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Kubernetes has become the cloud container orchestration program. Red Hat jumped on the Kubernetes bandwagon early in 2015. Today, Red Hat is all in, with the release of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7.

This latest version of Red Hat's enterprise-grade Kubernetes container application platform is meant for building and managing containers from the data center to the public cloud. When Red Hat says public cloud, it is not kidding. Red Hat now makes popular Amazon Web Services (AWS) accessible directly from the OpenShift Container Platform. This integration makes it easier for AWS users to configure and deploy these services from OpenShift, and it provides a single path of enterprise-grade support for customer needs.

At launch, AWS Services accessible through the OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 include:

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS)

Amazon Athena

AWS Route 53

Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3)

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

Amazon ElastiCache

Amazon Redshift Simple Email Service (SES)

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR)

Red Hat isn't giving up on the private cloud. Instead, the company sees a hybrid cloud future ahead. It plans on helping create this vision of tomorrow by binding services across public cloud and on-premise resources to OpenShift-based applications. This will provide a consistent, open standards-based foundation for cloud-native enterprise applications.

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As Steve Pousty, Red Hat's lead developer advocate for OpenShift, recently said at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit, Kubernetes serves as a "common operating plane for cloud-native computing using containers." Pouty added, "For Red Hat, Kubernetes is the cloud Linux kernel. It's this infrastructure that everybody's going to build on."

Red Hat's not the only who see Kubernetes as the hybrid-cloud's future glue. 451 Research reported more than 60 percent of enterprises implementing cloud strategies are using two (or more) different cloud environments. These include on-premises private clouds, hosted private cloud, and multiple public clouds. Increasingly, modern applications built for digital transformation rely on a mesh of loosely coupled component and microservices, making consistency across cloud providers a significant challenge, but one that Red Hat claimed the OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 can address. Red Hat's not the only one trying this approach; Cloud Foundry is taking a similar approach.

OpenShift Container does this by providing developers and system administrators with a single platform to build, deploy, and manage applications consistently across hybrid-cloud infrastructures. This helps businesses achieve greater value by delivering modern and traditional applications with shorter development cycles and lower operating costs. The platform is built on open-source programs including Docker, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and Kubernetes.

To make this practical, OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 includes the OpenShift Service Catalog. This enables IT organizations to connect any application running on the OpenShift platform to a wide variety of services, regardless of where that service runs.

The OpenShift Service Catalog uses the Open Service Broker application programming interface (API) standard to enable developers to search for, provision, and bind application services to OpenShift applications. It also provides a more secure and consistent way for administrators to provide new services to end users. This helps to free development teams from having to deeply understand service creation or consumption, and it places more emphasis on building applications to deliver business value rather than sourcing services.

To make it even easier, OpenShift Container includes the OpenShift Template Broker. This turns any OpenShift Template into a discoverable service for application developers using OpenShift. Templates are lists of OpenShift objects that can be implemented within specific parameters. This makes it easier to deploy microservices-based, reusable, composite applications.

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With this latest OpenShift Container, you can use the Ansible DevOps program for provisioning and managing services through the OpenShift Service Catalog. The OpenShift Ansible Broker enables users to provision complicated services both on and off the OpenShift platform, helping to simplify and automate complex workflows.

In addition, OpenShift Container includes OpenShift Application Runtimes. This is a beta set of runtimes to help programmers build and deploy their first cloud-native applications. It also includes Red Hat Container-Native Storage 3.6. This is a software-defined storage built from Red Hat Gluster Storage. It handles container storage both on-premises and from the cloud.

Finally, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 features also include:

Network Policy is now out of Technology Preview. This enables project administrators to apply network rules and policies to inbound traffic for specific OpenShift pods.

Prometheus, an open-source systems monitoring and alerting ecosystem, is now available as a Tech Preview.

Put it all together and you have more proof -- not that it was needed -- that Red Hat's long-term goal is to become a hybrid-cloud power. Linux, while vital, is the means to that end.

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