For many organizations today, the hybrid cloud has become the preferred cloud implementation. How to effectively implement this strategy continues to be a work in progress. Red Hat Inc.’s OpenStack-based platform is one solution top of mind at Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts.

It provides the ability to “stitch together” multiple cloud environments using an application program interface at the infrastructure layer, as well as providing a cloud infrastructure for enterprises that do not want vendor lock-in, according to Radhesh Balakrishnan (pictured), general manager of OpenStack at Red Hat.

However, if an organization has a private cloud, “you can use the APIs that OpenStack provides to manipulate the resources that are on AWS, Google,” he added.

Balakrishnan recently joined Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during Red Hat Summit to discuss how OpenStack works and where they see cloud advancing in the near future.

Future of digital transformation

During the past two years, the focus around digital transformation has shined a light on the application layer, according to Balakrishnan. Developers have become the kingmakers, where the speed from thought to executing code is what is going to make or break a business. That’s why the action is happening in containers and DevOps, he said.

However, there is still a need to have an agile infrastructure at the bottom layer,. he stated. Rather than reinvent the “plumbing” at the compute, storage and networking levels, it’s possible to build on top of OpenStack. Adding OpenShift on top of OpenStack provides fungible infrastructure at the bottom, with the DevOps running on top of that, he explained.

“That’s what we’re seeing as a path to the future,” Balakrishnan concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Red Hat Summit 2017. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this Red Hat Summit segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE