Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Friday, March 29, 2024

AWS, Red Hat Partner on Containers 

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Red Hat and Amazon Web Services are extending their partnership to allow customers to deploy AWS services from within Red Hat's OpenShift container platform.

The partners announced the new hybrid cloud collaboration during this week's Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) annual summit in Boston. Red Hat also released a batch of developer tools as customers' container platforms move steadily into production.

The hybrid cloud partnership allows users to roll out AWS (NASDAQ:AMZN) services in OpenShift containers both on-premise and on the AWS cloud, and would also support new Amazon services on Red Hat's flagship enterprise Linux platform, the partners said Tuesday (May 2).

The arrangement allows Red Hat customers to configure and deploy AWS services directly from an OpenShift console, including Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift and the cloud giant's elastic load balancing service along with future offerings.

The companies have been collaborating over the last decade to run enterprise applications, databases and analytics workloads via Red Hat's Linux distribution running on the AWS cloud. As more of these applications and services are deployed in containers, the alliance would allow users to build applications on the OpenShift container platform using AWS computing, database, analytics, machine learning, networking and other cloud services.

The expanded partnership also aims to help customers leverage the public cloud regardless of where they are running OpenShift, Paul Cormier, president of Red Hat's products and technologies unit.

Among other things, Red Hat OpenShift is intended to bring Docker and Kubernetes container orchestration to enterprise customers. One goal of the collaboration is ensuring better Kubernetes performance on the AWS cloud, Cormier added.

Red Hat and AWS are demonstrating the new hybrid container services at this week's company summit. They are expected to be generally availability this fall.

Separately, Red Hat announced a batch of OpenShift upgrades along with a container monitoring service and the integration of Gluster storage into the OpenShift container platform running on AWS. The addition of the software-defined storage capability is intended to stabilize stateful applications.

A related service called OpenShift.io is a development platform for building cloud native applications using open source code. The new DevOps "tool chain" automates the transfer of code to application containers that can then be deployed to OpenShift. The result, Red Hat said, is "containerized development testing."

The company also released micro-services runtimes for containers running on OpenShift.

As containers move to production, Red Hat and others have rolled out new container monitoring tools designed to ensure containers are stable and secure. Red Hat's "container health index" service released this week inspects and "grades" containers along with those of its software partners. The company said it expects to certify 20 independent software vendors, including Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), under the container monitoring service within the next three months.

Container leader Docker released similar image security scanning and continuous container vulnerability monitoring in March.

Cormier stressed the said the new suite of tools "really focuses on the developer" as hybrid cloud adoption accelerates along with enterprise adoption of containers. The company's list of customers currently running containers in production via OpenShift includes bankers like Barclays and Deutsche Bank, healthcare providers such as Massachusetts General Hospital and UnitedHealth Group and carmakers BMW and Volvo.

"It's a complex, multi-cloud world," Cormier added, with enterprise customers picking and choosing cloud providers depending on how well an application runs on individual cloud platforms.

 

About the author: George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).

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