The announcement of general availability for Red Hat OpenShift 4.6 at the end of October signaled another step in the evolution of the open hybrid cloud. Red Hat Inc.’s customers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux can now run OpenShift on practically any platform they can find.

“OpenShift provides an abstraction which combines Kubernetes on top of Linux with RHEL, across all open environments — from bare metal to virtualization platforms to various public clouds and out to the edge,” said Joe Fernandes (pictured, right), vice president and general manager of core cloud platforms at Red Hat. “More customers are not only looking at containers, but running containers directly on bare metal environments. That’s definitely a trend that we’re seeing.”

Fernandes spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA event. He was joined by Stefanie Chiras (pictured, left), senior vice president and general manager of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux business unit, and they discussed new partnerships with major cloud providers, support for use cases at the edge, and the company’s evolving open hybrid cloud approach. (* Disclosure below.)

Support for AWS and Azure

Red Hat’s most recent OpenShift release offers a number of new features. In addition to the full stack installation of OpenShift on bare metal, the latest iteration includes support for Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure Government Clouds.

Fernandes indicated there is more in the works involving Red Hat’s OpenShift partnerships with AWS and Azure. Joint customers can currently access OpenShift in an Azure environment as a native Azure service. Red Hat announced a similar partnership with Amazon in May, and there may soon be additional news on that as well.

“We’re already doing pilots on the Amazon-Red Hat OpenShift service,” Fernandes said. “This new service will be jointly operated by Red Hat and Amazon together. That will be coming out in general availability later this year.”

Red Hat’s bare metal implementation and expanded partnerships signal the company’s commitment to an open hybrid cloud strategy and providing its customers with a consistent experience for application development across multiple platforms.

“Our view around this open hybrid cloud story has always been about consistency; it’s about that language that you speak no matter where you want to run your applications,” Chiras said. “That consistency leads to a lot of flexibility, whether it’s through a broad ecosystem or it’s across footprints. Some of it is about distributing your data center, getting that compute closer to the data or closer to your customers.”

Getting compute closer to the data increasingly means providing capabilities in edge environments. Red Hat has been working with developers inside its Fedora ecosystem to extend solutions for the growing number of use cases being generated by internet of things devices.

Some of that work was incorporated into the most recent release of RHEL 8.3, also announced in late October.

“In the Fedora upstream community, there has been a lot of work that’s been done in the IoT Special Interest Group,” Chiras noted. “They’ve been investigating the requirements for this use case in edge. It’s all about being able to deploy at scale in a distributed way, be ready for that use case, and have some predictability and consistency.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 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