F5 ‘Open’ for Business at Red Hat Summit

OpenStack. OpenShift. Open Source.

Undoubtedly no one reading right now would be surprised by the finding from Sonatype’s 2017 DevSecOps Community Survey that “80% of a typical application is now assembled from open source components and frameworks.” Nor would you be surprised to hear the author of the NorthBridge Future of Open Source survey claim that “the most important transformations in the enterprise IT space - cloud, SDI, digitisation and DevOps - will be driven by open source.”

What you might find surprising is that the same NorthBridge survey found, for the first time, adoption of open source for production environments outpacing proprietary software. More than 55% of respondents are using OSS for production infrastructure. That sudden leap ahead was also reflected in our 2017 State of Application Delivery survey, where use of OpenStack by respondents rocketed from less than 10% in 2016 to more than double at 21% in 2017. That’s significant, because the roles most likely to cite strong adoption of Open Stack were not app developers and cloud architects, but infrastructure and network roles (27%), security roles (26%) and those in executive level positions (21%). Roles typically associated with production environments, not just development. In the face of the most recent OpenStack community survey (available here) that notes “The median OpenStack user runs 61% to 80% of their overall cloud infrastructure on OpenStack” that make sense. If you’re running a cloud, you need your infrastructure automated and provisioning/management processes orchestrated, and OpenStack certainly provides a way to achieve that. That means infrastructure and network roles, as well as security diving in. 

Adoption rates of other open sourcey technologies is similarly skyrocketing. There are a good number of companies out there whose business model is based on open source, with support and services along with a commitment to continue developing and contributing to such projects forming the basis for that model. Almost all follow in the footsteps of Red Hat, who not only pioneered the model but proved it could be successful.

That’s why F5 is pleased as punch to be sponsoring Red Hat Summit this week, as well as committing our own resources to development and support for Red Hat open technologies like OpenStack and OpenShift. We recognize the importance of open source to business everywhere, particularly when it comes to cloud and software-defined everything, and we’re proud to support the communities and providers that support the communities by making sure our technologies play well together.

We recently certified our reference design for version 8 and 9 of Red Hat OpenStack on top of our Red Hat OpenShift news that includes taking the reins of that project and driving it forward in conjunction with its very enthusiastic community.

We’ve got a lot going on at Red Hat Summit, so stop by the booth and get your badge swiped for a chance at an Oculus Rift + Touch and then check out one our demos showcasing Cisco APIC and Red Hat OpenStack or our OpenShift demonstration. If you’re near the Partner Pavilion Theater on Tuesday, May 2ndat 12:30pm you can take a break and hear how to Automate, Secure and Scale with F5 & Red Hat, presented by Senior Manager of Architecture and Engineering Paul Pindell and his Solution Architect cohort, Kent Munson. Ask them lots of questions and tell them I sent you cause they love that, really. Kent will also be presenting on our OpenShift integration in the theater, so you won’t want to miss that.

We’re also expanding and enhancing our Ansible playbooks (available on git, of course) and I hear there’s another demo for that. There are lots of opportunities at the show to stop by the booth (#136) and get a look at a broad selection of integration of F5 and Red Hat technologies.

If you're not at the show (and you’re not alone, trust me) you can follow along on Twitter using #RHSummitor follow @F5Networks for updates and news from the show floor.