As the world tackles a global pandemic, the conversation around the practical implications of virtualization and scaling of enterprises is being tested like no other time. Companies are wrestling with many questions such as, how much consistency does there need to be from all of the options within cloud, hybrid cloud, multicloud, and on-premises environments? And how can all of this be managed, especially when teams are scattered like never before?

According to companies such as Red Hat Inc, which became a subsidiary of IBM in 2019, open source was created for times such as these, and Red Hat is on the forefront of all of these issues by using open-source, Kubernetes-based solutions with its OpenShift 4, according to Ashesh Badani (pictured), senior vice president of cloud platforms at Red Hat. 

“Now you’ve got clusters running in multiple environments … and managing these clusters at scale is becoming more and more critical,” Badani said. “We’ve been doing a bunch of work … on this cluster management technology for a while.”

Badani spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience. They discussed the continuing complexity of the evolving virtual needs of enterprises, and ways Red Hat’s technology is tackling these questions through open-source solutions. (* Disclosure below.)

Connecting the world across complex virtual environments

Red Hat has been enhancing its OpenShift 4 product, which is a Kubernetes-based, container-focused platform using open source. As Red Hat continues to update this platform, it is creating one that is autonomous in nature, acting more like a mobile phone in the way that companies can manage, update and upgrade.

Many of Red Hat’s customers, such as Thomas Bavarian Motor Works Inc. (BMW) and Ford Motor Co., are taking this further with their own innovations on the OpenShift platform.

“BMW [is] building its next-generation autonomous driving platform using containers and then all this massive data platform on OpenShift,” Badani described. “Ford [is] doing a lot of interesting work with regard to bringing together a … development team taking advantage of existing investments in hardware  and so on … that they’ve then got in place with the platform.”

As Red Hat and IBM continue to develop these ideas within OpenShift, they are creating what Badani calls the most advanced cluster management technology that’s out on the market. Red Hat is also bringing virtualization into containers through an open-source project called KubeVirt.

“Can we take workloads that are running in these kernel-based virtual machines or VMs running in VMware-based environment, and then bring them natively and run them as containers and managed by Kubernetes, orchestrated across this distributed set of clusters that we’ve talked about?” Badani asked. “It’s a very modern approach to modernizing existing applications, as well as thinking about building new services.”

Red Hat is also working on a project called Quarkus, which is an initiative to rethink Java workloads and how to run those in a cloud-native way within a container orchestrated by Kubernetes. And they are tackling the notion of a portable serverless solution that’s native to Kubernetes regardless of where companies might run it across the cloud. 

“To put all the pieces together … the way we’re thinking about this is a center of gravity is a Kubernetes-based platform that we make fully automated, that we make very operational. Make sure that it’s interoperable and modular and, at the same time, then start layering on additional capabilities,” Badani concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE