With back-to-back summits happening in Boston, Massachusetts, over the past two weeks, Red Hat Inc. and its open-source container application platform OpenShift have been busy showing the tech world how open source is leading the enterprise to viable solutions that provide choice and the ability to leverage legacy systems to take advantage of the latest technology.

“We’re spending a lot of time talking about what we’re doing with the combination of OpenStack and containerized platforms, and for us that’s OpenShift built on Kubernetes,” said Chris Wright (pictured), chief technologist at Red Hat. “That’s the big piece that’s new. Something I’m focused on [is] how do these components or how do the technologies go together as components and new technologies.” 

Wright spoked to host Stu Miniman (@stu) and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during this week’s OpenStack Summit in Boston, Massachusetts.

OpenStack as an infrastructure layer

The important thing to consider for Wright is determining which tasks need solutions for the enterprise and providing them with the right tools to accomplish that function. Wright explained that infrastructure needs software to help manage it.

“We’ve put a lot into making OpenStack that infrastructure layer. That is more of an infrastructure ops perspective. If you look at it more top-down, from the application point of view, you’ve got application orchestration,” he said.

Wright believes that the right tool for the job is Kubernetes, an open-source system for containerized applications, because it is efficient in building out an application-, multi-tiered- or microservice-based architecture.

Simplicity is the name of the game in bringing new technology to IT departments, and Wright commented that “simple is sexy” because it is essential to maintenance, operability and upgrading on “day two” or after deployment.

At first, the objective was to deploy, but Wright disclosed that it is well past that point.  

“Now it’s get it up and get it running forward. Rolling it forward and doing  updates. That is something that we’ve spent a lot of time at Red Hat focused on, both in the community and then in our products,” he said.

He noted that Red Hat is thinking from the customer perspective, and there is no need to change or complicate systems for IT organizations. The strategy is to bring changes forth as an evolution to simplify the client experience.

“We serve an enterprise customer base, and they are looking for stability, without getting distracted by the next shiny, new object,” Wright concluded.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE