#rhsummit

Another Red Hat Summit in the books. I think this was my third or fourth in the order and completely out of order. My Linux life began with Red Hat Linux 4.2 over 20 years ago. I had a stint of Slackware and later transitioned over to Fedora when they restructured the outputs. I even took a RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer) exam on Red Hat Linux 8.0. I later refreshed that on Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1, what eventually become RHEL at 3.0. So, I was relevant with Red Hat for quite some time in my early sysadmin days.

Anyhow, this year’s summit was jammed-packed with session but I had too much booth duty to enjoy any of it. See this as a wrap-up from a lurker on the ecosystem expo floor.

New use case clip

Our social media guru Stephane captured me doing a brief talk about lift & transform on the bridge across the ecosystem expo hall.

Announcements

Tuesday night was the intro keynote. I was out in the expo hall and somehow the audio was terrible. Later that turned out to be case for the folks in the live audience as well. During one of our customer’s talks they had to swap out the mic during the keynote.

Jim and Ginni had a little fireside chat about their crusade to embrace open source to drive innovation. I did not quite catch the full context but Satya Nadella showed up and chatted up Jim with a partnership around Azure. I can only imagine that Red Hat wants some of that developer love that Microsoft is shedding left, right and center.

The big news was that RHEL 8.0 hit GA which has been in beta since late last year. I was going to make an attempt to summarize the new features but I will run out of breath quickly. Head over to the official documentation and gasp at that long, long list of new features. Although, I can’t wait to create that 1PiB XFS volume!

Next up was the OpenShift 4.0 release that “soon” will become available. I wrote a post on this subject a few weeks ago but what also has become available is the ability to install on bare-metal besides the AWS open developer preview. That said, I can’t wait to get back to the ranch and kick the tires. Unfortunately, I missed the release party because we had our own event.

Customer appreciation event

We got spoiled by the #HPERedHat partnership by getting a tour of the legendary Fenway Park in Boston. I’m not a baseball fan by any means but I do appreciate the history that the stadium represent. I only had a brief visit at this event as I had the graveyard shift on the show floor combined with an Uber driver who took two laps around downtown before dropping me off on the opposite side of the stadium entrance. Whiskey tasting and socializing with customers was the primary agenda and mission accomplished!

In-booth talks

When this event was starting to form, I had the idea of submitting a handful of talks and maybe one or two get picked to be presented. Nope. Big Nope! I got all four, scheduled twice. Stephane captured a few minutes of one here and you can check out the topics here (unfortunately I can’t share the decks):

Introduction to HPE Nimble Storage with Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift and HPE Cloud Volumes: A perfect match made in the public cloud

Instantly clone production data to use in CI/CD pipelines with Red Hat OpenShift

Best practices for stateful workloads on Red Hat OpenShift using SAN storage

The crowd at Red Hat Summit was amazing, couldn't do it without them!

Summary

I hope I get to do this next year again. I’d be more careful about submitting abstracts for the in-booth talks though and I'll sharpen an even better talk for the CFP. An upgraded pass to attend a few sessions would be nice too. 😉

Great customer conversations! Great partner conversations! I have a long list of things to follow up on, but before that, I’m going to enjoy a weekend in Boston with my wife. I think it was over ten years ago I was here, the skyline has changed, I’ve noticed that much.

And to close, there is no “i” in team! Awesome job everyone who supported the show!

Random pictures scattered on my phone