IBM Acquires Red Hat for $34 Billion USD: Linux, Hybrid Cloud, OpenStack, & Kubernetes Solutions

Written by Eliran Ouzan

Posted on Oct. 30, 2018

"Game Changing" Move by IBM the Largest Software Company Acquisition in Corporate History

IBM announced this weekend that it will acquire the shares of Red Hat (NASDAQ: RHT) at a $190, a 62.8% premium to their closing price of $116.68 in a $34 billion USD deal still subject to approval by regulators & stockholders. If closed successfully, the deal will represent the largest purchase price paid for a software company in history, topping the 2016 acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft for $26 billion USD. In initial comments on the merger, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty stated: “The acquisition of Red Hat is a game-changer. It changes everything about the cloud market. IBM will become the world’s #1 hybrid cloud provider, offering companies the only open cloud solution that will unlock the full value of the cloud for their businesses.” Founded in 1994, Red Hat is one of the oldest and most widely used Linux distributions available for data centers today. Red Hat was the first open source software company to $500 million USD in annual revenue and is expected to surpass $3 billion in revenue in 2018. IBM gains the Red Hat Enterprise Linux codebase, programming talent, patents/IP, & goodwill, as well as the OpenShift, Kubernetes, OpenStack, JBoss, CoreOS, & Ansible resources. Red Hat has over 12,600 employees with corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina. As IBM is projecting cloud scale-out at the global level as a $1 trillion USD annual market, Red Hat's programming & engineering talent is already innovating at the highest levels of implementation for Fortune 500 corporations and provides an industry leading Linux product suite for data center management. This merger could have a major impact on the future of CentOS.

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FutureStack 2018: New Relic Cloud-Native Monitoring Tools for Kubernetes, Docker, & Microservices

Written by Eliran Ouzan

Posted on Sep. 23, 2018

Monitoring, Visibility, & Metrics for DevOps - Improved Production Efficiency for Web/Mobile Apps

New Relic is a cloud software analytics company founded in 2008 by Lew Cirne. New Relic raised $214 million in venture capital funding before going public with an IPO in 2014. Now listed on the New York Stock Exchange ($NEWR), the company has a valuation of $5.4 billion USD. The New Relic network monitoring tools for data centers and web/mobile software applications in production have been widely adopted as enterprise solutions. Each year the company holds a FutureStack conference for programmers, developers, & ecosystem companies to present seminars on various technical issues or announce new product releases. At the FutureStack 2018 convention in SF, Cirne noted that 50% of global GDP will be digitized by 2021, representing a total of $52 trillion USD which "drives world's brightest minds to focus on the problem." The question for enterprise corporations is how to move faster and accelerate the future. The solution New Relic is promoting is based in the use of Microservices, Kubernetes, & Docker containers. New Relic has 50 Agile teams with over 400+ programmers working on building new software for monitoring, visibility, & metrics, as well as enabling devops teams to automate repetitive tasks. The key to this is New Relic's "Four Pillars of an Observability Platform," where cloud metrics, network routing, & data analytics software must all be "Application Centric, Cloud Native, Intelligent, & Programmable." Cirne announced new tools for programmers and systems administrators at FutureStack 2018, including distributed tracing, the Elixir agent for APM, Kubernetes monitoring, & GraphQL API support. The FutureStack 2018 keynote address also included featured showcase presentations from major New Relic partners IBM & USA Today using the software at scale with thousands of active elastic cluster node servers.

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Nabla Containers: New Format from IBM Designed for Strong Isolation on Cloud Hosts

Written by Eliran Ouzan

Posted on Aug. 1, 2018

Framework Installs with Docker to Add Unikernel Techniques Based on Solo5 & runnc

IBM recently launched a new container standard that functions as a type of plugin alternative to Docker's native format with the intention of creating more isolated sandbox environments for cloud architecture. Similar to the gVisor framework released by Google this year, Nabla Containers seeks to reduce the number of attack vectors that can be targeted by exploits for apps operating in production at scale. Rather than functioning as a true competitor to Docker, Nabla basically works as an alternative format that can be installed on the same hardware and software platforms (i.e. public/private cloud hosts) to provide more robust security. Nabla uses library OS/unikernel techniques via the Solo5 project middleware that reduces the number of Linux system calls required to 9 when operating a container. The main difference is that Nabla uses runnc as "the OCI-interfacing container runtime," whereas gVisor (another new hardened container sandbox alternative) is built around runsc and Docker containers are based on runC as the universal container runtime. Docker donated the code for runC to the Open Container Project in 2015 "as a standalone tool, to be used as plumbing by infrastructure plumbers everywhere." The Solo5 project was originally started by Dan Williams at IBM Research during work to port the MirageOS to support the Linux KVM hypervisor. The main components of Solo5 are the kernel, ukvm, a testing suite, and a set of tools which support various virtualization requirements across different operating systems & hardware devices. Nabla Containers will mostly appeal to programmers and developers who have a drastic need to reduce the number of system calls permitted to a VM in production to implement higher levels of security, although this will require custom formatted disk images that are not cross-compatible with Docker's runC code.

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