Red Hat Summit
IT leaders must deliver innovative customer experiences to stay competitive, but every new application and service you release adds cost and complexity.
To support innovation and your IT budget, you may be developing new applications in a public cloud and moving existing workloads there as well. But the reality for every organization is never as simple as a full-scale cloud migration.
Instead, the future of IT is hybrid. This is true for your customers, who expect you to continuously deliver a mix of different services, and for your teams, who must maintain some workloads on-premises while also supporting cloud-native development.
“63% of IT leaders have a hybrid cloud
Infrastructure today.
Among those who don’t, 54% plan to have one within the next 24 months.”
Deciding which public and private clouds are right for each workload is a complex issue, and what you choose today won’t always be the best solution tomorrow. If you want to evaluate a multicloud strategy in the future, for example, or push deployments out to your network’s edge, it’s important that your software solutions don’t limit future options.
This demands a consistent, flexible platform across every environment you choose, and services like integration, data, analytics, and more to enable the different apps you release. But how do you sustain a long-term capability to bring together new clouds, tools, and integrations, especially when you can’t predict future needs?
The answer isn’t one company, one cloud, or one vendor.
To enable the full ecosystem of application services and infrastructures at your disposal, there’s only one broadly compatible foundation: open source code.
Put open source flexibility to work for hybrid cloud
Whatever hardware runs your critical infrastructure and whatever cloud you want to deploy your modern applications, one technology works everywhere: Linux. It’s why the open source operating system was able to revolutionize datacenter operations, enables all the major public clouds, and continues to power new cloud-native initiatives.
Linux containers are now the preferred deployment option for cloud-native apps, and the open source Kubernetes platform is the industry standard to manage and orchestrate those containerized workloads.
“Pretty much every cloud today is built on a Linux foundation. You can't really be in the cloud business unless you're in the open business.”
Some hybrid cloud management solutions put open source components on a proprietary foundation—But a little open is still mostly closed. As your vendors, your cloud providers, and your goals change, you need the flexibility and adaptability that only true open source delivers.
Cloud
Clouds, whether public or private, offer self-service developer capabilities as well as the elasticity and scalability that operations teams need to manage apps as demands change. With containers, microservices, and application programming interfaces (APIs), DevOps teams can make frequent improvements to cloud applications. These are the building blocks of cloud-native development and the reasons why organizations increasingly look to the cloud as they modernize their IT systems.
Hybrid Cloud
The greatest benefit of a hybrid cloud strategy is the ability to choose the optimal solution for each task or workload. Even if you aren’t currently evaluating hybrid cloud, it can become a necessity for many organizations as they grow. For instance, you might use on-premises infrastructure to store sensitive data, and public cloud services for application development. You might use multiple public cloud vendors to meet a variety of local regulations, or shift workloads from one provider to another based on pricing and demand. You may want to invest in an edge computing strategy to distribute greater compute and storage power closer to data sources and users in your network. A consistent platform running portable workloads can enable these choices now and in the future.
Open Hybrid Cloud
No one cloud provider or on-premises environment has everything you want, and too often, proprietary solutions can restrict your choices and adaptability in the future. To fully enable the capability to adapt to change without costly rebuilding, your hybrid cloud should be built on a consistent foundation of open source code. Your operations, development, and security teams can build and manage a full IT stack in a standard, unifying platform that works on bare metal, virtual machines, private clouds, public clouds, and at the edge.
Hybrid Cloud
The greatest benefit of a hybrid cloud strategy is the ability to choose the optimal solution for each task or workload. Even if you aren’t currently evaluating hybrid cloud, it can become a necessity for many organizations as they grow. For instance, you might use on-premises infrastructure to store sensitive data, and public cloud services for application development. You might use multiple public cloud vendors to meet a variety of local regulations, or shift workloads from one provider to another based on pricing and demand. You may want to invest in an edge computing strategy to distribute greater compute and storage power closer to data sources and users in your network. A consistent platform running portable workloads can enable these choices now and in the future.
Open Hybrid Cloud
No one cloud provider or on-premises environment has everything you want, and too often, proprietary solutions can restrict your choices and adaptability in the future. To fully enable the capability to adapt to change without costly rebuilding, your hybrid cloud should be built on a consistent foundation of open source code. Your operations, development, and security teams can build and manage a full IT stack in a standard, unifying platform that works on bare metal, virtual machines, private clouds, public clouds, and at the edge.
“Hybrid cloud is about a capability. It’s not about an end state. It’s not about having this percentage in public cloud, and this percentage in a private cloud, and this percentage on bare metal. It’s about the ability and the capability to be able to move and adapt and adjust as you see fit, and based upon your needs.”
Create a capability to adapt with Red Hat
Red Hat has spent nearly 30 years creating neutral, interoperable solutions for your entire IT stack. We did it by seeing the enterprise potential of open software like Linux and Kubernetes from the very start. We work directly within open source communities, contributing code, stewarding projects, sponsoring events, and more to develop open source software for enterprise requirements.
Our open hybrid cloud approach can help optimize the full scope of your IT organization:
Hybrid cloud infrastructure so you can run workloads on any cloud or footprint
Cloud-native development to deliver apps faster and easier
Automation to improve your processes at scale
Team processes to get the most out of an open hybrid cloud approach
The specific products and consulting services of open hybrid cloud are not one-size-fits-all, but they do share a common technological foundation: Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® and our Kubernetes platform Red Hat OpenShift®.
This means
a consistent platform running diverse workloads on every infrastructure.
integrated management and automation capabilities.
cloud-native application services and tools for developers.
changing or adding public cloud providers doesn’t always lead to costly refactoring or retraining.
any proprietary software you use is ultimately connected to flexible open standards across your organization.
your vendor doesn’t control your IT future. You do.
“You can take your application from on-premises today and you can move it to any public cloud. And vice versa, you can bring it back on-premises. Your creations, are now fully portable across the clouds, to on-premise and out to the remote edge.”
Analyst reactions to our open hybrid cloud approach
Just like our code, our approach is always open. Our hybrid cloud strategy is shaped by voices across Red Hat and open for discussion with industry experts.
Watch Stefanie Chiras, Vice President and General Manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Business Unit, and Brian Hopkins, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, in an open conversation on the future of cloud and Red Hat’s recommended strategy.
