While Red Hat Inc. will always be associated with its flagship offering for Linux, it provides many other open-source tools, including OpenShift, OpenStack and Linux containers. Unlike many software vendors that are looking to promote one main product in a line, Red Hat has a tendency to take a long view across organizations, according to Matt Hicks (pictured), vice president of software engineering, OpenShift, at Red Hat.

This changes the mindset from ‘How can I sell this one product?’ to one of “How do we provide value across the entire ranges of support offerings that we have?” Hicks explained.

Hicks  joined Stu Miniman (@stu), Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed the importance of open-source tools in the enterprise, as well as the company’s new Container Health Index. (* Disclosure below.)

Mitigating container vulnerabilities

Red Hat devised and announced at the summit a Container Health Index. Hicks explained that the index grades (from A through F) all of Red Hat’s containerized products, as well as the Red Hat base layer of containers from certified independent software vendor partners, reflecting how well maintained they are. While containers are considered to be volatile, that volatility can actually be an advantage, he stated.

For example, a container might have an A rating — meaning there are no current security vulnerabilities — but in a week, it could have multiple, critical common vulnerabilities and exposures (also known as CVEs) that have been open and that now affect that container. The benefit is, you can re-roll the container and consume that update, he explained. However, if you don’t know about it and you stay on that old version, you carry the same risk as if you had an out of data OS that was static.

“If they’re on an out of data version of RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] and they’ve embedded that in their container, that can cause as many problems and they need to apply the updates in their stacks,” Hicks said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Red Hat Summit 2017. (*Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsors some Red Hat Summit segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE