Red Hat Open Source Day - Milan
On past 30th October, I had the opportunity to attend the RedHat OpenSource day in Milan, an event that is organized by RedHat once a year (here the official event link https://www.redhat.com/it/events/red-hat-open-source-day-italia). It represents a moment for discover news, meet RedHat partners and meet colleagues that works with IT systems just like us. Moreover, but not least important, during the event there are a lot of technical sessions, that are an opportunity to deepen some subjects, to discover functionalities, features and common use cases of products, to attend some Clients use cases presentations or simply to feed your curiosity about something that you don't usually see at work.
The event was divided in two parts: a common session in the morning, open to all participants together, and some parallel technical sessions in the afternoon, split in 8 different rooms. In the morning, the common session started with a welcome talk by the Regional Director of RedHat Italy, Turkey, Israel and Greece, Gianni Anguilletti, and another one by the Vice President Regional Sales EMEA, Michel Isnard. After that, there were 3 Clients’ use cases:
- Nexi: regarding their projects about credit card solutions, leveraging RedHat products, for example OpenStack
- SNAM: regarding their projects about the creation of a custom PaaS based on OpenShift
- Agos: regarding their efforts in order to migrate from Mainframe to more modern and agile solutions
During the afternoon, there were a lot of technical sessions that I was interested to, but I had to make a choice! Since sessions' duration was only 30 minutes with no time-break between sessions, I decided to choose an entire path in a single room, avoiding moving from a room to another. Since I'm currently interested in Ansible automation features and in the migration to the Cloud, I chose the room with title: "Da Linux ai Container, dalla virtualizzatione al Cloud: trasforma il tuo IT". The sessions for this topic were the following (sessions were in Italian):
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux: novità del sistema operativo cuore delle soluzioni Red Hat
- Red Hat Virtualization: ultime novità per una “dual strategy” possibile
- Datacenter, Rete, Sicurezza Proattiva e Cloud automatizzati con Ansible Tower
- Caso cliente Nexi OpenStack + Ansible
- OpenShift e Container Storage: Kubernetes enterprise per le grandi idee
- OpenShift e Container Native Virtualization: le ultime novità della piattaforma Kubernetes enterprise
As you can suppose from titles, it was a kind of "voyage", packed in only three hours, from operating system through virtualization, containers and automation, and, in the end, the Cloud and the OpenShift Platform. The sessions were quite technical and there were a lot of demos. For a matter of time, the demos were not live, but recorded videos were showed while speaker added comments and explanations to them. Clearly, so concentrated demos are a way to feed your curiosity and lead you to deepen subjects on your own, not a way to teach you how to do something. I'm not going to describe each session in details: I could bore you and probably make mistakes too. I will give only some hints. In the first two sessions, speakers talked about new features of latest operating system version (RHEL 7.6) and virtualization software-defined platform RHEV 4.2. The following two sessions dealt with Ansible and Ansible Tower: speakers talked about features of both of them and about how you can integrate Ansible Engine with OpenStack and with public cloud provider. For example, a very interested demo showed how Ansible Engine can be integrated with Google Cloud Platform in order to create VMs on cloud and then configure them. After that, there were a lot of short sessions dedicated to OpenShift Platform. Each speaker dealt with some features of OpenShift, starting with intro sessions, during which they talked about Kubernetes too. Then, there were more detailed sessions, for example one dedicated to OpenStack/OpenShift integration, another one dealing with provisioning a separated instance of MariaDB from OpenShift catalogue and then another one regarding Container-Native Storage for integrated storage management, that is still in technology preview.
For me, this was my first participation to a RedHat OpenSource Day and my impressions were positive! Attending to these kind of events, I don't expect to become an expert in so little time, learning "how to do" something, but I watch for receiving interesting inputs about "how much you could do".
For everyone interested, there is the app associated to the event, named "RedHat events", where documentation about technical sessions should be soon uploaded (probably after RedHat OpenSource Day that will take place in Rome on next 14th November).