Red Hat and Microsoft have announced the general availability of Azure Red Hat OpenShift, which brings a jointly-managed enterprise-grade Kubernetes solution to Microsoft’s public cloud, Microsoft Azure.
At the same time, IBM planned purchase of Red Hat for $34-billion acquisition continues to move along with the deal expected to close in the second half of 2019.
According to the companies, Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides an on-ramp to hybrid cloud computing, enabling IT organizations to use Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform in their data centers and extend these workloads to use the power and scale of Azure services. The availability of Azure Red Hat OpenShift marks the first jointly managed OpenShift offering in the public cloud.
As organizations look to expand resources with public cloud infrastructure while maintaining existing on-premises investments, Kubernetes provides a common bridge between the data center and public cloud environments, making it a key technology in enabling hybrid cloud computing.
Azure Red Hat OpenShift combines Kubernetes with Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Azure. The combination is intended to help organizations manage and orchestrate cloud-native workloads across a hybrid cloud environment more easily. With Azure Red Hat OpenShift, customers can also bring containerized applications into workflows where they exist, while mitigating many of the inherent complexities of container management.
Customers receive an integrated experience, including unified sign-up, onboarding, service management and technical support. The service is added into customers’ existing Azure bill.
Azure Red Hat OpenShift is available now via Microsoft Azure.
“Hybrid cloud provides a clear vision into the future of enterprise computing, where public cloud services stand alongside virtualization, Linux containers and bare-metal servers,” said Paul Cormier, president, Products and Technologies, Red Hat. “Together, this forms the new data center in the hybrid cloud world. Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides a consistent Kubernetes foundation for enterprises to realize the benefits of this hybrid cloud model.”