With rapid advancements and innovation dominating most conversations around cloud computing, it can be easy to neglect the issues of maintaining reliable infrastructure while also remaining competitive in today’s data revolution.

As an early pioneer of open source, Red Hat Inc. is continuing to innovate through its Amazon Web Services Inc. partnership while keeping a strong focus on maintaining standards and supportive frameworks for additions to new and existing offerings.

“What we’ve been doing very aggressively is looking at what’s happening in the open-source community, helping innovate in the technologies that Amazon … has been maturing and help building out a new framework for developers to do that,” said Mike Ferris (pictured), vice president of technical business development and business architecture at Red Hat.

Ferris spoke with host John Furrier (@furrier) and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed Red Hat’s journey with AWS and what Ferris hopes to accomplish through the partnership in the future. (* Disclosure below.)

A focus on security, reliability and scalability

Now a few years into a collaboration with AWS that was originally intended to simplify running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the platform, Red Hat is looking at new ways to help developers by providing more tools, capabilities and services to accelerate applications and enable the capabilities of the customers they serve. These efforts are largely centered around creating extra value around a new generation of containers via systems like Kubernetes, an open-source process for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications.

“[We’re] starting at the open-source level and helping innovate in the technologies there. … Our focus is very much on taking those same core principles and making them applicable to anything new that gets developed,” Ferris said.

Red Hat keeps developers engaged not only through the development of applications and tools, but in the active design of systems and products. Focusing on developer support not only promotes innovation, it also drives increased value by promoting maintenance of the fully tested product offerings customers can rely on, according to Ferris.

“We learned how to move in that bifurcated market where you’re dealing with open-source innovation but also having to answer to customers that want to make sure that things are always secure and stable,” he said.

For customers transitioning into the cloud, Ferris advised a hybrid approach to retain flexibility and support. “Anytime you deploy a platform … you are committing to something that’s on a specific release cycle that may have specific support statements, that may follow specific open source paths,” he said. Maintaining awareness from both a financial and infrastructure perspective is crucial to selecting the right option for customers architecting their cloud strategy.

Bolstered by their progress, Ferris is eager to see what Amazon’s innovations will bring to its partnership with Red Hat. “It’s not just about the software or the service they provide … it’s in how they do business and the business models that surround it. To me that means they’re building an entire IT environment,” Ferris concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* 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