Linux has blossomed into the right platform at the right time for enterprise computing.

When she was vice president of Cognitive Systems at IBM Corp., Stefanie Chiras (pictured) kept a vial of metal on her desk, a memento of an internship spent developing advanced materials for NASA that would be light enough to be carried into space yet strong enough to support a load. The vial was a reminder that the right materials must be matched to the right project or the outcome will likely be failure.

Since those days with NASA and IBM, Chiras has moved on to a different role as vice president and general manager, RHEL business unit, for Red Hat Inc., but the vial’s message is still the same. Today’s expanding computing infrastructure demands the right operating system, and Chiras is absolutely convinced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL, is the right solution at the right time.

“I always say to customers, you may not know the applications you’ll run next year, in three years or five years, you may not know where you’ll want to run them,” Chiras said. “What you do know is they’ll run on Linux. It’s the fastest-growing operating system in the industry today.”

Chiras spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think event in San Francisco. They discussed the role Linux plays in multicloud, features contained in the latest RHEL update, how Red Hat’s technology supports containerization, new tools to help manage a complex infrastructure, and passion exhibited by the open-source community. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE features Stefanie Chiras as its Guest of the Week.

Central to Red Hat’s business

RHEL sits at the core of Red Hat’s business, and Linux is the foundation upon which the digital world is built. Developed in the early 1990s by Linus Torvalds, Linux today runs supercomputers, stock exchanges, smartphones and cars. It’s an open-source operating system that’s everywhere, and the best part is it’s free.

Red Hat Linux is not only the number one operating system for on-premises computing; it is also number one in the cloud, according to IBM chief executive Ginni Rometty. And what’s fueling its popularity is a reputation for stability, security and reliability in a multicloud world.

“You can buy a house, an office building, an apartment building, but what doesn’t change is the land underneath,” Chiras said. “You need that land to be stable, and you can build whatever you want on it. And that’s how we view Linux. Consume it anywhere you want. It’s always secure; it’s always stable in multiple public clouds.”

RHEL beta speeds updates

In November, Red Hat released a major RHEL update that was designed to recognize the cloud, application and container-based ecosystem of the current information technology landscape. One of the key new enhancements found in the beta version of RHEL 8 is Application Streams, which allows developers to upgrade user space packages, system memory allocated for running applications, without having to monkey with the core operating system. This allows for experimentation with newer programming package versions while running an older, more stable edition in production.

“It allows you to do faster updates, continue on your core, run multiple versions of your user space,” Chiras said.

The newly released beta version of RHEL also enables new Linux tools for container creation and management. These include Buildah for generating a container, Podman to run it, and Skopeo for application sharing.

Red Hat’s implementation of RHEL 8 demonstrates how the firm is positioning itself in the cloud ecosystem. The various elements contained in the new beta follow a carefully orchestrated trail from developer tools for applications to containers, with OpenShift, the firm’s enterprise container and Kubernetes platform, playing a key role in the ultimate move toward the hybrid cloud.

“We believe strongly in the customer experience we deploy with RHEL, that trusted ecosystem,” Chiras said. “In order to be able to take that into a container world, we need to be able to get access into the user space, into Kubernetes, and into the kernel because they’re so intimately entwined. As we transition that, OpenShift is the way we deliver it.”

New tools for Ansible

Container orchestration and managing complex IT production environments can be a tricky business. To make life easier in the DevOps world, Red Hat is optimizing the open-source Ansible automation framework for the hybrid cloud.

In January, Red Hat announced that it would add support for playbooks or workflows inside Ansible to help automate IT processes. Ansible Tower is the console that Red Hat provides to create and manage playbooks. As part of last month’s announcement, Tower 3.4 will now run on RHEL using a Federal Information Processing Standard for compliance mode.

“Ansible is an amazing tool,” Chiras said. “We’ve pulled in things like system rules directly into the operating system so you can set up networking, you can set up storage with Ansible playbooks in a much simpler way.”

Red Hat has also added DevOps capabilities to its system management program — Satellite. In October, the company updated its Satellite interface to integrate more fully with Ansible by providing remote execution and desired state management functionality. Ansible playbooks can now be generated automatically.

Passion for open source

All of these recent moves by Red Hat signify the company’s continued focus on the IT community by providing system administrators and developers a continuous stream of new tools to make the complicated challenges of running compute operations an easier proposition.

IBM is not new to the open-source world, having invested $1 billion in 2001 to support the Linux movement. Chiras was quite familiar with both Linux and open source before she moved to Red Hat last year, yet she found herself still deeply impressed by the level of dedication among developers in the community.

“What I loved and what surprised me a bit was the passion around open source,” Chiras explained. “They understand the market; they do this as a hobby on the weekends. It’s just unbelievable.”

Whether Red Hat and IBM can channel that enthusiasm into a new model that will propel both companies forward remains to be seen. But the goal is unmistakably clear. IBM’s Rometty flatly stated during interviews and presentations at Think this month that her company will become number one in hybrid cloud, and she is betting that Linux is the right tool at the right time to reach the mountaintop.

“Clearly there’s a lot of buzz and excitement around what both IBM and Red Hat can do together for the open hybrid cloud,” Chiras said. “I couldn’t be more excited about what Linux is going to do for innovation.”

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