UPDATED 15:33 EDT / MAY 05 2017

CLOUD

A closer look at the AWS-Red Hat partnership for hybrid, on-prem cloud

The cloud is an interesting place. One reason is the services supplied by cloud providers can replace many applications to gain organization-wide efficiencies. However, that scenario really only works for the public cloud. Private and hybrid clouds are locked behind walls with strict controls on what can run there.

Mike Ferris (pictured), vice president of technical business development and business architecture at Red Hat Inc., believes a partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. is changing that.

Ferris spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, during Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts, to talk about this partnership. (*Disclosure below.)

Ferris covered a number of topics — from the plan behind this joint effort to Red Hat’s own open-source business model.

The power of the cloud, delivered anywhere

“What we have done with Amazon is jointly delivered the power of the public cloud to hybrid and private clouds through OpenShift [container application platform],” Ferris said. He described how Red Hat had been talking to customers about taking enterprise software and applying open source to it. The question was how to evolve infrastructure and technologies in that context.

Now, in the past couple of years, customers are also looking at alternative deployments and emerging platforms. They want to take Amazon’s power from the public cloud side and deliver it to those applications wherever they run.

Red Hat is using OpenShift to make that happen. Applications written to a platform like OpenShift can be used everywhere. Because of this, the next several years will see applications and platforms becoming more mobile, Ferris explained.

For the developers familiar with AWS, this means the same services can be delivered through OpenShift. Everything will look the same either on-prem or in a hybrid environment. “All the training you’ve gone through will apply directly as well,” Ferris said.

As to Red Hat’s business model, the core of its success is understanding the difference between a project and a product. When they go into a technology, they make sure it’s open source. It’s a technical investment, Ferris explained. When serving customers, the company thinks about long-term lifecycles, support and financials. This helps turn it into a product.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Red Hat Summit 2017. (* 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 content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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