News

Amazon Cloud, Red Hat Integrate on OpenShift Containers

• By David Ramel
• May 2, 2017

Red Hat Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) are teaming up in an integration pact to enable developers to directly access AWS services from within the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

OpenShift is Red Hat's open source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) based on the open source Kubernetes system for managing and orchestrating Docker container clusters.

The OpenShift platform is designed to help enterprise developers more easily and quickly build, develop and deploy applications for various infrastructures, including public clouds or on-premises systems.

As part of the new agreement, developers will be able to access many AWS services -- compute, database, data analytics, machine learning, networking, mobile and different application services -- from directly within OpenShift, whether they're using the AWS-hosted version of the OpenShift Container Platform or an on-premises implementation.

"Customers will be able to seamlessly configure and deploy a range of AWS services such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53 and Elastic Load Balancing with just a few clicks from directly within the Red Hat OpenShift console," the companies said in a news release today during the Red Hat Summit in Boston.

Another part of the alliance will see closer ties between AWS services and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which has been available on the Amazon cloud since 2008. By more tightly aligning their products, the companies said new AWS services will become more quickly available to Red Hat Enterprise Linux users.

And that's not all. "AWS and Red Hat will continue to offer the complete suite of Red Hat JBoss Middleware offerings as fully supported services on AWS, allowing customers to run Red Hat JBoss Middleware as containerized application components with the functionality, elasticity, and security customers have come to expect from AWS," the companies said. "To further enhance Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform performance on AWS, the companies will collaborate on development to further strengthen the integration between AWS and Kubernetes, the container orchestration platform that powers Red Hat OpenShift."

In another announcement, Red Hat said a new container-native storage product will extend container application portability in hybrid clouds by increasing the availability of Red Hat Gluster Storage for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform in the AWS cloud. Red Hat Gluster Storage is part of the emerging software-defined movement that's most known for transforming network virtualization architectures.

The two companies will be discussing their partnership in more detail during the summit, though general availability of the new integration isn't expected until the fall of this year.

And Red Hat exec Paul Cormier promised more news to come during this week's summit in a blog post. "In the coming days, you will also see us talk about our vision for the automated enterprise, powered by Ansible, which is increasingly becoming the standard for automation," Cormier said.