It’s All About Identity

If you have an offering in heterogeneous computing environments you need to be able to offer a blended range of features and solutions within your stack. Red Hat with it’s recognised model of having a stack from operating system through hypervisor (KVM), storage and big data (Gluster), Middleware (JBoss) leading to our abilities in PaaS with OpenShift and the IaaS gamechanger CloudForms that we’re launching in early summer 2012.

Now one common thread throughout this entire stack is the ability to manage and deploy solutions to handle and manage the whole SIEM piece and to provide directory capabilities.

Red Hat’s Directory Server products, and our whole journey we’ve taken with our IPA technologies are nothing new to analysts and customers alike but as we move to Cloud the whole identity piece gets amplified.The whole “federated” buzzword then emerges over the parapet to greet you to bring with it a whole plethora of descriptions (depending on the vendor sometimes). The basic premise being that the secure sharing of credentials and identities across networks and platforms locally on premise or potentially in an Open Hybrid Cloud. Without federation single sign on (SSO) becomes a non starter so getting it right and proving you are deploying authentication as a cornerstone of provisioning and architecture for any form of active Cloud deployment.

JBoss then adds another dimension as the whole SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) piece comes in and with JBoss natively supporting SAML2 you can actually engineer authentication goodness into your core application (We even give you a quick start you can grab here).

WIthin Red Hat Enterprise Linux the whole authentication piece is often missed by sysadmins and customers who just see Linux as the basic LAMP stack and don’t go digging around underneath the hood even though we make it transparent to do so.

This week we’ve released a short video on our integration of directory solutions and identity access management technologies. Hope you find it useful, especially if you’re stuck in Active Directory hell – oh and it’s free. Can you afford not to take a look ?

And once you’ve looked at the video we’ve made configurability and usability open and transparent too. Heres’ a user guide.

JBoss Dev Studio 5.0 Early Access Beta out now !!

So you’re wondering what you’re going to be doing in the run up to Olympics 2012 / the European Football Championships, the UK Jubilee celebrations, well I have something for you which might act as a panacea for all those developers who like myself were worried about having to down tools to be social in the weeks and months ahead.

If, like me, you want something to play with that will keep you occupied and deliver a sense of achievement whilst reducing your chances of having to attend social gatherings over the next few weeks and the risk of a suntan then I have good news for you. We just made JBoss Developer Studio 5.0 Early Access Beta available for free download.

In all seriousness, we’re all about the developer and application in Cloud and we’re making these download(s) available to you to demonstrate the power of both our tools and our message.

Beta downloads are available for Windows, Mac and of course Linux. More info available here.

Remember you can also register and download the latest versions of JBoss EAP 6 Beta and empower yourself with lots of Java EE 6 goodness as well. You can find more information on that by visiting this page on RedHat.com.

Now you have no excuse to remotely engage in any other activity outside your IDE for the next couple of months. We’re nice like that at Red Hat – tell your friends 🙂