Overview
Businesses are increasingly adopting cloud computing. By moving enterprise workloads into the cloud, organizations can work in a more agile way, improve innovation, and expand and contract resources as needed.
Hybrid cloud environments (which combine some cloud infrastructure with some on-premise infrastructure) and multicloud environments (which combine multiple public clouds) both provide the benefits of public cloud resources while meeting specific workload, security, and compliance expectations on premise. This makes the choice of a cloud operation system (OS) tremendously important.
A cloud-based OS—like a traditional operating system—manages the operation, execution, and processes of all cloud resources, including virtual machines (VMs), virtual infrastructure, and hardware and software resources.
Things to consider before moving to the cloud
Given the many variables involved, moving to the cloud is a complicated undertaking. This is especially true when moving to hybrid and multicloud environments. New interactions and multiple integrations combine to make management more challenging.
As you're preparing for your move to the cloud, you'll likely have a few important questions:
- How do you keep everything connected and running?
- How do you make sure your existing on-premise infrastructure interacts smoothly with the new virtual components?
- How do you maintain oversight, visibility, and security?
- Should you consider automation?
- And how on earth do you manage it all?
Choosing the right OS largely influences the answers to these questions—and the amount of complexity involved.
As you move more critical enterprise workloads to the cloud, your OS plays an important part. It should provide the capabilities and permission controls needed to ensure optimum performance of your basic configurations and web applications—on demand and in real time. As you adopt hybrid or multicloud environments, you'll often use more than 1 public or private cloud service alongside Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions. This makes an OS that provides consistency across platforms and providers crucial.
The benefits of Linux for cloud computing
Linux® is ideal for cloud environments because of its open source development model. This model gives you the flexibility and freedom to choose technologies—like Kubernetes and edge computing—that will help your organization achieve its business goals. And because Linux is open source versus proprietary, you can avoid being locked in to any 1 vendor's solutions.
Linux has a long history in cloud computing and virtualization, working within the open source community to create cloud systems and help them grow. Linux offers the same tools and processes for cloud workloads that it brings to traditional IT deployments, making management less cumbersome and reducing the need for staff retraining. Today, thanks in great part to the versatility that comes from being open source, Linux remains a top operating system in cloud environments.
If your organization requires enterprise-grade features, an enterprise Linux solution for cloud environments helps meet the critical needs of your applications and workloads. It does this by providing:
- Innovation from the open source community.
- Consistency across infrastructures, environments, and use cases.
- Container portability.
- On-demand scalability.
- Continuous patches and updates to improve security.
One of these capabilities—providing consistency across platforms—is a major factor in reducing cloud-migration complexity. You can migrate workloads to any hybrid cloud environment, knowing that processes, practices, and skills used in an on-premise environment will also work in the cloud.
Something else to consider: Linux comes in different distributions (Linux distros), each with different benefits, subscription models, operational costs, support models, and integrations with existing infrastructure or third-party technologies. The Linux distro you adopt in the cloud should optimize cloud operations by maximizing security, performance, scalability, manageability, and overall reliability.
Why choose Red Hat for cloud computing?
Red Hat® Enterprise Linux has become the world's leading commercial Linux operating system1. It provides consistency from the datacenter to the cloud to the edge, helping you easily manage all applications and workloads with a single tool. In many ways, Red Hat is Linux. We’re a top contributor to the Linux kernel and have more than 25 years of experience and expertise in the open source community.
Our cloud solutions extend beyond our cloud products. Red Hat OS, storage, and application services products are also engineered to support cloud computing.
For developers and DevOps engineers working at the command-line level, Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers quick and easy access to reliable OS images in the cloud. It also lets them access the toolchains, libraries, container tools, and runtimes needed to streamline the path from development to production in public cloud, private cloud, multicloud, and hybrid cloud environments.
Organizations of all sizes turn to Red Hat Enterprise Linux to manage their cloud environments because it provides a stable, security-focused foundation for agile business operations in the cloud. As the most-deployed commercial Linux distro1, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is certified for use:
- With all major cloud marketplaces and cloud providers, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.
- On hundreds of other public cloud and service providers.
- On thousands of other types of software and hardware.
You can bring your own subscription, pay as you go, or use cloud provider committed spend. You can even work directly with Red Hat to build a plan tailored to your specific needs. For example, Red Hat and Microsoft collaborate closely to help optimize solutions for cloud performance on Azure.
We can help you get the most out of your subscriptions today and safely invest in your applications for tomorrow—knowing they can all run anywhere.
1IDC study. "Worldwide Server Operating System Environments Market Shares, 2022: Steady Growth Persists." Document #US51038623, July 2023.
