Red Hat Summit 2018: Containers are talk of the conference

Red Hat Summit 2018 kicked off in San Francisco, with its biggest attendance ever. Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s EVP and President of Products and Technologies, keynoted during the summit’s opening and said their bigger-than-before- attendance is due to more and more organisations now acknowledging open source as being able to help them with their digital transformations.

“Open source is driving the pace of innovation today, and at a rate that we’ve never seen before,” he said, drawing attention also to how open source software had unleashed innovation from the hardware segment to compete and thrive.

“There has been an incredible amount of hardware innovation in the past 15 years,” he said adding also that innovation is exploding around the Linux platform.

In summary however, Cormier’s keynote set the stage to demonstrate how Red Hat is executing towards supporting their vision for a hybrid cloud world.

“Hybrid cloud is the only practical way forward,” he said.

And being able to extend workloads from on-premise to the cloud requires consistency in terms of the underlying environment, something which Red Hat OpenShift is able to facilitate.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, is Red Hat’s on-premises private platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that comprises of Docker-powered application containers and Kubernetes’ orchestration and management. All of this is based upon Red Hat’s operating system, Red Hat Enteprise Linux (RHEL).

Red Hat customer, STT Connect’s CTO David Robinson echoed the hybrid cloud’s requirement for consistency also, saying, “Containerisation makes cloud become agnostic. So choice is only about whether its on-premise or off-premise and who your service provider is.”

He explained the benefit of this consistency as being end-to-end control and security, “If developers are allowed to grab images themselves for instance, they will grab anything and this introduces challenges from security perspective. So full control and visibility is important, from ideation all the way to production.”

Red Hat’s containers

Cormier also explained what they are doing with container technology. “Bringing this tech into the enterprise, is complex. It takes a lot of work and resources,” he said.

“We started OpenShift in 2011, but last year it started to gain traction. This is serious, making enterprise-class products is serious.”

“Open source products are driving businesses today,” Cormier pointed out, adding that their new tech innovations are testament to the rising adoption of open source by the enterprise segment.

“There is real enterprise adoption,” he said. He also shared upcoming announcements of their collaboration with Microsoft and IBM where Red Hat would be “integrating our work with the biggest of the biggest in the enterprise world.”

“Everything we have done is to support this hybrid cloud vision. Today, we take that forward,” he concluded.

(This journalist is a guest of Red Hat’s to their annual conference in San Francisco).