IT Focus Area: cloud

Red Hat wrapped up its 14th annual summit in San Francisco this year with a record-breaking 7500 attendees. The theme of this year’s summit centered on “Ideas Worth Exploring.” With dozens of keynote speakers and 325 breakout sessions, Red Hat made it clear that exploration and innovation—the very foundation of open source technology—is Red Hat’s past, present and certainly its future.

The Future is Now

With Red Hat now in its 25th year, Paul Cormier, president, products and technologies, took a moment in his opening keynote to look back at an important moment in the history of open source: when Intel introduced its hardware innovation and new ecosystem, combined with Linux, an open -source operating system. This, says Cormier, “is what drove the pace of innovation seen today.”

However, the emphasis was squarely placed on what is yet to come: “The future is open,” declared Jim Whitehurst, CEO. Open indeed: Open-minded, with an open-door atmosphere of collaboration and revolution, and definitely open-sourced.

Also made quite clear: the future for Red Hat and digital business is hybrid cloud, as Comier predicted: “We will make hybrid cloud the default in the enterprise.” Comier backed up his statement with numbers from recent studies that also predict “a multicloud strategy will become the common strategy for 70 percent of enterprises by 2019, up from less than 10 percent today.”

4 Key Announcements

Red Hat also took the opportunity of the summit platform to make four key announcements, each of which bolster the wide-spread use of enterprise hybrid cloud:

1. Microsoft and Red Hat expand partnership and introduce Red Hat OpenShift for Azure.

Red Hat and Microsoft further a powerhouse partnership to focus on cloud, container, and increasing the productivity of developers. With this collaboration, the companies will introduce the first jointly managed OpenShift offering in the public cloud, combining Red Hat OpenShift, an enterprise Kubernetes platform, and Azure, Microsoft’s public cloud.

“By extending our partnership with Microsoft, we’re able to offer the industry’s most comprehensive Kubernetes platform on a leading public cloud, providing the ability for customers to more easily harness innovation across the hybrid cloud without sacrificing production stability.”

—Paul Cormier, President, Products and Technologies, Red Hat

2. Red Hat and IBM combine forces to extend hybrid cloud in the enterprise.

 The collaboration brings together two enterprise application platforms—Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and IBM Cloud Private—and adds IBM’s software and cloud solutions to the mix.

“With IBM’s recent move to containerize its middleware, today’s landmark partnership between IBM and Red Hat provides customers with more choice and flexibility. Our common vision for hybrid cloud using container architectures allows millions of enterprises—from banks, to airlines, to government organizations—to access leading technology from both companies without having to choose between public and private cloud.”

—Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice president, IBM Hybrid Cloud

3. Red Hat introduces Kubernetes Operators to the Red Hat OpenShift partner ecosystem.

Kubernetes Operator offers a simplified path for software partners to deliver tested and validated applications on the Kubernetes platform. An Operator helps to remove the barriers to building complex applications for Kubernetes, resulting in services designed to “just work” across any cloud where Kubernetes runs.

Red Hat intends to use our vast technical expertise in Kubernetes and cloud-native application and service development to help our software partner ecosystem and customers build their own specific Kubernetes Operators which can then be readily deployed and supported at-scale on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

—Ashesh Badanivice, President and General Manager, OpenShift, Red Hat

4. Red Hat unveils integration roadmap for CoreOS technologies with the Red Hat OpenShift portfolio.

CoreOS technology, combined with Red Hat OpenShift, will power fully-automated Linux container platform stack, from the operating system to application services, across the hybrid cloud. As a result, CIOs can fuel digital transformation, more quickly adopting containers and Kubernetes, without sacrificing existing applications or IT investment. CoreOS’ technologies provides a roadmap for the digital enterprise while simultaneously making hybrid cloud a viable choice for deploying both modern and traditional applications.

We strongly believe that the integration of CoreOS’ automation technologies with Red Hat’s powerful infrastructure solutions will redefine the hybrid cloud, meshing the simplicity of public cloud deployments with the enhanced security of private cloud computing.

—Ashesh Badanivice, President and General Manager, OpenShift, Red Hat