Optimize IT Operations with Red Hat Services | RHEL Presents Ep. 71

For episode 71 my cohost Brian Smith and I had a full house. We dug into Red Hat Services, the consulting side of Red Hat, and I said up front that I wish I’d had access to it back in my sysadmin days. We brought on three experts to cover the breadth of the portfolio: Jerome Young on the platform side (RHEL, Satellite, identity management, Ansible), David Gordon on middleware and application services (integration, APIs, app development), and Matt Witzman from the OpenShift and cloud platform practice. The idea was to talk through what happens when you’ve got a distribution, management tools, and automation in front of you and you’re not sure where to start.

A few things worth carrying away from the conversation:

• Red Hat Services is there for the “where do I even begin” moment. Whether you’re a new customer or evaluating becoming one, consulting is meant to help you get engaged and moving along a path instead of staring at a pile of tools.
• The portfolio is broad, and so is the help. We deliberately pulled in platforms, middleware, and OpenShift because a real environment rarely lives in just one of those buckets, and the services side spans all of them.
• The best lessons come from the field. I tried to coax anecdotes out of our guests about what they’ve actually seen in the wild, because that’s where the value of experienced consultants really shows up.

If you’re standing up Red Hat technology and want a sense of how consulting fits in, this episode is a friendly walkthrough.