Just days after announcing the conclusion of its US$34-billion acquisition of open source company Red Hat, IBM issued two further announcements that confirmed – if any further confirmation was needed – its commitment to and support for open source.
The first, at this week’s Open Source and Software Development (OSCON) 2019 conference in Portland, Oregon, introduced a series of new open source projects which are designed to help develop and deploy applications for Kubernetes more quickly.
The second, which must have been in the works prior to the confirmation of the Red Hat deal, was the announcement of a multi-year multi-billion dollar “strategic alliance” between IBM and US communications network giant, AT&T.
IBM and AT&T Business in strategic alliance
In terms of the alliance agreement, IBM will help to modernise AT&T Business Solutions’ internal software applications, enabling migrations to the IBM Cloud. In addition, IBM will provide infrastructure to support AT&T Business’s applications; and AT&T Business will use Red Hat’s open source platform to manage workloads and applications.
In turn, IBM will make AT&T Business its primary provider of software defined networking, with AT&T Business helping to transform IBM’s networking solutions with their 5G, Edge Compute and IOT as well as multi-cloud capabilities using Red Hat.
In a statement, Thaddeus Arroyo, CEO of AT&T Business noted that AT&T Business has long had a strong commitment to utilising open source technologies. As part of the new strategic relationship, AT&T Business will continue to use Red Hat's open source platform to manage the workloads associated with its internal applications.
“On the heels of IBM's recent Red Hat acquisition, AT&T Business would have even greater access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift platforms as the foundation for workload portability and interoperability across any vendor's cloud, on or off premises,” the statement continued.
“Through our collaboration with IBM, we're adopting open, flexible, cloud technologies, that will ultimately help accelerate our business leadership."
A trio of Kubernetes projects
Meanwhile at OSCON 2019, Nate Ziemann, senior product manager for developer technologies for IBM Cloud, pointed out that as companies modernise their infrastructure and adopt a hybrid could strategy, they’re increasingly turning to Kubernetes and containers – but it was often difficult to adopt Kubernetes effectively.
“To lower the barrier of entry for developers to use Kubernetes and to bring together different disciplines, IBM created new open source projects that make it faster and easier… to develop and deploy applications for Kubernetes,” he said.
The three new open source projects are:
Kabanero, which is designed to enable developers, architects and operations to work together faster. It is said to give enterprises the control required for governance and compliance, while meeting developers’ need for agility and speed.
Appsody, which is said to simplify the creation of cloud-native applications in containers by providing pre-configured stacks and templates for a growing set of popular open source runtimes and frameworks. This provides a foundation on which to build applications for Kubernetes and native deployments.
Codewind which provides extensions to popular integrated development environments (IDEs). “It enables you to develop in containers without knowing you are developing in containers,” Ziemann said. Codewind is a new open source project managed by the Eclipse Foundation, but IBM has made the first major contribution to it.
Share