Four of our technical architects joined 1,900 other attendees at the Red Hat Technical Exchange North America in Orlando, Florida, Oct. 14-18. This is the first time the Technical Exchange has been open to Red Hat partners – historically, it was a Red Hat-only event.
The weeklong conference gave attendees a chance to network with Red Hat’s technical resources, hear about Red Hat technologies, and “crash and burn” while learning new software. “We don’t always have the opportunity to try new things before we get in the field,” said Steve Williams, Perficient technical architect. “The hands-on labs gave us that opportunity, and we now have that experience and knowledge to take back to our customers.”
Red Hat also made several announcements at the Technical Exchange, including:
OpenShift 4.2, which allows for installation on restricted networks for development in security-conscious environments
We work with financial services, government, and healthcare clients that cannot have open networks because of security concerns and system restrictions or do not have the capability. This makes it difficult to stand up an OpenShift environment because it is disconnected from Red Hat.
The OpenShift 4.2 release focuses on tooling that is designed to deliver a developer-centric user experience. It also helps ease the management of the platform and its applications, with the availability of OpenShift migration tooling from 3.x to 4.x, as well as newly supported disconnected installs. OpenShift 4.2 provides a more flexible environment for clients in all industries and allows developers to work in one environment rather than in multiple environments.
IBM Cloud Paks™, are enterprise-ready, containerized software solutions that provide an open, faster, and more secure way to move core business applications to any cloud
IBM Cloud Paks run on OpenShift on IBM Cloud and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and includes containerized IBM middleware and common software services for development and management, as well as a common integration layer. Clients can use certified IBM software (part of the Cloud Pak) deployed as a container workload and deploy it on OpenShift.
As the new IBM and Red Hat partnership grows, we will see more collaboration and more streamlined software capabilities like those introduced at the Technical Exchange.
An OpenShift case study
Currently, Red Hat’s focus is on OpenShift, which was evident in the many keynotes, breakout sessions, demos, and labs at the Technical Exchange. One of the keynotes was about Red Hat’s partnership with Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) to deploy the ChRIS Project, a web-based medical imaging platform developed using Red Hat technology, on the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC). ChRIS started out as an open-source research project at the BCH Fetal-Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center to enhance clinicians’ access to the latest developments in research software innovation, specifically software that analyzes image data from MRIs and x-rays.
ChRIS has a distributed user interface that is designed to enable real-time collaboration between clinicians and radiologists around the world. The keynote helped attendees see how Red Hat technology can be applied to a global problem and help create better health outcomes for patients.
Key takeaways
OpenShift’s versatile platform allows developers to integrate it with a variety of software and create custom applications and systems for clients. Like Red Hat, Perficient is leveraging OpenShift for many of our clients. “We’re also ramping up OpenShift, and it’s exciting to know that we’re part of this momentum and helping Red Hat build business around OpenShift,” said Technical Exchange attendee Dave Ellis.
If you didn’t make it to the Technical Exchange, save the date for Red Hat Summit 2020, which will be held in San Francisco April 27-29.
