Red Hat deepens partnership with AWS

Open-source bigwig Red Hat is deepening its ties with Amazon Web Services (AWS) by enabling enterprises to use public cloud services on its OpenShift container platform.  

With access to AWS services such as Amazon Aurora, Redshift, Athena, CloudFront, Route 53 and Elastic Load Balancing, developers will be able to build container-based applications on-premise as well as on AWS.

In addition, enterprises will be able to build and extend container-based applications with the OpenShift container platform, using a range of AWS compute, database, analytics, machine learning, networking, mobile and other application services.

Speaking to the media on the sidelines of Red Hat Summit in Boston, Mike Ferris, vice-president for technical business development and business architecture at Red Hat, said the two companies will also provide a single support path, so enterprises can receive assistance for both AWS services and OpenShift at the same time.

The renewed partnership between Red Hat and AWS comes at a time when more enterprises are running applications in lightweight containers that can be developed and deployed quickly without the performance overheads of virtual machines.

“Container adoption is taking off in the enterprise, and this alliance is designed to accelerate that by giving customers access to AWS services directly in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform,” said Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat.

“By bringing together the incredible pace of innovation and breadth of functionality that AWS provides with the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise-grade container platform, we’re enabling customers to bring the combined advantages of these offerings across their hybrid environments with the backing of our joint support,” he said.

Apart from the OpenShift collaboration, Ferris said Red Hat and AWS will align their development and release cycles, so enterprises can take advantage of new AWS services in areas such as networking and storage capabilities for applications powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux on AWS.

“As things move forward, we’ll provide support for new services that Amazon launches faster than we’ve ever done,” he said.

Since 2008, Red Hat has been making Red Hat Enterprise Linux available through AWS. The two companies will continue to support Red Hat JBoss middleware on AWS, as well as work together to improve integration between AWS and Kubernetes, the container orchestration platform.

“Given that Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open-source solutions, our enterprise customers have been passionate about seamlessly running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and various other Red Hat solutions on AWS,” said AWS CEO Andy Jassy.

“With AWS’s pace of innovation continuing to accelerate, we're excited about deepening our alliance with Red Hat so that customers can enjoy AWS’s unmatched functionality as quickly as it comes out, whether they’re using Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.”

Red Hat is among a growing number of software suppliers that are looking to partner with AWS and Microsoft Azure as more enterprises turn to the cloud to augment their IT capabilities.

In October 2016, VMware announced plans to deliver a vSphere-based cloud service running on AWS, enabling enterprises to run applications using a set of familiar software and tools in a consistent hybrid cloud environment.