In May 2020, Red Hat Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. announced an expanding collaboration between the two companies called Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), a jointly managed and jointly supported enterprise Kubernetes service on AWS.

Sathish Balakrishnan (pictured), vice president of hosted platforms at Red Hat Inc., is breaking down why Red Hat and AWS are offering this newest choice to customers.

“AWS and Red Hat increasingly are leaders in public cloud and hybrid cloud and are approached by IT decision makers who are looking for guidance on changing requirements and how they should be doing applications … in very containerized and hybrid cloud world,” Balakrishnan said.

Balakrishnan spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed Red Hat and AWS’ partnership over the years and its latest expansion. (* Disclosure below.)

Free will for managing containerized applications

Red Hat and AWS have a long history of collaboration between the two companies, starting in 2007 when Red Hat offered Red Hat Enterprise Linux on AWS. With Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, the two companies offer a fully managed service that helps enterprises build and deploy applications in AWS on Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform using the same tools and application program interfaces, according to Balakrishnan. With more than 170 integrated AWS cloud native services, developers can build containerized applications for enhanced agility and scalability.

“We’re very excited to have that new offering that’s going to be completely integrated into the AWS console,” Balakrishnan said. “We have a lot of customers already on preview, and we have a long list of customers that are waiting to get on this program.”

Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS will help IT organizations start cloud native systems with enterprise-grade security, agility and cost efficiency. And, ultimately, the real benefit in this newest solution is about letting customers get to choose the way they use Kubernetes, which is what Red Hat wants, according to Balakrishnan.

“With all of that experience and all the work that we’ve done upstream in building Kubernetes and making Kubernetes really the hybrid cloud platform for the entire IT industry, we’re excited to bring this joint offering so we can bring all the engineering and the management strengths. Combined with the AWS infrastructure and the AWS teams … this is really going to help our customers as they move to the cloud,” Balakrishnan concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* 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