Wednesday the 3rd of october was the Red Hat Forum day in Breda. Red Hat Forum is an event organized by and for RedHat partners and their customers to showcase projects they have done, using Red Hat technology, and of course to meet each other, collect swag/goodies and leave with new ideas.
A great event from the start
Like any Red Hat event everything was very well organized, you were welcomed by a Barista in the morning to provide you with some quality caffeine, registration was smoothless and they even created an app which contained the agenda and other useful information.
The day was quite business focused. This showed in the subjects and depth of the presentations. No updates about the latest and upcoming features in Red Hat products, but more a general picture of why and how you would choose Red Hat and its partners for helping your organization through your digital transformation.
“Adaptability to change is the most important success factor for survival.”
Inspired by
Charles Darwin
Red Hat Forum 2018 takeaways
The day started with an opening keynote by Margaret Dawson (VP of product marketing at Red Hat). Her story was well presented and good food for thought, and supported by some nice facts. The world is moving faster than ever and she referenced Darwin; adaptability to change is the most important success factor for survival. Therefore, make sure you invest more in innovation, be willing to take risks and create a culture of collaboration. High performing organizations have continuous deployment processes in place and deploy more frequently than less performing organization (ref: State of DevOps report 2018), they use open source technology on a wide scale, leveraging the community. Think about how you are currently being disrupted in your field and how you instead can try to become a disruptor yourself.
DORA’s State of DevOps Report 2018
Presentation takeaways
- More organizations are transforming their structures to become more lean and agile in order to fulfill consumers increasing demand.
- We see that organizations are choosing some form of hybrid cloud, because they also have to deal with their legacy. Important here is to choose application first, think about which (cloud) strategy works best for the application.
After the break the second keynote presented how semiconductor company NXP is on the way of transforming processes to become more autonomous by using DevOps and becoming ready for constant change. They started by focusing on their workforce, creating a learning culture, working out loud, experimenting, failing fast and automating repetitive work. From there they picked their technologies to support this transformation. In the end the architecture of the full operations pipeline was shown.
- Key take-away here is in order to transform people to adapt to the new culture, management plays an important role to lead by example, coach and create a safe environment where these values are supported.
“AI and robots are there to augment us and make sure we can do our work better, safer and make less mistakes.”
The next presentation was by Hans Bos, National Technology Officer of Microsoft, which highlighted the partnership between Microsoft and Red Hat. This partnership focuses mainly on having Red Hat technology available on Azure, where this is the technology stack of choice if you expect you will need to scale up. The subject then went to how the cloud can help us progress in the field of AI and machine learning. A cool example was showcased where a model was being used for machine learning of autonomous driving in a simulated 3D environment, leveraging the compute power of the cloud to speed up this learning process. Of course we were also soothed by the message that robots will not take over the world with lasers, or more serious that AI will start taking over our jobs and doing intelligent human work. AI and robots are there to augment us and make sure we can do our work better, safer and make less mistakes.
Breakout sessions with Rabobank container technology customer case
Lunchtime provided a multitude of delicious foods, to fuel up and get ready for the afternoon sessions. In the afternoon there were four time slots with breakout sessions and workshops. One of the highlights here was a session about how Rabobank had been experimenting with container technology, especially with OpenShift and successfully on-boarding teams in production.
One of the lessons learned by Rabobank was “decide on strategy first, before introducing new technology just for the sake of it”.
The workshop followed was on how to monitor your application containers and nodes running on your OpenShift environment using Prometheus and Grafana given by our expert engineers Miguel Lopes and Gopal Ramachandran, very useful to learn! More on observability in OpenShift? Read this blog.
Of course the event ended with a drink, more networking, drinking Club Mate and winning 3rd price in the Stack the Containers competition.
Video impression
Photo impression of the 2018 BeNeLux Red Hat Forum
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