The cloud has changed how businesses operate, and open-source tools have driven this transition. As the cloud landscape itself starts to shift toward hybrid models and the edge, open source remains a crucial tool for managing changing cloud environments.

“Our customers have environments that are on-premises, in the cloud, and all the way out to the edge,” said Peder Ulander (pictured, right), head of product marketing for enterprise, developer and open source at Amazon Web Services Inc. “And, today, when you think of a lot of solutions and services, it’s a fractured experience that they have between those three locations.”

AWS is currently seeing, from many of these customers, a strong demand for consistency in order to reduce IT sprawl.

“What they really want to do is have the smallest number of simplest environments they can,” said Bob Wise (pictured, left), general manager for Kubernetes for AWS. “And so the customers that standardize in OpenShift really want to be able to standardize OpenShift both in their own premises environment and on AWS.”

Ulander and Wise spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during Red Hat Summit. They discussed how Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) is helping enterprises simplify and scale their cloud projects as more businesses move toward the edge. (* Disclosure below.)

Simplification and collaboration let users capitalize on open source and hybrid clouds

Enterprises expanding into hybrid cloud deployments and the edge may have difficulty managing their now diverse, fractured environments. Open-source managed services like ROSA help simplify these operations to let companies transition more quickly and with less disruption.

“One of our biggest commitments to our customers is to make things super simple, remove the complexity, do all of the hard work,” Ulander said. “Customers are looking for a consistent experience, environment and tooling that spans data center to cloud to edge.”

The issue of complexity is a barrier to open source itself for many companies too. Enterprises with little knowledge or experience in these technologies, especially at the start of open source’s popularity, may not be able to deploy them to their fullest potential.

“The biggest opportunity, yet challenge, was the access to the technology, but it still required you as a customer to learn how to set up, configure, operationalize, support and sustain,” Ulander stated. “AWS removes that heavy lifting.”

ROSA simplifies the process of moving to hybrid cloud environments and the process of applying open-source tools, according to Wise. “A lot of customers have been running OpenShift on AWS before this time, but of course, they were managing it themselves,” Wise said. “So now they get a fully managed option.”

This collaboration between Red Hat and AWS helps consolidate the services that enterprises were already using. As the transition to hybrid and edge environments becomes increasingly simplified and streamlined, more businesses can take full advantage of it, Wise concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit. (*Disclosure: theCUBE is a paid media partner for Red Hat Summit. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE