A case can certainly be made that Red Hat Inc. and the open-source movement have commoditized portions of the information-technology infrastructure. A much wider range of tools and systems are now available to enterprises than ever before.

This trend is just part of the open-source journey, one that Chris Wright (pictured), as the senior vice president and chief technology officer of Red Hat and a veteran Linux developer, has seen evolve over more than 20 years as a software engineer.

“What we’re experiencing in the Linux space is, it’s driving a commoditization of infrastructure,” Wright said. “It’s switching away from the traditional vertically integrated stack of a [reduced instruction set computer]/Unix environment to providing choice. As infrastructure changes, it’s not just hardware; it’s virtualized data centers. It’s public clouds.”

Wright spoke with Justin Warren (@jpwarren) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas. They discussed the concept of an open hybrid cloud and Red Hat’s partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. (* Disclosure below.)

Open source at the edge

Red Hat has posted a great deal recently about its notion of the open hybrid cloud, the concept of bringing interoperability, workload portability, and flexible open-source software to enterprise environments. When it comes to edge computing, this strategy could play an important role, according to Wright.

“Having some consistency is a great way to manage that,” Wright explained. “Maybe you have a dependency on a data set, and that data set is supplied from sources that are in an edge location. We can codify that and then enable developers to build applications, with test and development production across a variety of environments, pushing all the way out to an edge deployment.”

Despite last year’s acquisition of Red Hat by AWS competitor IBM Corp., the public cloud provider and the open-source pioneer remain partners. It’s part of the open-source philosophy to work together, although both companies have differentiated solutions in the container space.

“When you look in the open-source communities, engineers thrive on building great technology together, independent of any corporate boundaries,” Wright noted. “We run our platforms on top of AWS, so we bring customers to AWS and have a shared benefit there. We’re both invested in Kubernetes. Ours is OpenShift, theirs is EKS, so customers have a choice in that context.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent event. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE