This article is translated from the original Italian. The speakers were attending the first Italian edition of the OpenShift Commons Gathering event.
Back in September in Milan, with more than 350 very attentive people, the first Italian edition of the OpenShift Commons Gathering event took place. The event, which brings together experts from all over the world to discuss open source projects that support the OpenShift and Kubernetes ecosystem, as well as analyzing best practices on native cloud applications and deepening container technologies, brought together developers, DevOps experts and system administrators, to explore the evolution of container technologies in order to make them effective and safe on a large scale. A day full of ideas and reflections, thanks also to the presence of Red Hat experts and above all of the users who brought their testimonies.
Director of the entire operation, and perfectly at ease in the role of “hostess”, was Diane Mueller, Director, Community Development, Cloud Platform of Red Hat, to which ImpresaCity asked to tell in person the value of the OpenShift Commons event. From her base in Vancouver to Canada, Diane Mueller is particularly concerned with community development, and has therefore immediately declared herself very satisfied with the presence of over 350 people at the first Italian edition of the OpenShiftOpen Shift meeting, also underlining “the excellent mix of people present, all united by the desire to participate in a community event whose purpose is not to ‘sell’ something such as happens in the classic corporate events, but aims to exchange experiences on the topic of open source and particular on the Open Shift ecosystem.”
Concrete experiences
A relevant aspect of OpenShift Commons, and perhaps the reason for its success, is for Diane Mueller the fact that, “a good part of the event is dedicated to getting people who actually work on our products to talk, to share their experiences with their colleagues: if it is true that in general many events are organized, it is also true that community meetings like this make the difference because we bring both our experts and companies that talk about concrete cases, and the presence of users this contributes to increasing trust in open source and why not also to create new connections with a view to networking.”
Not only: “open source has long changed many aspects of the technological landscape, and even companies have understood that taking part in open source communities plays an increasingly fundamental role in the drive towards innovation and digital transformation”, he continues Diane Mueller, underlining that “this is even more true today as practically all companies of a certain size are substantially software companies, given that now the apps permeate all aspects of corporate life. And the more companies will realize that contributing to the sharing of experiences, in the philosophy of open source development, the more they will see that they can derive concrete benefits “.
Even Giuseppe Bonocore, Red Hat’s Senior Solution Architect, is satisfied with the participation at the event: “this is certainly a very good start, which shows how the participants understood the value of the community. Even the presence of three important customers sees us satisfied, even if we need to motivate companies even more to perceive the advantages that can be had in telling their needs and sharing use cases with others.”
The latter is in fact an entirely Italian peculiarity, as there is often some resistance on the part of companies in sharing projects, for an issue that is perhaps more cultural than substantial. But according to Bonocore there is room for optimism, also judging by the “presence of customers in three different vertical sectors, with Amadeus for the Travel and Internet sphere, Poste Italiane representing the Public Administration, and SIA for banking, demonstrating that the needs are common regardless of the sector of activity, given that all three companies presented substantially similar experiences on stage. I am confident that other companies will follow this example for future community events that we will organize.” Also because, concludes Bonocore, “companies later on these issues have already noticed: being more present with testimonials in first person to the community events represents an excellent tool of employer branding, to present oneself at best in order to attract valid talents and resources, which is a well-known problem in the IT field.”
In addition to the Red Hat experts and the testimonies of the three customers, which will be examined later, at the OpenShiftOpen Shift Commons event, Microsoft was present as the sole sponsor. Impresa City asked Marco D’Angelo, Developers Relationship Manager, Microsoft’s Western Europe, to explain the reasons for this participation. Which are multiple, starting from a general character so to speak, which sees Microsoft focus a lot on the presence of this type of community events to, “be able to show our new face up close: as we know, we have not been just a long time software vendors, but we have increasingly become cloud providers with Azure, “notes D’Angelo, pointing out that another of the purposes is to, “establish or re-establish relations with communities that did not use Microsoft software.”
In particular, continues D’Angelo, “Open Shift Commons is an event of which we are the only sponsor also because we have contributed to bringing it to Italy, but not with purely commercial connections as enhancing the connections with the technical people of the various intervened realities.” According to Microsoft, the formula of community events lends itself to underlining the desire to work with the developer community “even if there is no contract or otherwise, that is, without a short-term advantage, instead an investment in the facts, showing concretely that our focus on the open source world, as happens in this Red Hat event, is of extreme collaboration,” explains D’Angelo.
Speaking of which, D’Angelo points out that “Red Hat represents one of the partners with whom we can both talk to the same kind of audience, during community events like this, and to do business together, as our market goals they are perfectly aligned. To take just one example, we as Microsoft have brought native Red Hat applications into our cloud, and in essence it’s as if we were resellers of their products.” It is another aspect of a profitable relationship between the two companies, which began about four years ago, while “In Italy it is the third year that we present ourselves on the market together, sponsoring joint events or presenting us together: the results are not lacking, given that at this moment the relationship with Red Hat in Italy is what is showing the greatest growth of joint engagements,” concludes Marco D’Angelo.
But the time has come to give the word to companies, starting with …
Amadeus’ OpenShift infrastructure
A relationship that has lasted over five years, the one between Red Hat and Amadeus. “In 2014 we were looking for a partner to support us in bringing workloads to the cloud and we started a selection, from which few names remained in the shortlist, to the point of choosing Red Hat,” said Amadeus Software Engineer Salvatore Dario Minonne. Milan event told how OpenShift revolutionized the company’s cloud infrastructure.
There is no need for big presentations for Amadeus, as in addition to being one of the leading providers of advanced technological solutions for the global travel sector, it is also among the top ten software companies in the world, with more than 17 thousand employees and operations in 190 markets. Amadeus chose Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform as the basis for its application infrastructure, called Amadeus Cloud Services, improving the service offered to customers, increasing platform availability, simplifying operations and shortening the time to market of new services.
“In the fall of 2014 we got to know the Red Hat engineering team in Raleigh in the United States, putting their hands on the first versions of OpenShift for the first time and actually starting a fruitful collaboration that has become a real ‘ engineering partnership ‘, to the development of which we contribute with our use cases, in the best spirit of open source,” continues Minonne. Today in Amadeus the Enterprise version of OpenShift is used, which is present on multiple cloud platforms, with many workloads in production. However, it should be said that “not all Amadeus applications are on the cloud,” explains Minonne, underlining that it is “a long process that must be carefully evaluated, even if Red Hat’s strategy towards the unified hybrid cloud presents more than one reason of interest, since both public and private clouds are present in Amadeus.”
Towards the multicluster
In Minonne’s words, “Red Hat has always been seen by many as a provider of open source super partes software, and we continue to perceive it as such. Also because events like today’s show the will to remain super partes, and the fact that the Multicluster Federation is pushed in the first person by Red Hat also goes in this direction.” In this latter regard, Minonne underlines that “in Amadeus we look carefully at the multicluster, and not only for a simple vendor lock-in speech, but also for the possibility, unfortunately always existing, that something goes wrong with a provider , or to have the possibility to quickly dismantle a particular cluster because it is buggy and therefore there is a safety problem. These are real needs that would be well met.”
Spreading the discussion in a more general context, Minonne points out that “still today many levels of the “all cloud” obstacles remain. The first is the cultural one: if once it was said ‘not invented here’, today the syndrome has remained, but with the different name of ‘not hosted here’, and it is more widespread than we think.” Not only: “if you want to bring everything to the cloud, the software development and management practices must also change. Here there is also a technical obstacle, because applications not originally designed for the cloud sometimes have compatibility problems with the cloud itself. In fact, many Kubernetes resources have been created precisely to reduce these incompatibilities, “continues Minonne. But the message is that the obstacles can be overcome, even if there is still a lot to do both on the client side and on the cloud side: as Minonne pointed out in his presentation to the audience at the OpenShift Commons Gathering in Milan, the Cloud provider APIs are still different and poorly uniform, explaining that, “it is a fact that customers would like to install the same cluster everywhere, and it would be desirable for providers to do more to comply, because it would lead to greater portability and ease of migration of workload.”
Poste Italiane’s new technological path between open source and DevOps
The testimony of a client like the giant Poste Italiane, who is known to be active in numerous fields of activity, starting with the postal service, for which he was born over 150 years ago, is also very relevant. Today, Poste Italiane is also present in many other areas: just to name a few, it goes from the banking sector, where the widespread PostePay payment card stands out, to the insurance card, with PosteVita which represents a not inconsiderable share of the entire business of the company, to then arrive at mobile telephony, in which it operates with the PosteMobile brand and is characterized by being the most successful “virtual” operator in Italy.
At the Red Hat event in Milan “we retraced the ways in which Poste Italiane pressed the accelerator of the Digital Transformation in the last year, focusing above all on open source and on the DevOps philosophy,” explains Pierluigi Sforza, Poste’s Senior Solutions Architect Italian, which together with Paolo Gigante, who has the same position in the company, is part of Poste Italiane’s IT Technological Architecture Group. It is, underlines Sforza, of “a support structure for the activities of delivery, experimentation and implementation of new technologies”, framed within the IT function, which sees Mirko Mischiatti, Group CIO of Poste Italiane as head, and that is ” in essence centralized and unified: even if the various companies that are part of the galaxy have local IT micro-functions, the general structure is unique,” explains Gigante.
