Why you should be talking about Portfolio Architectures in 2023

Since its founding nearly 30 years ago, Red Hat has grown from just a single product, the Red Hat Linux operating system, to an entire portfolio with numerous products for application development, data services, cloud computing, automation and management, and more. It can be complex to understand how each product fits specific business needs and how they all work together.

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Red Hat's Portfolio Architectures aim to decrease some of this complexity. These architectures are designed as a point of reference to highlight how some of our most innovative customers are actively using our products and leveraging their combined strengths to build powerful solutions for difficult business problems.

Build on experience

Imagine that you're building a new home on a beautiful plot of land that's been handed down through the generations. This land means a lot to your family, so you want to build it right the first time. But you're new to homebuilding and the first encounter with anything new typically results in some level of failure. Most people turn to a professional builder as someone who has already failed and learned from their mistakes. You can leverage their experience, their connections with trustworthy vendors, and their knowledge of the best materials to build with.

Also similar to building a home, where you want the latest features and trendy styles but you don't want to risk compromising your long-term vision in the home, many of our customers and partners want to be cutting edge, but perhaps not bleeding edge. They want to be near the front, but they don't want to take the risk of being the first to try something. Portfolio Architectures help them achieve their goals by using the trials and experiences of other innovators who have already paved the way.

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How we create a Portfolio Architecture

Much like the different types of residential architecture designs for different climates, purposes, and lifestyles, Red Hat has Portfolio Architectures for multiple industry sectors and use cases. For example, we have architectures designed around concepts like event-driven automation and edge medical diagnosis, and within specific industries such as financial services, healthcare, education, and many others.

We base each Portfolio Architecture on our work with customers who have built that architecture in their environment. For example, for our event-driven automation architecture below, we pinpointed our customers' three main business objectives: automating remediation of monitored events, scaling system updates across a hybrid infrastructure, and improving emergency response for security and compliance risks.

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This architecture has an event source monitoring the environment and a message broker hosted in a container platform handling communications between different components such as the microservices that manage the actions of each event, automation invocation, and ticketing; an intelligent router for handling prioritization of higher profile events; and an automation orchestrator for executing task automation and recording results.

What is the Portfolio Architecture Center?

The Red Hat Portfolio Architecture Center digs deeper into these various solutions. It shows which products Red Hat offers to meet different needs, as well as how these products directly interact.

While these solutions are designed around how our customers have addressed their challenges, they are not set-in-stone mandates to use Red Hat products in your environment. They are built around the open source framework, and most began as a collection of Red Hat, upstream and third-party open source products adapted to the users' software requirements

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Learn more and contribute

Throughout 2022, our team wrote many articles about the Portfolio Architectures we've created, and you can find the top 10 articles listed below. We hope you'll read them and find ways to use them to benefit your own environment.

Our Portfolio Architecture community was built from partner and customer solutions and thrives with the community's support. If you have a similar solution or you've iterated on our reference architectures to meet a different need, we'd like to hear about it!