Friday Five — May 12, 2017

Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst kicked off Red Hat's Summit meeting in Boston last week, which attracted more than 6,000 people, up 20% from last year. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up with Whitehurst at the show for an update on the company's position and prospects... "We have data that shows our customers who use cloud actually grow faster in total with us than ones who don't," says Whitehurst. "The promise of cloud accelerates the Unix-to-Linux migration as people modernize applications to be able to move to cloud–whether they move immediately or not–because clouds primarily run Linux. In general, anything that makes people move to a new architecture is good for us because we have a high share of new architecture relative to old. [But] hybrid cloud is a journey, not a destination. We're there in some ways. We have banks and hedge funds today that have a RHEL estate and they run analytics on-premise and they will burst out on the public cloud, either at the end of the trading day or right before the trading day. The key is not every application and not every context."

Multiple public clouds, hybrid infrastructure, legacy applications paired alongside cloud-native and hunger from end users for better, faster and more services forms a Gordian knot of complexity that seems like too much to overcome. But it can be, with Red Hat leading the way in conquering the complexities of the four IT footprints (on-premise, virtual, private cloud and public cloud) and beyond with consistent, open and innovative technologies. The consistency that Red Hat provides, from the enterprise-grade backbone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to the open standards embraced by Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to the industry-standard automation of Ansible by
Red Hat, helps enterprises to focus on their own innovative differentiation: their applications. By adding open innovation to a consistent technology foundation, enterprises are able to deliver the applications and services that make them stand out. More importantly, they can deploy across all four footprints plus multi-cloud without fear of complexity ruling their lives. Build anything. Deploy everywhere. Do everything. This is the future of computing, and Red Hat is making it possible.

Hopefully by now, you have either seen the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Red Hat alliance keynote or at least read the press release. Some highlights in case you missed it: AWS cloud services integrated with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to enable hybrid deployments, joint support path for applications using Openshift with integrations to AWS, collaboration on Kubernetes to make OpenShift run more efficiently on AWS, and enhanced Red Hat Enterprise Linux optimizations for AWS. In short, AWS and Red Hat plan to develop a single support path for the use of AWS Services integrated with OpenShift. If you call Red Hat for support, then we plan to support you with these integrations backed by the specific service experts at AWS. We know customers rely on both companies, and are not keen on having to reach out to multiple organizations for assistance, so being able to call Red Hat with the knowledge that the two companies plan to collaborate on support issues is important to customers. We want the user and customer experience with AWS to be as seamless as the other services and frameworks we support within OpenShift.

Last week, Red Hat announced native access to Amazon Web Services products in its Red Hat OpenShift product. Deeper integration between OpenShift and AWS means that OpenShift users can access services such as Amazon Aurora, the company's cloud-based database, the Amazon RedShift data warehouse product and other cloud-based AWS services directly through OpenShift. This is significant news for multiple reasons. Firstly, as some have pointed out, the partnership between AWS and Red Hat OpenShift further solidifies OpenShift's standing in the market because it now has stronger ties with the leading public IaaS cloud. Secondly, it supports OpenShift as a hybrid cloud platform that allows customers to extend workloads managed in OpenShift between their on-premises infrastructure and the public IaaS cloud. For AWS, the partnership makes sense too. Like many of their pacts with independent service providers, this basically amounts to an on-ramp for moving applications to the AWS cloud.

This year's Red Hat Summit, held this week in Boston, has been a feast of information about enterprise application development, IT automation, containers and microservices. All of which are heavily intertwined, of course. A key message from Red Hat this week reads as follows: "Containers in production are real on Red Hat OpenShift." Red Hat executives say it appears that the company has enabled more production deployments of containers than any other vendor–including Docker itself–through its OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service. And while enterprises have been pursuing IT automation for decades, there are some indicators that its promise is finally starting to be fulfilled. Joe Fitzgerald, vice president of management at Red Hat, contends that the company's Ansible product represents "a paradigm shift in IT automation." The product differentiates by offering new levels of simplicity for automation–meaning that it's not solely for engineers, he said.