As cloud has extended its impact beyond Silicon Valley and hit the mainstream market, many new enterprises are working to adapt business models to fit the software as a service experience so many customers desire.

“We’re seeing banks using Kubernetes [container orchestration management system], airlines, trains. All of them want to be mobile … [have a] user experience better than it was before. … That’s the big trend we’ve seen, people want to change their customer experience and containers make it easier. Kubernetes makes it scalable,” said Brian Gracely (pictured, left), director of product strategy at Red Hat Inc. At Red Hat, enterprises can find support through their challenging migrations and the multicloud decisions many industries are not equipped to make on their own, Gracely explained.

Gracely and Mike Barrett (pictured, right), senior manager at Red Hat, spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Austin, Texas. They discussed the expansion of digital need across industries and how Red Hat is using its container-based software deployment platform OpenShift to help customers grow. (* Disclosure below.)

Innovating with the Kubernetes community

Red Hat created OpenShift to drive developer velocity and help customers bring new ideas to market through software. Kubernetes has been integral to that mission. “You need … a user experience … that helps you deal with these containers, build them, deploy them. … Kubernetes is an engine, and you can put it in a truck or you can put it in a Ferrari, and we just happened to put it in OpenShift,” Barrett said.

Communicating with customers enabled Red Hat to embrace Kubernetes and make the strategic changes to the company’s technology that has allowed them to create and maintain a loyal user community. With the help of Red Hat and Kubernetes, these enterprises are learning how to build distributed applications.

“It’s very hard to translate what you can do in Silicon Valley to what you can do in Cleveland. … Things like service meshes and Istio … are basically saying, ‘Let me give you enough of a framework to build these cool applications,’” Gracely said. Kubernetes and OpenShift alleviates the manual labor of developers and allows for the automation that enables innovation at companies, he added.

For Red Hat, Kubernetes is ideal for providing customers with new technology through its open-source community and giving them the opportunity to build their own process from the ground up. “It’s layerable; it’s pluggable; it has defined APIs and interfaces where you can remove stuff. That allows different businesses to come in and be extremely successful in the ecosystem without taking out the entire platform,” Barrett concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 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