Catching up on the Red Hat Partner Conference

Last week was a whirl wind of activity at the Red Hat Partner Conference hosted in Frankfurt, Germany.

I provided tips before attending this conference and it seems quite a few of you took them to heart.

While my workshop did not get the room needed, a talk on sales conversations around Cloud Infrastructure was selected for the main keynote stage together with Margaret Dawson.

The event kicked off on Sunday, but due to earlier commitments I arrived on Monday afternoon. The event for me is almost a reunion with many of the current Red Hat partners around Europe having been around since my Solution Architect days in the Benelux area.

Start laying your digital foundations today!

I spent Monday evening touring the regional areas during a dinner where I got to chat with the partners from the Benelux region, German region, Italian region and UKI region.

That final group included my good friends from the Scotland JBug who were one of the first meetups I ever spoke at in Europe.

The power of networking was in full swing as the Italian region solicited for a keynote at the OpenSlava 2017 conference hosted by Accenture, so watch for me there in the Fall.

Digital transformation with hybrid cloud solutions

Getting ready to dive in to your digital journey?

Are terms like digital transformation, digital business, modernizing infrastructure, scalable infrastructure, optimizing IT, and modern development starting to resonate with you?

These and many more topics related to hybrid cloud solutions are on stage (virtually) this week, keynote speakers, sessions and more.

Everything is brought to you live sessions and as post-event recordings on-demand that you only need to register for to attend and view (recordings available through late September).

Red Hat Cloud Suite is the baseline for these sessions, bringing together Ops, DevOps and modern AppDev storylines in a single event. This is Red Hat's broadest offering combining OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat CloudForms, and much more.

Register for this virtual event to learn how Red Hat's hybrid cloud solutions can help your organization meet business demands—today and tomorrow. Join Red Hat experts, industry thought leaders, and market innovators as they discuss how to:

3 ways to effectively prepare for process improvements in your digital journey

Effectively prepare for process improvements.

In our journey to transform our ways of working, our focus on our customers’ wishes, and our plans to pivot to a digital business, process improvement is a must.

While the transformation to a digital business can encompass many aspects that are new to your organization, there are always existing investments in technologies and processes that need to be evaluated. Some can be modernized and migrated onto the new infrastructure that will support your digital business. Others will remain in place as legacy systems of record.

One thing is for sure: Evaluating existing business processes and looking to improve their effectiveness is a necessary step. Here are 3 ways to effectively prepare for process improvements in your digital journey.

Digital Transformation with Hybrid Cloud Virtual Event (slides)

On June 29th Red Hat is hosting an online virtual event entitled, Digital Transformation with Hybrid Cloud Solutions. 

This event spans a day of online keynotes, sessions and demonstrations. You can register online to see this live, or post-event to view recordings of any of these items.

My session explains why the Red Hat Cloud Suite is the ultimate application development stack and below is the abstract followed by the slides for you to enjoy.

"As you can imagine, Red Hat Cloud Suite is a complete and all encompassing solution that offers a lot to an enterprise, but you might be left asking yourself, "How can I experience the Red Hat Cloud Suite as an application developer?"

This session will orientate your interests on application development with the Red Hat Cloud Suite stack, getting you started on the path to containerized application development and Cloud happiness."

Anyone show you how to install OpenShift Container Platform in minutes? (video)

The OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) is the primary way to manage your application development experience in the Cloud.

From code, to containers, to deployments in a polyglot of languages and frameworks, nothing is easier to integrate in to your toolbox or IDE than OCP.

To make this process of getting your very own private Cloud based on OCP, a simple and fast installation project was created. I spent some time on presenting this to various groups and at this years Red Hat Summit event. It has also become a basis for the free online workshop where you can enjoy application development with containers in the Cloud.

The best teacher is a video that supports the claims of installing the latest OCP in just minutes, so here you go:

AppDev in the Cloud self-paced, free, online workshop

AppDev in the Cloud free online workshop.

Are you ready to get hands on with containers, web services, Java, .Net, PHP, service integration, and all that in the Cloud on your very own laptop?

If you are, hold on to your hats, this is the workshop for you.

The description for this workshop provides you with the basics behind what you will be doing with your very own laptop:

Ready to get hands-on with AppDev in the Cloud with container based services? This workshop will let you experience the wonders of Red Hat's open technologies for Cloud based application development, letting you pull together multiple services in to a Cloud on your laptop (be sure to bring it with you).

In this workshop you're a developer working for Destinaisa, a travel agency that needs to setup its online bookings applications backend services. You'll be installing the OpenShift Container Platform on your laptop, then installing JBoss BRMS to work in the Destinasia discount rules. 

Once they are completed, you leverage Ansible playbook to see infrastructure automation in action. Each playbook will deploy a new container based service to support flight, hotel, car and discount rule queries from your application. In total you will be running 6 container based applications or services on your laptop in a private PaaS before testing this solution with a REST client, sending a booking and verifying the discounts provided by the rules you implemented.  

As you can see, this is a complex and realistic application development workshop that will pull together quite a few open technologies on your laptop.

Let's examine the parts that make up this workshop.

Boston JUG - Evening of AppDev in the Cloud Workshop

Boston JUG

A few weeks back I spent an evening with the Boston Java User Group (JUG), a group I've visited through the years as part of my journey through the world of Red Hat product evangelism.

This is a smart group of developers that enjoy everything from core Java, business processes, business logic, Cloud and more.

It's always a group that I like to test my workshops on as they provide a good baseline of knowledge and user interaction, ensuring what I'm trying to bring to the application developer is actually resonating.

This evening was during the week of OpenStack Summit in Boston and gave me a chance to step out to the Rapid 7 offices downtown for pizza and good conversations around the topics of application development in the Cloud. There were 44 registered attendees and the hosts at Rapid 7 provided a fantastic area for the attendees to work in.

Let's take a look at what the workshop offers attendees and what that experience looks like.

How To Take New Improved Mortgage Finance Process in to the Clouds

New and improved Mortgage Finance process application.

Early last year I showed you how to take a JBoss Mortgage Finance process in to the clouds.

A little over a year later it's time to refresh this experience and the release of OpenShift Container Platform v3.5 gives you a Cloud in just minutes to deploy it on.

For some time now it has been apparent that application developers can't ignore their stack anymore, as stated in the App Dev Cloud Stack series. Part of this story involves providing something interesting to deploy on your new Cloud Stack.

Updated and ready for OpenShift Container Platform, today you can start running the Mortgage Finance process in a few easy steps. It's a full demo application and leverages a financial process example based on JBoss BPM Suite with the business central web console running containerized in the Cloud.