Insights and news on Red Hat training, certification and consulting
A Red Hat Blog
by Mike Randall (Red Hat)
Below are links to some pages and articles we found this week and really liked.
Red Hat
Taste of Training: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 – Domain vs. Standalone Server Deployments, RedHat.com
Red Hat starts with Individual Exam Sessions, ITCertificationMaster.com
Monthly Facebook contest, Facebook.com
Hybrid cloud, PaaS mark ‘new era for Red Hat’, Wired.com
Another look at RHEV with Dor Laor, YouTube.com
by Zach Rhoads (Red Hat)
One of the core tenants of agile development is to focus on the tasks that are the highest priority and immediate need. This is sometimes referred to as “Just-in-Time” development. The idea is to focus on the tasks needed to ship the feature now and worry about everything else when it is actually needed. Another tenant that goes hand-in-hand with “Just-in-Time” is the idea of failing early. Basically, a team should know as early as possible if something is going to fail, that way the team does not waste time going down the wrong path. This means the team should develop a feature and solicit feedback in short cycles, allowing the team to quickly understand what works and what does not.
It has been a little over a year since Quint Van Deman was named 2011’s worldwide Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year. Out of 600 submissions, Van Deman, an RHCA and director of open source consulting at Emergent, stood out with his experience helping clients move from last-generation, proprietary IT infrastructures to next-generation architecture that embraces the synergy of open source, open standards and cloud-based solutions. With the next winner set to be awarded on June 28 at Red Hat Summit in Boston, we wanted to catch up with Quint to hear the story that won the title, what he’s working on now and how his past year has been.
So, what story did you submit to win the award?
What I really wrote about was my journey to becoming an RHCA and how that really benefitted my professional endeavors. The journey to becoming an RHCA really exposes one to the breadth of solutions that are out there in the Red Hat stack, and how those solve organizational challenges. I was very clearly able to take some of those direct lessons and apply them out into my work. Also, how the RHCA really provides what I call the ‘instant badge of credibility’ when I walk in somewhere. A lot of time when you go into an organization as a consultant, there’s a lot of what I call ‘technical chest-bumping,’ where there will be someone in the room whose only objective of the meeting is to prove that they are smarter than you. Having that RHCA up there really defers a lot of that, especially with folks in the room that may have taken a Red Hat exam.
by Guy Martin (Red Hat)
Transforming Organizational DNA – sounds like a lofty goal brought down from the ivory towers of an MBA or marketing program, doesn’t it?
While it is a lofty goal, the way companies utilize technology is fundamentally shifting, and savvy organizations realize this transformation is now well under way. In a recent keynote at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst gave a talk that highlights this trend. He touched on the explosion of computing power, plummeting costs, and the near ubiquity of technology that was simply not available even a few years ago.
In 2012, most IT executives have already seen aspects of what Jim was talking about. There’s no longer any question that Linux and open source provide real enterprise options — these are not only robust and secure, but are viable alternatives to proprietary solutions. Despite this recognition, a recent Sonatype survey found that over half the respondents didn’t have a corporate open source strategy/policy. Even this far into the ‘Age of Open Source,’ policies to help corporations effectively and strategically consume open source are not the norm.
At Red Hat, we are continually seeking new ways to provide customers and developers who are interested in becoming Red Hat certified with new, more flexible ways to take exams. To that end, Red Hat Training is proud to announce an innovative new exam delivery method that provides candidates with greater convenience. Individual Exam Sessions, alternatives to the traditional classroom environment, are now available through personal testing stations and allow customers more choice in taking and scheduling many of Red Hat’s most popular exams. Watch the video to learn more, or visit www.redhat.com/individualexam
by Bruce Wolfe (Red Hat)
Red Hat Messaging (RHM) is built on top of the AMQP wire-level protocol, and is designed to be inherently reliable. However, if you have the resources, you can make your messaging application more robust with the addition of High Availability (HA) Clustering.
To set up a simple cluster you will need to edit three files, and populate the same values across each RHM broker and/or RHEL host instance:
/etc/corosync/corosync.conf
In the totem section add the network bind address (bindnetaddr), multicast address (mcastaddr), and multicast port (mcastport). For example, respectively: 192.168.10.0, 224.0.0.10, 5430
/etc/corosync/uidgid.d/qpidd
by Malcolm Herbert (Red Hat)
This post originally appeared here on May 30, 2012, in the Guardian.
To make sure your organisation benefits from cloud computing, lay a solid foundation before making grand plans
Cloud computing is ubiquitous in technology conversations. It’s not just a buzzword, but a catalyst to a new wave of thinking. Cloud is still yet to show its full capabilities as the demands on the world’s datacentres continue to rise – open source and virtualisation are spear-heading this movement.
There are many opportunities for organisations to benefit from cloud computing and slot it into their overall IT strategy. However, instead of getting overwhelmed and “eating too many elephants” it’s important to prepare the groundwork for cloud and pace the business by laying a solid foundation.
by Justin Hayes (Red Hat)
There is a lot of buzz these days around Big Data, and rightfully so. The volume of data produced and the number of sources producing it are growing faster and faster. Similarly, the potential for organizations large and small to harness these data cannot be understated, and should not be overlooked.
There is also a lot of noise when you look closer at the Big Data question, or to get right to the point, when you decide what your organization’s Big Data strategy should be. Here are some things to think about as you navigate the Big Data waters.
