UPDATED 19:30 EDT / DECEMBER 06 2022

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Q&A: Why Red Hat, AWS are partnering for OpenShift services

In 2021, Red Hat Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. launched a service to make it easier for Red Hat OpenShift customers to build, scale and manage containerized applications on AWS.

The service, called Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), has been expanding in 2022 to offer features like Red Hat OpenShift Data Science — just in time to celebrate OpenShift’s 10-year anniversary.

Chuck Svoboda (pictured, right), senior director of managed cloud services for Red Hat and Ted Stanton (pictured, left), global head of sales for Red Hat and IBM at AWS, spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Lisa Martin and Paul Gillin at AWS re:Invent, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

They discussed the evolution of ROSA and other Red Hat cloud services that are now available for consumption on the AWS Marketplace. [The following content has been condensed for clarity.]

Gillin: Talk about ROSA and how it differs from previous iterations of OpenShift. You had an online version of OpenShift several years ago. What’s different about ROSA?

Svoboda: Amazon is the number one cloud that OpenShift runs on. So, a lot of those customers … want one bill. ROSA comes through the one bill, comes through the Marketplace. Not only that, we’re financially backing OpenShift with a 99.95% financially backed SLA. That means that if we drop below 99.95% of availability, we’re going to give you some money back.

Stanton: What’s really great about ROSA, too, is we built some really fantastic integrations with some of the AWS-native services … to make it very simple and easy for customers to get started. We talked a little bit about the Marketplace, but it’s also available just on the AWS console. So customers can get started in a pay-as-you-go fashion. And if they want to move into more of a commitment, more of a set schedule of payments, they can move into a Marketplace private offer.

Gillin: For OpenShift customers who want to move to ROSA, can they run both environments simultaneously and migrate over time?

Svoboda: We have quite a few migration tools. There’s also partners like Trilio … who can help move applications, back them up. In fact, we’re working on a pretty cool joint go to market with that right now. Generally speaking, the OpenShift experience … is primarily the same. You don’t have to really retrain your people. If anything, there’s a reduction in operational cost.

Stanton: I would actually say migrations from OpenShift … to ROSA maybe only represents about a third of the customers we have. About another third of the customers is existing AWS customers — maybe they’re doing Kubernetes, do it themselves. And another third, we have quite a few customers that were new OpenShift customers, new Red Hat customers, and new AWS customers that were looking to build that next cloud-native application. Lots of … the startup space have actually chosen to go with Rosa.

Gillin: Red Hat has really stepped up their commitment to the AWS Marketplace. Why are you doing that now, and how are the marketplaces evolving as a channel for you?

Svoboda: We are a customer-centric, customer-first approach. Our customers want to buy through the Marketplace. If you’re an Amazon customer, it’s really easy for you to go procure software through the Marketplace, and instead of having to call up Red Hat and get on paper and write a second check — one-stop shop, one bill. That is very, very attractive to our customers. Not only that, it opens up other ways to buy … pay-as-you-go, by-the-drink pricing using exactly what you need right now. AWS pioneered that. That provides that elasticity, one of the core tenants at … AWS cloud. And we weren’t able to get that with the traditional self-managed on Red Hat paper subscriptions.

Here’s the complete video interview, part 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

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