The software giant’s chief executive said Microsoft will develop more hardware as the firm sets the stage to release its first branded tablet, the Surface. [Read more]
In his few short years as a developer, 19-year-old Sam Kottler has racked up what seems like a decade’s worth of Linux experience.
After starting a small web consultancy building Drupal sites as a high school student in Connecticut, he dabbled in systems administration for Drupal, worked in hosting engineering at Acquia, then joined mobile payment startup Venmo as a one-man systems engineering group where he worked on scaling up their data stores and performance tuning.
That company was sold this summer for $26 million and Kottler started working full time in the virtualization R&D group at Red Hat. Meanwhile, the sophomore at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts is pursuing a double major in political science and computer science. On the side, he contributes to Fedora and volunteers a few hours each month for the New York group of Technology for Obama.
How does he possibly have time for all of this?
“It’s a very interesting experiment in concurrency, for sure,” Kottler said with a slight laugh. It helps that the team he works with is based in Scotland, he said, so he works in the morning and very late at night.
“Red Hat has a solid work-life balance,” he said. “The weekends are mine and I do almost all my school stuff then.”
Still, most of his energy and effort goes into his Red Hat project, “The Foreman,” a lifecycle management tool for servers that works with Puppet. His job is “to make it awesome,” he said, by adding features to the point at which it’s ready to be included upstream in the company’s CloudForms product.
That also means tirelessly evangelizing the project to grow the community of contributors. He’ll speak at more than a dozen events this year and writes papers and blog posts for the project.
This devotion to problem solving is a common trait among Linux enthusiasts, he says, citing the kernel developers profiled each week in Linux.com’s “30 Developers in 30 Weeks” series. Like them, Kottler originally got involved with Linux to fix bugs in his favorite tools, he said. And like them, he now finds himself absorbed by that work.
“It fits in somewhere between work and passion project,” he said.
As you finalize your plans for LinuxCon Europe, you may find yourself needing to plot out your schedule for each day of the event. After all, in addition to the main conference, there are an abundance of co-located events throughout the week, including the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, the KVM Forum, the oVirt and Gluster workshops, and even a few 
more. With all that going on, not having a schedule means running the risk of missing something amazing. Furthermore, and more to the point, you may miss something amazing that’s taking place in the Gluster Community Workshop on Thursday, Nov. 8.
GlusterFS is a very popular distributed file system. By some bizarre coincidence, it also happens to be ridiculously easy to deploy and use. Actually, that’s not a coincidence at all. GlusterFS’ popularity is partly explained by its ease of use and simplicity. As part of our efforts to expand the usage of GlusterFS and grow the Gluster community globally, we created these workshops as an opportunity for community members to learn more about GlusterFS, and this is shaping up to be the best workshop yet – by far.
5. See me present the most recent roadmap for the Gluster Community and the GlusterFS distributed storage system. Read that sentence carefully. It’s almost as if I’m referring to two separate things. Hmmm.
4. Hear all about the hard work that’s gone into building a GlusterFS block device driver for QEMU. As part of that, you’ll see the most recent benchmarks (hint: they’re pretty exciting). And what’s more, you’ll learn that this work is being contributed by non-Red Hat employees. In fact, they work for a multi-gazillion dollar tech titan that you’re no doubt familiar with.
3. Learn about integration with oVirt. Vijay Bellur, one of the GlusterFS project’s architects, will talk about how we integrate GlusterFS, KVM and oVirt under a single management interface. One complaint we often hear is that there is no management GUI for GlusterFS. Vijay will demonstrate how oVirt now supports deploying and managing GlusterFS volumes. He’ll also show some of the management APIs that we utilize.
2. Extend GlusterFS in new and exciting ways. Florian Haas, Hastexo CEO, discuss how one goes about integrating GlusterFS with the Pacemaker HA stack for high availability clusters. You’ll also see Gustavo Berviand Brand of the SCALUS project talk about how he implemented on-demand file caching in GlusterFS with custom translators. Remember, GlusterFS isn’t just a distributed filesystem, it’s a highly flexible set of building blocks for creating your own distributed storage systems.
1. Expand your knowledge of GlusterFS with practical, in-depth instruction for sysadmins of all stripes. Dustin Black will give his highly popular “GlusterFS for Sysadmins” talk, and Eco Willson and Niels de Vos will give live demos featuring a practical getting started script, Unified File and Object via the OpenStack Swift API, and a Wireshark integration.
And of course, we’ll also have some lovely parting gifts for everyone who attends. I heard a rumor that there will be a drawing at the end for a couple of geek-friendly devices that you won’t want to miss.
If this sounds like your kind of gig, you may want to register, either as part of your global LinuxCon registration or individually, for those who won’t be able to attend the rest of LinuxCon.
Ever since it was apparent that Red Hat would become the first billion-dollar Linux company, fans of free and open source software have held the company up as the poster child for Linux’s business success.
That milestone was officially achieved earlier this year, but somehow the good news about Red Hat just keeps on coming.
