The right tool for your job

by Matthias Luebken

Today is the announcement of OpenShift.io: a SaaS developer environment for cloud-native application development running on OpenShift. And I am really excited about this since it brings together a couple of areas which I am especially passionate about Agile, Containers and Open Source:

1) Collaborative Agile software development

Agile development and teamwork have always been dear to my heart and with OpenShift.io you have the best tooling right at your fingertips. This is especially useful when getting a new team onboard. Everything is there and is fully integrated: A planning and tracking tool (read Trello on steroids), an online editor (best in town: Eclipse Che), a build pipeline (based on Jenkins) and a deployment and runtime environment based on OpenShift (our enterprise grade Kubernetes distribution).

2) Based on container technologies

Containers have fundamentally changed the way I develop and run software. The great thing with OpenShift is that you can dive into the details about containers, but you don’t have to. So if you are new to this paradigm, you wouldn’t even notice. But once you get familiar with everything you can dive into the details. And the best thing: This is all based on Kubernetes the leading orchestration engine and open standards from the open container initiative.

3) It’s Open Source

Everything we build is open source. Head up to our upstream communities on Che, fabric8 and Openshift and get involved. We are looking forward to your pull request. :-)

So where is the catch? Well, there is a waiting list. ;- ) So make sure you sign up today for the OpenShift.io Developer Preview.

One more thing: developer analytics

Now we haven’t stopped there. As part of openshift.io, we are launching our developer analytics: a set of services to bring back confidence into software development.

In this fast-moving world of open source, it’s a real challenge to find the right tool for the job. It sometimes seems that if you take a short break in keeping yourself up-to-date, everything has changed and you need to reevaluate everything:

  • Is this still the best tool for the job?
  • Are there better-suited libraries for my current use-case?
  • Are the “old” solutions still maintained and secure?
  • Is this compatible and compliant with the work in my company?

Let me assure you, you are not alone with these challenges. While we as developers all love the rise of ever better tools and frameworks, we at the same time struggle to pick the right ones.

We have seen this challenge first hand within Red Hat and our customers. So we have challenged ourselves to change the status quo and help developers to pick the right tools for the job. Today we are starting with guidance on choosing the right application packages. And we provide this guidance throughout the whole application lifecycle.

We start by integrating our guidance right when you code. Here you see an example of a security warning on a library on Che on openshift.io and a recommendation on how to fix it:

The next level of guidance is provided during every build. Eg. Here you see an analysis of your whole application stack and showing you some of the hotspots in it and some actionable recommendations on how to fix these:

We want to enable every team and developer out there to make faster, better and more confident decisions. In the end, we as software developers want to get our job done. Sometimes it’s about choosing the latest greatest but compatible and secure library. And sometimes it's about the right compromise to meet company and team standards.

I had started on this journey about a year ago when I joined Red Hat and this is just an awesome ride. I would like to thank everyone at Red Hat who helped to get this project to life. Many different teams and individuals throughout the organization have helped to kick this off. But most importantly I would like to highlight the engineering and design work: They have done a tremendous job in bringing this to where it is today and integrating everything into an exceptionally end-user experience.

I’m genuinely excited about today's announcement. And this is just the beginning. There is a lot more to come. So be part of our journey: As a user, a customer or an upstream contributor: Let’s find the right tool for your job.

(Note: This is a cross-post from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/right-tool-your-job-matthias-luebken)