Red Hat Inc. is extending its partnership with Amazon Web Services by providing access to the public cloud platform through its OpenShift software container and Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.

The hybrid cloud collaboration was announced at the Red Hat Summit Tuesday. The open-source company also announced a host of new developer tools for containers, which allow applications to run on multiple operating systems, to assist companies moving into production.

The partnership with AWS means that Red Hat customers can now use the public cloud giant’s services in OpenShift containers, either on-premises or in the cloud. In addition, Red Hat will also support AWS services on its flagship Enterprise Linux platform. Users will be able to configure and deploy AWS services such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift and many others directly via the OpenShift console, the company said.

Red Hat and AWS have been collaborating for a number of years now to allow enterprise applications, databases and analytics workloads on Red Hat’s Linux distribution to run on the AWS cloud. Now, with more of these services being deployed in containers, this new collaboration caters to those workloads. Customers can now build applications on OpenShift using AWS’s compute, database, analytics, machine learning, networking and other services.

In addition, the partnership expansion means customers can tap into AWS’s cloud regardless of where they’re running OpenShift, Paul Cormier, president of Red Hat’s products and technologies unit, said in a keynote.

One of Red Hat’s main aims with OpenShift is to bring Docker and Kubernetes to its enterprise customers, the company said. The collaboration with AWS will ensure that Kubernetes performs better while running in the cloud, Cormier explained. The two companies are demonstrating the new capabilities at the Red Hat Summit this week, ahead of general availability this fall.

In an interview on SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio theCUBE following his keynote, Cormier said the collaboration was a game changer, not just for Red Hat and AWS, but also for customers looking to deploy hybrid cloud strategies.

“Prior to this, invoking an Amazon service for an application could only be done from AWS infrastructure, and it could only be run there,” Cormier explained. “We’re now bringing the connection points back into OpenShift, so the application can now invoke that Amazon service from AWS or even on-premise. It extends the reach of Amazon to really build a hybrid cloud environment.”

Besides the extended collaboration, Red Hat announced a number of upgrades to its OpenShift platform, including a new container monitoring service and the integration of Gluster storage for OpenShift running on AWS. This new software-defined storage capability is designed to help stabilize stateful applications, Red Hat said.

Red Hat also announced a new related service called OpenShift.io, which it describes as a development platform for building cloud-native applications with open-source code. The idea with this is to make it less painful for developers to manage, maintain, and build integrated development toolchains, by automating the transfer of code to application containers before deploying them on OpenShift.

The company also introduced a new container health monitoring tool that’s meant to ensure containers are secure and stable. Red Hat’s container health index works by inspecting and grading each container, along with those of its software partners. The company reckons it will certify 20 software vendors under the service in the next three months, including Microsoft Corp.

From Red Hat’s description, the new monitoring tool works similarly to Docker Inc.’s new image security scanning tool launched last month.

(* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsors some Red Hat Summit segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over the content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.) 

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