with “a cloud native solution that spans public cloud, on premises and hybrid cloud deployments.”

• Everything that was announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon

  KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 is being held this week in Seattle, and naturally a long list of companies and organizations are using the event to update the public on their projects related Kubernetes and Cloud Native Computing.

  The event is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. The foundation oversees Kubernetes and other open source projects related to microservices.

• Google's rent-a-cloud biz revs Istio for its Kubernetes service

  As a gathering of DevOps types at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 gets under way in Seattle, Washington, Google plans to tell anyone who will listen that its managed Kubernetes service, GKE, now can be ordered with Istio on the side, though you'll have to ladle it on yourself.

  Here's how the Chocolate Factory described the open source software:

  "Istio is a service mesh that lets you manage and visualize your applications as services, rather than individual infrastructure components," said Chen Goldberg, director of engineering at Google Cloud and Jennifer Lin, director of Google Cloud management, in a blog post provided in advance to The Register.

• Exploring Kubernetes’ impact in hybrid cloud at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018

  In a computing market constantly chasing more agile methods of deploying data, portable container technologies have become the lynchpin in enterprise multicloud strategy with the Kubernetes container orchestration at the helm. Boasting historic growth and popularity among leading cloud vendors, the relatively young technology is proving fundamental within a market transforming as a result of the freedom and experimentation it has enabled.

  As a shift in favor of hybrid cloud computing prompts cloud leaders to prioritize Kubernetes and, more directly, leverage its capabilities, how will its standardization and widening adoption transform the open-source tool? Moreso, how will Kubernetes continue to transform the market at large?

  Looking to answer these and other questions, SiliconANGLE is at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018, currently underway in Seattle, Washington, with exclusive commentary and interviews from our roving news desk, theCUBE. TheCUBE coverage will begin at 10:30 a.m. PST Tuesday, Dec. 11, and end at 3:30 pm. Thursday, Dec. 13.

• CNCF Takes Control of Open Source etcd Data Store Project

  The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which oversees the development of Kubernetes, announced today that the open source etcd distributed key value store has now been accepted as a complementary incubation project. The announcement was made at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 conference today.

  etcd was developed by CoreOS to provide a reliable way to store data across a cluster of machines. CoreOS was subsequently acquired by Red Hat. At its base level, etcd is written in Go and relies on the Raft consensus algorithm to manage a highly available replicated log to manage everything from recovering from hardware failures to portioning networks.

• Red Hat donates a key open-source Kubernetes tool to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

• The Cloud Native Computing Foundation adds etcd to its open-source stable

  The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the open-source home of projects like Kubernetes and Vitess, today announced that its technical committee has voted to bring a new project on board. That project is etcd, the distributed key-value store that was first developed by CoreOS (now owned by Red Hat, which in turn will soon be owned by IBM). Red Hat has now contributed this project to the CNCF.

  Etcd, which is written in Go, is already a major component of many Kubernetes deployments, where it functions as a source of truth for coordinating clusters and managing the state of the system. Other open-source projects that use etcd include Cloud Foundry, and companies that use it in production include Alibaba, ING, Pinterest, Uber, The New York Times and Nordstrom.