What's behind the trend of companies moving from public to hybrid cloud Watch Now

special feature Integrating the Hybrid Cloud As far and fast as cloud computing is embedding itself into the enterprise, there remain many cloud-resistant applications and services. Read More

As you doubtlessly have noticed, IT is moving away from server rooms and data centers to clouds and containers. Red Hat, the leading Linux company, has. In its latest release of its hybrid cloud, the Red Hat Cloud Suite, Red Hat proclaims it offers "an end-to-end, deployment-ready solution for enterprise digital transformation."

Shorn of the marketing buzz, this means Red Hat claims the new Cloud Suite enables organizations to more easily build cloud-native applications, deploy them, and manage these workloads through a single offering. This will help businesses to move to the cloud without sacrificing existing IT infrastructure investments.

Gary Chen, IDC's research manager of Software Defined Compute, agrees. In a statement, Chen said, "Open source continues to drive significant innovations in cloud computing. Organizations are increasingly interested in multi-platform architectures that support microservices-based, cloud native applications as well as traditional workloads. With Red Hat Cloud Suite, customers can embrace this new paradigm, and deliver applications faster in a highly scalable, integrated, and fully-managed environment."

Specifically, Red Hat Cloud Suite addresses the drive toward the cloud and and adoption of Linux containers by bringing together Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, the company's enterprise-grade container application platform, with Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Virtualization's massively scalable infrastructure provided. All this is managed with Red Hat CloudForms.

The newest Red Hat Cloud Suite boasts numerous new features and enhancements. These include:

Enterprise-grade Kubernetes container orchestration - Via Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Cloud Suite now includes a comprehensive, Kubernetes-based container application platform. In addition, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform supports the creation of next-generation cloud-native applications while simultaneously supporting existing workloads, including those requiring stateful resources. Red Hat CloudForms with Ansible automation - Red Hat is finally answering the question of what it will do with two DevOps programs. The answer? Combine CloudForms with Ansible. This makes CloudForms easier to deploy across an organization and increases the depth and breadth of management automation. Composable OpenStack services - For Cloud Suite clouds built on OpenStack, users can now compose precisely where they want each of their services to run. This helps improve operating efficiency by allowing the scaling and management of specific services as needed rather than all services at once. Flexible, powerful virtualization capabilities - The latest version of Red Hat Virtualization enables users to deploy a "thin" hypervisor by default or layer on additional software and services as needed to address unique use cases. Virtualization administration has also been improved with the addition of Cockpit for greater insights into virtualized environments and workloads.

Put all this together and Lars Herrmann, Red Hat's general manager of Integrated Solutions, said Cloud Suite offers "an end-to-end answer for how organizations can embrace IT's future without sacrificing IT's 'now.' Cloud Suite provides the technologies to drive this transformation while retaining existing IT investments, unified, ready-to-deploy solution to fit nearly every enterprise IT infrastructure need."

What I see Red Hat doing here is putting together an all-in-one hybrid-cloud platform from many of its existing cloud programs. The move makes perfect business sense and I expect it to do well with its customers.

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