Supercharging its position as an open-source purveyor, IBM Corp.’s recent acquisition of Red Hat Inc. has helped spread enterprise adoption of containers’ virtualized method for running distributed software applications. IBM now stands as an experienced enterprise player with a new open-source toolset.

IBM’s investment in open source goes back years. Big Blue went all-in on Kubernetes, the popular open-source container orchestration platform about two years ago, according to Chris Rosen (pictured), program director, offering management, IBM Container Service and IBM Container Registry. The company contributes to the open-source Cloud Native Computing Foundation upstream and then simplifies the technology for end users.

“We build our solutions on top of these open-source projects, adding value, simplifying the management of those solutions,” Rosen said.

Rosen spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Seattle, Washington. They discussed how IBM balances upstream open-source contributions with downstream productizing of open-source technology. (* Disclosure below.)

Enterprise orders Kubernetes well done

“You hear time and time again at these conferences that the power of the community is so much greater than one individual company,” Rosen said.

This has been borne out by companies like Google LLC, Lyft Inc. and Tesla Inc., freeing up their technology to open source. Companies benefit from the community of developers; developers benefit from the code; end users benefit from improved technology.

“So let’s work together as a community, build that solid foundation at the open-source level, and then IBM’s going to add things that we think are differentiating and unique to our offering,” Rosen stated.

The most valuable thing a provider like IBM can offer for complex technology like Kubernetes is simplification. It simplifies the entire Kubernetes stack with orchestration at the top, containerd engine below that, plus Prometheus monitoring, Calico security, etc.

It’s complex, and what might further tangle it are new releases of Kubernetes. For this reason, IBM participates frequently in CNCF conformance testing.

“We typically are the first public cloud to add support for a new version of Kubernetes,” he said. “The only way we can do that is by actively participating in the community.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: IBM Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE