Dan's Take
Red Hat's New Products Emphasize Cloud Computing, Containers
The company made a barrage of announcements at its recent Summit show.
- By Dan Kusnetzky
- 05/03/2017
Red Hat has made a number of announcements at its user group conference, Red Hat Summit. The announcements ranged from the announcement of OpenShift.io to facilitate the creation of software as a service applications, pre-built application runtimes to facilitate creation of OpenShift-based workloads, an index to help enterprises build more reliable container-based computing environments, an update to the Red Hat Gluster storage virtualization platform allowing it to be used in an AWS computing environment, and, of course, an announcement of a Red Hat/Amazon Web Services partnership.
Red Hat summarized the announcements as follows:
- OpenShift.io. A free, end-to-end, SaaS development environment for cloud-native apps built with popular open source code, built for modern dev teams using the latest technology. Built from technologies including Eclipse Che, OpenShift.io includes collaboration tools for remote teams to analyze and assign work. Code is automatically containerized and easily deployed to OpenShift.
- Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes. A pre-built, containerized runtimes for multi-language microservices (Spring Boot, Java EE, Eclipse MicroProfile, Eclipse Vert.x, and Node.js) natively integrated with OpenShift. Working with Red Hat OpenShift Application Services (containerized middleware services running on OpenShift).
- Container Health Index. The index inspects and grades all of Red Hat's container products as well as those from certified ISV partners, giving customers confidence of deploying containers that are secure, stable and supported. Red Hat will be certifying 20 ISV partner products within the next 90 days.
- Red Hat Gluster Storage with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on AWS. A new solution to help customers achieve more consistent, software-defined storage for stateful applications.
- Partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to integrate AWS services into Red Hat OpenShift.
The announcements targeted a number of industry hot buttons, including containers, rapid application development, storage virtualization and cloud computing. As with other announcements in the recent past, the company is integrating multiple open source projects and creating commercial-grade software products designed to provide an easy-to-use, reliable and maintainable enterprise computing environment.
Dan's Take: Easing Cloud Deployments
Red Hat is hoping to capitalize on industry trends towards more highly virtualized development and deployment environments as well as the use of on-premises, off-premises and hybrid computing models. Although the integration with AWS isn't complete, it's clear that Red Hat and Amazon want to make deploying workloads in the cloud as easy as deploying them locally.
In previous announcements, Red Hat has pointed out that it has certified Red Hat software executing in both Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure cloud computing environments. So, the company can claim to support a broad portfolio of enterprise computing environments.
These announcements will be of the most interest to large enterprises since they are the ones most likely to adopt these products. These tools might be used by independent software vendors (ISVs) to create IT solutions for smaller firms as well, leading to potential impact on some small to medium size business.
About the Author
Daniel Kusnetzky, a reformed software engineer and product manager, founded Kusnetzky Group LLC in 2006. He's literally written the book on virtualization and often comments on cloud computing, mobility and systems software. He has been a business unit manager at a hardware company and head of corporate marketing and strategy at a software company.