Editor’s note: Technology Business Research Analysts Sanjay Medvitz, Geoff Woollacott and Michael Soper report on Red Hat’s annual Summit in Boston in the second of a two-part report.

HAMPTON, N.H. – The major announcement at Red Hat Summit 2017 was the partnership between Red Hat and Amazon Web Services (AWS) that adds prepackaged AWS services to Red Hat OpenShift. OpenShift users will be able to leverage these various cloud services in hybrid, private and on-premises cloud environments rather than in just public cloud, increasing users’ flexibility. Customers also benefit from the ability to have a single point of support from Red Hat while leveraging AWS services.

The relationship is expected to evolve, with the addition of new services over the next few years.

As container adoption takes off, Red Hat fuels developers with new tools and capabilities

Container technology continues to gain traction across the IT landscape, and Red Hat’s long involvement with containers, dating back to 2008, and leading reputation with Linux bolster its position in the market. Red Hat recognizes the increasing role of the developer as a high-value customer and has embraced container technologies as a next-generation way to deliver agile and consistent application development and deployment in complex hybrid environments.

The vendor also aims to attract new age cloud developers by differentiating with its ability to provide free access to underlying infrastructure and development tool kits while deriving revenue from subscription-based services for application testing, integration and platform extension. Red Hat’s announcement during the event of several new offerings demonstrated its growing focus on containers and improvement of developer experiences.

  • OpenShift.io

OpenShift.io provides customers cloud-native and container-based developer tools resulting in a free, end-to-end SaaS development environment for building cloud apps with open-source code. The offering solves various developer pain points including getting customers up and running faster, improving ease of container use, managing the developer tool chain, and driving customer confidence in technology choice. OpenShift.io is built to enable collaborative development and bring together various tools and open-source projects, such as fabric8, Jenkins and Eclipse Che, in a single environment.

  • Red Hat Container Health Index

Red Hat also launched its Container Health Index, which provides a security metric and imaging resource to inspect the health of containers and associated maintenance as they are moved into production. The Container Health Index is part of Red Hat’s Container Catalog service and extends its inspection capabilities and system to its ISV ecosystem.

Impact and opportunities

  • Partners

The Red Hat strategy revolves around the fundamental — and widely accepted — premise that the developer will be king for many years to come. Time and effort spent with manual tasks to run infrastructure will be automated away. Integral to that automation layer will be an infrastructure-independent PaaS layer to provide multicloud consistency, which Red Hat seeks to dominate through OpenShift. Partners seeking to build applications will benefit from infrastructure independence if writing in the OpenShift PaaS layer rather than using unique tool kits and services offered by major infrastructure cloud participants such as AWS, Google, Microsoft and IBM Bluemix.

  • Customers

Red Hat’s customer momentum was on full display throughout the event as customers such as Barclays, United Health, Deutsche Bank, GovTech Singapore and BMW presented their success stories of using OpenShift and running containers at scale in a wide variety of industries. Enterprise customer benefits include all aspects that provide value to the partner community in writing and developing applications. Additionally, customers benefit from the infrastructure independence that writing in an open PaaS layer can provide when seeking to expand deployments where geographic concentrations may require the use of multiple cloud service providers.

Furthermore, customers can hold their IaaS providers accountable on their price competitiveness if the movement of their workloads can be accommodated through a single push of a button, with that simplicity coming from writing code with the utilities, tool kits and services offered by the vendor that pioneered the open software market.

(C) TBR