Red Hat and Microsoft bring new enterprise Kubernetes platform to Microsoft Azure
Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Red Hat OpenShift, which brings a jointly-managed enterprise-grade Kubernetes solution to a leading public cloud, Microsoft Azure.
Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides a powerful on-ramp to hybrid cloud computing, enabling IT organizations to use Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform in their datacenters and more seamlessly 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.
Both Red Hat and Microsoft recognize the importance of hybrid cloud computing to modern IT, as organizations look to expand resources with public cloud infrastructure while maintaining existing on-premises investments.
Kubernetes provides a common bridge between the datacenter and public cloud environments, making it a key technology in enabling true hybrid cloud computing.
Azure Red Hat OpenShift combines the innovation of enterprise Kubernetes with the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, running on the scale and power of Azure. Together, these technologies provide a powerful solution for more easily managing and orchestrating cloud-native workloads across a hybrid cloud environment.
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.
A fully-managed, jointly-operated service, Azure Red Hat OpenShift is backed by both the open source expertise of Red Hat and the public cloud might of Microsoft. Customers receive an integrated experience, including unified sign-up, on-boarding, service management and technical support. The service is added into customers’ existing Azure bill, further streamlining the user experience.
Additionally, Azure Red Hat OpenShift offers enterprise developers and operations teams:
- Fully managed clusters with master, infrastructure and application nodes managed by Microsoft and Red Hat; plus, no VMs to operate and no patching required.
- Regulatory compliance will be provided through compliance certifications similar to other Azure services.
- Enhanced flexibility to more freely move applications from on-premise environments to the Azure public cloud via the consistent foundation of OpenShift.
- Greater speed to connect to Azure services from on-premises OpenShift deployments.
- Extended productivity with easier access to Azure public cloud services such as Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Machine Learning and Azure SQL DB for building the next-generation of cloud-native enterprise applications.
Azure Red Hat OpenShift represents Red Hat and Microsoft’s continued mutual commitment to provide a powerful, supported and more secure choice for developing and deploying hybrid cloud workloads. Jointly supported by both companies, IT organizations can have greater confidence in adopting hybrid cloud innovation that meets the requirements of mission-critical workloads in production.
Microsoft and Red Hat are also collaborating to bring customers containerized solutions with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 on Azure, Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.8 and Ansible Certified modules. In addition, the two companies are working to deliver SQL Server 2019 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 support and performance enhancements.