Looking more closely at the experience presented at the Red Hat event, it was “a process of modernization of the infrastructures, in a DevOps key and therefore open source, with a closer relationship with Red Hat, in light of an intense use of more advanced technologies like OpenShift or Ceph, to give some examples,” continues Sforza. Gigante echoes him, stressing that the emphasis on open source was born as a “reflection of the recent technological scenario, where the demands placed by the Digital Transformation require accelerations that often the proprietary technologies of classic vendors fail to follow with due timeliness” . And even if it is true that “a part of the company has always worked with open source, both in Community and Enterprise versions, with different levels and with different vendors”, as Sforza points out, it is also true that “the needs of delivery sometimes requires taking the risk of trying less resilient technologies, starting to experiment with the open source community and then relying on more structured vendors, such as Red Hat, to have the levels of resilience needed to go into production.”
Infrastructure in production
The path followed by just over a year now started with a real project of “adapting old legacy infrastructures to the new world of DevOps and containerization, which then laid the foundations for creating a stand-alone project that led to main realization, or rather that of the regulatory adaptation to the PSD2 directive of our financial platform,” explains Sforza, underlining that” with OpenShiftOpen Shift we were able to create a reliable platform, perfectly adapted to our needs and above all very performing, in order to fully correspond to a another of the goals we had set ourselves, that is to say, the one to be posed as the backbone of new successive developments.”
More in detail, one of the important guidelines of Poste Italiane’s IT renewal is that of simplification, where “a relevant chapter is also that of offloading the mainframe,” emphasizes Sforza, stating that “it is a strategic project to answer to the increasing traffic coming from digital channels. The idea is to use the mainframe to make it perform only the typical tasks of the mainframe, that is those that require ‘real’ transactionality, as is the case for transfers, for example, lifting it instead of loads that are not properly transactional, as is the case of the account statement or other similar requests. We will go more and more towards the lightening of the mainframe from what does not make sense to keep you in a monolithic, non-scalable and substantially expensive way, entrusting instead these tasks to a containerized infrastructure, with microservices and other systems such as MongoDB or Kafka, always making more efficient traffic due to the growing amount of requests coming from digital channels.”
Finally, two words on participation in community events: “we consider them very useful as they allow us to have a vision of the market, thanks also to the customers who concretely tell their implementations, in addition to explaining the challenges to which the suppliers have been called,” points out Pierluigi Sforza. It is also for this reason that “we have tried to intensify our presence in this type of event: from customers it is always interesting to participate, also to have a direct comparison with other companies, and not only with those operating in our own field,” he concludes Paolo Gigante.
The methodology of change in SIA
Also SIA, which is headquartered in Milan and is present in 50 countries, does not need too much introduction, being a European leader in the design, construction and management of technological infrastructures and services dedicated to Financial Institutions, Central Banks, Companies and Public Administrations in the areas of payments, e-money, network services and capital markets.
The testimony of SIA at the OpenShift Commons Gathering event in Milan wanted “not so much to bring our experience in the use of a Red Hat product, but to tell how the company and its people moved to ensure that the services made on the basis of OpenShift were successful,” explains Nicola Nicolotti, Senior System Administrator of SIA, underlining that “in other words, we wanted not to focus all our attention on technological applications but to highlight above all the organizational considerations, which are equally relevant.” A focus that is also centered on the spirit that animates this Red Hat event, which “unlike other events where attention is above all on technology, is more a moment of sharing, where the main aim is to create community to grow products and share best practices, even if each of us works in different companies,” adds Matteo Combi, SIA Solution Architect.
More in detail, “we presented a working methodology with which we intend to demonstrate that the traditional waterfall approach is often not combined with the adoption of new technologies, which instead require more intensive integration,” continues Nicolotti, underlining that “in the structured companies, there are many difficulties that can be encountered when changes are put into practice, and this is why we believe that it is useful to tell both what the problems in adopting new technologies may be and the answers given for looking at business objectives, sharing the approach adopted to resolve the difficulties.”
The value of sharing
The aspect of sharing is perhaps the main value of this type of event: “we also participated in the Red Hat Summit in Boston, noting that at the international level there is a greater propensity to compare different experiences,” notes Combi, explaining that “often the comparison with different realities allows to develop other ideas, not only related to technologies, to better face the challenges, and it is also for this reason that we have decided to participate in this event as speaker.”
In conclusion, Nicolotti summarizes, “we are very satisfied with the opportunity to participate in meetings such as the Red Hat OpenShift Commons Gathering, also for the networking possibilities and for employer branding opportunities for our company, given that we present our experiences to events of this type undoubtedly constitute a showcase for attracting talents interested in the new technological frontiers.”
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Quelle: OpenShift