Case in point: On top of the ever-rosy financial results it continues to report — the most recent of which were announced last month — Red Hat was also recently named by Forbes magazine the fourth most innovative company in both the United States and the world.
Forbes ranked companies using an “Innovation Premium” that measures cash flow, anticipated growth, and current market capitalization. “The idea of transparency and collaboration infuse the entire business,” the magazine said about Red Hat. “Even its mission statement was a group effort.”
Given the ongoing nature of Red Hat’s success, there are surely lessons to be learned from the company’s example. For more insight on that question, Linux.com recently spoke with DeLisa Alexander, the company’s executive vice president and chief people officer, and Jay Lyman, a senior analyst with 451 Research.
“Red Hat is a mission-based company, and the people we hire are passionate about what we do — it’s been that way from the very beginning,” Alexander told Linux.com. “We built a billion-dollar business by doing what the industry said was impossible: selling free software.
“We’ve never been afraid to try new things or take a chance on a wild idea,” Alexander added. “The combination of our unique company culture, the open source approach to software development, and Red Hat’s decision to sell software subscriptions rather than licenses is a business model innovation that continues to drive our success.”
Indeed, “they had to go through a number of years of skepticism and lack of credibility, but they built that up over the years,” Lyman said.
The technology, of course, is a big part of the company’s success. “Red Hat has really dedicated itself to stability and enterprise-grade, production-ready Linux,” Lyman explained. “Another part comes from their focus on the enterprise server market — Red Hat has really maintained its enterprise credibility.”
In short, “not only has Red Hat been around for a while, but it continues to do it right,” Lyman added.
Red Hat’s use of a subscription model is a key differentiator that gives customers better control over their IT spend, Alexander pointed out.
“While proprietary software companies built their business models around locking in their customers, we worked hard to give ours freedom and flexibility,” she explained. “We built a vast ecosystem of partners, working together to certify their technologies on Red Hat Enterprise Linux so that customers could deploy their choice of applications and hardware.”
Red Hat also promoted open standards to give customers ownership of their data by making it portable among vendors, she noted, and it has always used open source licensing. It has also developed its software openly and in collaboration with customers, partners, and other contributors to build software that solves business problems.
“This community-powered innovation model is unusual and leads to high performance/high value solutions for our customers,” Alexander said. “Notably, we are using this model beyond Linux.”
Indeed, Red Hat’s close community connection has been a key factor in its success, both Alexander and Lyman said.
“The experience of working with and contributing to open source communities helped us develop a community-powered approach to innovation, which brings superior value and performance to our customers,” Alexander pointed out. “Our culture reflects the values of the open source developer community: We believe in transparency, meritocracy, collaboration, and rapid iteration.”
So strategic an advantage is that culture for the company, in fact, that it goes to great lengths to understand and sustain it. “For example, in our training and development programs, we explore what great Red Hat leadership looks like,” she noted. “As a company, we cultivate the behaviors that we believe result in a differentiated work experience for our associates, including trust, respect, transparency, collaboration, meritocracy, and connection.”
The advent of cloud computing has brought a new ubiquity to Linux and open source technologies, Lyman pointed out, and customers are increasingly seeking out open solutions and multivendor approaches.
That’s clearly an opportunity for open source companies, but along with that opportunity comes new challenges for Red Hat.
“It’s becoming a challenge for Red Hat to be as unique as it once was,” Lyman explained. “They’re challenged now, in fact, by being perceived as the very thing they were established to disrupt, and that’s the ‘all-in-one’ solution from one vendor.”
Still, “Red Hat continues to really lead in the way they manage their open source community and their commercial prospects,” he concluded. “They have displayed the ability to leverage that community without offending it, and there will always be advantages Red Hat can offer with its Linux.”
Indeed, “open source is a great way to make better technology faster, so we see a bright future for open source technologies,” Alexander said. “Open source companies, including Red Hat, will continue to find success in IT by collaborating with developers and enterprises to create the flexible and high performing solutions that they need.”
As the transition to the cloud and Big Data continue, open source software is playing an absolutely critical role. And now, Rackspace Hosting, which has been focused on OpenStack-based cloud computing, has announced a strategic agreement with Hortonworks, which provides Apache Hadoop development, support and training, to empower customers with an enterprise-ready Hadoop platform targeted to be easy to use in the cloud. Hadoop, which is used to yield insights culled from crunching very large data sets, can be complex to use. The new partnership will aim at simplifying Hadoop and making it cloud ready.
“Running Hadoop on your own is complex, which is why we’re excited about our development efforts with Hortonworks. We believe Hortonworks as a collaborator brings a substantial advantage in technology, services and experience that will clearly benefit customers,” said John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, in a statement. “We have customers today that deploy Hadoop clusters on dedicated hardware at Rackspace with support from Hortonworks. By joining forces, we intend to turn Hadoop into an on-demand service running on the Rackspace open cloud and in clusters on private cloud infrastructure in our data centers or the customer’s data center. The Hortonworks Data Platform packages the open source Apache version of Hadoop. That aligns with our vision of an open cloud future that eliminates fear of vendor lock-in, and allows customers to confidently invest in a technology for the long term.”
