As all aspects of society move online, the ability to connect remotely is increasingly essential. Applications have to run here, there and everywhere. Speed is critical, and downtime inexcusable. So companies are looking to hybrid cloud solutions that allow operations on-premises, across multiple clouds, and out on the edge.

“Our goal is really to provide a consistent platform for applications regardless of where they run across all those environments,” said Joe Fernandes (pictured), vice president and general manager of core cloud platforms at Red Hat Inc.

Fernandes spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience. They discussed how enterprise is increasingly adopting hybrid cloud strategies, the evolution of Kubernetes, and the release of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. (* Disclosure below.)

Red Hat’s history of consistency

Consistency across diverse environments is key for a successful hybrid cloud platform; and Red Hat has a history of bringing consistency to enterprise applications.

“20 years ago, it was all about Linux bringing consistency for enterprise applications running across x86 hardware,” Fernandes said.

The company’s new challenge is the more complex environment of hybrid cloud. According to the Red Hat “The State of Enterprise Open Source” survey, 63% of respondents have a hybrid cloud infrastructure right now, and of the 37% that do not, more than half plan to implement hybrid in 24 months.

Red Hat has set out to make OpenShift the platform that offers consistency in a hybrid environment, not just between an on-prem appliance and one public cloud, but across multiple clouds (from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft Azure to Google Public Cloud) into on-prem environments (bare metal, VMware or OpenStack), and out to the edge, according to Fernandes.

“That consistency is important for people who are concerned about how their applications are going to operate in these different environments, because otherwise they’d have to manage those differences themselves,” he said.

Hybrid is an evolution, not a revolution

Linux containers have been an important development on the path to hybrid consistency and portability, Fernandes stated.

“Linux runs in all these different footprints, and Linux containers as a portable packaging format enables that,” he said. “Then Kubernetes enables customers to orchestrate containers at scale.”

This makes Red Hat OpenShift an enterprise Kubernetes platform. The agility of Kubernetes containerization is important for both infrastructure and application development teams, creating a cohesive effect within an organization, according to Fernandes.

”It gives them the ability to make decisions around where the best place is to run these applications without having to think about that from a technology perspective but from things that should matter more, like cost and convenience to customers and performance,” he said. “It is an evolution in people and process and culture.”

Open-source community sparks innovation

In another step on the evolution scale, traditional virtual machines are now able to be managed in a Kubernetes environment.

“Let’s just merge VMs natively with Kubernetes in the same way that we manage containers,” said Fernandes, describing the thought process that led to the development. “Then it can facilitate for the application developer this evolution of apps that are running in one environment towards apps that are running, essentially, in a hybrid environment from how they’re packaged and deployed.”

Fernandes credits the ongoing open-source project KubeVirt — released commercially as Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization — as a driver for this innovation and more.

“Today, you can run stateful services in containers. You can run things like artificial intelligence and machine learning and analytics and internet of things-type services,” Fernandes said. “This has come through a lot of hard work in the Kubernetes community, in the various associated communities, the container communities, communities like KubeVirt, but it’s all kind of trying to leverage that same automation, that same platform to just do more things.”

Hybrid cloud and the container ecosystem is going to continue to evolve, according to Fernandes, and Red Hat will remain “right in the center of it.”

“It’s all happening in open source,” he said. “Red Hat as a leading contributor to Kubernetes and open source, in general, is driving a lot of this innovation.”

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