Red Hat Inc. and Google Cloud have been collaborating for more than 11 years in migrating customers to the cloud platform. At the heart of this partnership is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL, which provides an operating system backbone to streamline operations from datacenter to cloud and out to the edge.

The process of cloud migration requires trust, an important element since many businesses today depend on IT to drive business success, and enterprise customers want to make sure they know and understand the environment where critical workloads will be running.

“When customers come over, they want to make sure the experience that they’ve been getting on-premises is the same that they get on Google Cloud,” said Venkat Gattamneni (pictured, right), head of product management for Google Cloud at Google LLC. “That’s a key aspect of trust. When someone comes over to Google Cloud and runs RHEL, they can call either Red Hat or Google for their support needs. That’s another way of ensuring that when customers are coming in with their workloads … we’ve got them covered.”

Gattamneni spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Dustin Kirkland at the Google Cloud Next event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Dan Lah (left), global alliance executive for Google Cloud at Red Hat, and they discussed how Red Hat and Google collaborate in meeting enterprise needs. (* Disclosure below.)

Migration testing

Infrastructure security is a high priority for organizations seeking to migrate to the cloud. Through RHEL, Red Hat provides a foundation for rigorous testing to keep IT environments as protected as possible.

“It’s RHEL, and we have to maintain that,” Lah said. “When we bring it in through Google Cloud Platform, not only are we testing, the GCP team is testing as well. Google has the same type of energy and same type of desire for security in their cloud.”

The partnership between Red Hat and Google Cloud also involves an upcoming decision point for users of CentOS Linux 7. The Linux distribution that provided a community-based computing platform will be discontinued next June, and the two companies are working to deliver straightforward migration paths for shifting CentOS Linux deployments to RHEL. Customers are looking for a transition that minimizes both product friction and cost, according to Gattamneni.

“We see 90% of the customer base still on CentOS 7, which is going to go end-of-life in the middle of next year,” he said. “A segment of these customers are definitely looking at RHEL as their destination. We do think it’s more or less a seamless move, as long as we can figure out both the product dimension and the commercial dimension.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Google Cloud Next 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