This year’s Red Hat Summit 2016 led with a number of announcements that bring a diversified set of open source tools to developers using Red Hat Linux. Amid them Red Hat’s announcement of new container storage innovations with the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and a partnership with Microsoft, which open-sourced core parts of its .NET framework and web-focused ASP.NET with version 1.0 for Linux.

During his interview with SiliconANGLE’s TheCUBE, Paul Cormier, President of Products and Technologies at Red Hat, spoke to Red Hat’s increasing influence in the container market (video) and why bringing them to the enterprise is important. He believes that Linux is driving the innovation when it comes to container platforms and that’s why Red Hat seeks to deliver containers for every level of the development ecosystem.

Red Hat’s move into the cloud (and containers) has done well for the company with Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst recently attributed the company’s recent 21 percent total revenue increase, year-over-year to $544 million, on hybrid-cloud infrastructures and PaaS. As Cormier mentioned in his TheCUBE interview, “that’s why containers are popular right now: it’s a good vehicle to get applications to the hybrid-cloud.”

Brian Gracely, Wikibon cloud analyst, said, “Paul [Cormier] made a very bold statement, he said ‘We are in the lead,’ everyone is chasing them. This is a Linux game, you got to be a Linux distribution company, you’ve got to manage Linux, you’ve got to manage security… Overall this week [Red Hat] has laid out very, very compelling container strategy and a platform strategy … I think if you look at it portfolio-wise, Red Hat is in a very strong position.”

In reference to the Microsoft .NET/ASP.NET Core 1.0 announcement, Red Hat is clearly happy to become a partner in this open source release. “This makes Red Hat the only commercial Linux distribution to feature full, enterprise-grade support for .NET,” the company boasted on its blog. Developers will find that Red Hat has included .NET/ASP.NET Core runtime and libraries as OpenShift certified containers.

Microsoft’s .NET/ASP.NET Core 1.0 release will give developers the opportunity to quickly develop .NET applications that can be easily ported cross-platform (with support for Windows, OSX, cloud, server and mobile). Red Hat and Microsoft expect that this will open up platform choice for enterprise developers who want to use .NET on Linux using container-based environments (but it can also be shared-between or run on Windows servers as needed).

Keep reading for resources for OpenShift and for .NET/ASP.NET Core 1.0 development.

Developer Resources: Red Hat OpenShift

OpenShift is Red Hat’s container platform integrated as a format designed to ship with hits flavor of Linux and the intent is to prepare that container product for enterprises. To deliver this capability to developers, Red Hat provides a large documentation portal as well as a “Getting Started with OpenShift Online” guide for new developers.

First, here is a overview of the OpenShift developer resources, keep reading for a look at the OpenShift Container Platform.

As a platform, OpenShift is Red Hat’s public cloud platform designed to ease cloud development by automating provisioning, management and scaling. Developers can approach OpenShift with a large array of programming languages and services including Java, PHP, Node.js, Python, Perl, MySQL, ProgreSQL, MongoDB, Jenkins, Cron, and amultitude of JBoss xPasS Services (Fuse, BPM Suite, BRMS, Data Virtualization, Aerogear, and more). These are provided in what’s called “OpenShift Cartridges.”

The OpenShift development environment contains a web console—a backened for application management; RHC client tools—a set of downloadable tools designed to make it easy to create, deploy, manage domains and control access to OpenShift applications; and the JBoss Developer Studio—an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) designed to give developers a way to build rich web applications and transactional enterprise applications.

Developers approaching OpenShift will be working with a Platform-as-a-Service platform designed to deliver PaaS applications that can be provisioned on the fly as needed (as configured by the developer and the needs of the code).

OpenShift Container Platform

The OpenShift Container Platform (previously known as OpenShift Enterprise) incorporates all the concepts behind containerization into the Platform-as-a-Service hosting and provisioning automation of OpenShift to ease the development and use of containers.

To do this, OpenShift natively integrates Docker containerization; web-scale container orchestration with Kubernetes by Google; and integrates with RHEL and Atomic Host to provide secure, lightweight and minimal footprint Linux containers (from the infographic [PDF]).

For a quick overview of the platform and its features look at Red Hat’s brochure page on the OpenShift Container Platform.

Developer Resources: Microsoft .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0 for Linux

At the beginning of Red Hat Summit, Microsoft announced the official release of .NET Core 1.0, ASP.NET Core 1.0 and Entity Framework Core 1.0, now available on OS X, Windows, and Linux. This release includes the Core runtime, libraries and tools as well as ASP.NET Core libraries. The software company also released Visual Studio extensions designed to enable developers to create .NET Core projects.

One big takeaway for developers in this announcement is that .NET and ASP.NET Core 1.0 represent a capability for cross-platform development. The runtimes and libraries will run similarly across platforms and enable developers to code for the cloud and mobile as well as major PC and server platforms (Windows, OSX and Linux). The above-mentioned partnership with Red Hat also greatly increases the Linux support for the language and its developer tools.

Developers interested can read the getting started document and check the release notes for detailed information. Alongside these libraries, Microsoft has also released the full .NET documentation at docs.microsoft.com.

Official support by Red Hat (and a partnership) means that Red Hat Linux developers will have immediate ease-of-access upon unboxing a new installation of Red Hat and all the tools needed to install and begin using .NET Core and its siblings. For everyone else, the open source release means that there is a GitHub repository for the .NET Core runtime and libraries for other flavors of Linux.

Once the SDK is installed (download links above) getting started on Linux has become as easy as running a few commands from the console. In fact, the Microsoft announcement includes a three line command set that will generate a template (for a “Hello World!” example app), restores dependencies and runs the app.

dotnet new

dotnet restore

dotnet run

The result of these commands is, unsurprisingly, “Hello World!”

For developers interested in moving beyond the basic template, Microsoft has kindly provided tutorials for building on .NET Core 1.0 and ASP.NET Core 1.0.

Image Credit: Courtesy of Red Hat OpenShift, “What is a Platform as a Service (PaaS)?.”