Brian J. Atkisson is a Senior Principal Systems Engineer and the technical lead on the Red Hat IT Identity and Access Management team. He has 18 years of experience as a Systems Administrator and Systems Engineer, focusing on identity management, virtualization, systems integration, and automation solutions. He is a Red Hat Certified Architect and Engineer, in addition to his academic background in Biochemistry, Microbiology and Philosophy.
10 years ago, I started my first day at Red Hat by relocating geek toys and Despair posters to my new work-home. This was back in the days when floor-to-ceiling office walls were a thing. While the cubicles were closed, I was amazed at how the organization was open... and honestly was a little concerned. Red Hat was very much still in start-up mode, yet had this insuperable open source fervor, intent on freeing all the things. I was used...
Red Hat, Inc. recently released the Red Hat SSO product, which is an enterprise application designed to provide federated authentication for web and mobile applications. In the SAML world, RH SSO is known as an Identity Provider (IdP), meaning its role in life is to authenticate and authorize users for use in a federated identity management system. For example, it can be used to authenticate internal users against a corporate LDAP instance such that they can then access the corporate...
Red Hat's IT department recently deployed JBoss BPM Suite to handle automated process workflow. JBoss BPM Suite is officially defined as: An open source business process management suite that combines Business Process Management and Business Rules Management and enables business and IT users to create, manage, validate, and deploy Business Processes and Rules. IT's immediate use case is to replace our aging account management system, which is essentially a collection of perl and python scripts. Some of these date back...
As you would expect, security is a key focus for Red Hat. Secure by default is more than a goal, it is a guiding principle across all product lines. Middleware is no exception and there are some amazing things going on in this space. Divya Mehra and Vikas Kumar of Red Hat walked us through some of the recent innovations, including the recently released Red Hat SSO, product built upon KeyCloak. Derek Walker of SWIFT also spoke about how the...
OpenSCAP is a security framework for determining the compliance of a system to some defined set of standards. Jeffrey Blank of the National Security Agency and Shawn Wells of Red Hat gave their talk on automated compliance. We, as an industry, needed standardized formats for automated checklists. Specifically, we needed: Standardized inputs Standardized outputs Provide product independence SCAP is the standard and its checklist language is called XCCDF. Check instructions are detailed in OVAL or OCIL languages, which are open...
Meet the assertable Chaos Monkeys for your Docker system - The production system has been targeted by troublesome random failures over a long period of time, and countless hours of debugging has yielded no valuable
Following on an incredible Keynote demonstration today showing the power of DevOps and Open Source (see the Summit YouTube page), Lori MacVittie of F5 Networks gave her talk on DevOps. More specifically, the session describes the underlying elements of DevOps methodologies and challenges. Code doesn't have business value until it is in production We all know the challenge of getting code in production, late night on Saturday nights only to have the change reverted and told to go try again...
"Based on a wide variety of surveys taken over recent years, many companies are transitioning to something that looks more like Agile than the processes they were using in previous years. However, that transition doesn’t necessarily mean implementations have been done respectfully of the Agile Manifesto and the principles behind it. In large part, industry trends seem to indicate that the sloganization of the word has done a significant disservice to the ideas that were originally founded in 2001. To...
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