Innovation’s rocket fuel: Linux and hybrid cloud

50 years ago on July 20th, a computer deposited two men on the moon. The space race, driven by the two most powerful nations in the world at the time, was won with technology that possesses barely a fraction of the processing power of your mobile phone. But NASA did it - Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched the moon and came back.

In order to expand beyond mankind’s known limits, space exploration required a wave of innovation, from advancements in computer technology to space suits, to achieve the bold goal of the moon landing. Most IT organizations aren’t trying to launch into low Earth orbit or land on a celestial body, but we have our own bold goals. We want to build better applications, faster. We want to have 100 percent uptime. We want to anticipate the needs of users before they even know what they want. We want to just be better.

This requires a wave of innovation, just like NASA. We need rocket fuel to push ourselves beyond the given boundaries of IT...luckily, we already have it. IT’s rocket fuel was, is and will be Linux.

For more than two decades, Red Hat has viewed Linux as the wellspring of innovation, with the open source operating system making an indelible imprint on each of IT’s four footprints. From Linux containers and Kubernetes to OpenStack and the bones of the public cloud, Linux is the root of IT invention. Put bluntly, Linux IS enterprise IT. It underpins nearly every modern IT deployment in some way and provides a launchpad for innovation across the open source community. Linux is rocket fuel for innovation - without it, enterprise IT is going nowhere.

If Linux is the fuel, then hybrid cloud is the rocket. Hybrid cloud is built on and around the firmament of Linux as it expands as a default in enterprise IT landscapes. Without Linux, it’s unlikely that we would have hybrid cloud as we know it today. It helps IT organizations bridge their existing investments in servers, virtualization and traditional applications with the cloud-based future. Building on Linux, Kubernetes offers the platform to unify the IT landscape across the hybrid cloud, enabling IT organizations to build anything, anywhere, at any time.

At Red Hat Summit 2019, Red Hat is delivering the refined innovation for organizations to do more than just break the sound barrier of IT. We’re helping them take their businesses interstellar.

A more intelligent, more accessible Linux platform

Linux is a workhorse, quietly keeping the lights on in datacenters around the world. It runs connected devices, from your home’s thermostat to your phone, and at the same time enables the world’s fastest supercomputers. It’s the enterprise datacenter standard, but it is so much more than that.

Linux still needs to support production workloads, yes. But it should also help innovation thrive. That’s what the next generation of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, is designed to do.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 embeds intelligence into the soul of the operating system, helping IT teams to catch problems before they occur and to gain deeper insights into the state of their deployments. It makes it easier for developers to innovate without breaking things and it does so with a whole new set of distributed container-building capabilities. The platform does all of this while lowering Linux’s barriers to entry, helping a new wave of systems administrators and IT professionals engage with the community-powered innovation.

This is about more than the technology of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, although the refined innovation of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform is certainly a big part of it. It’s also about our ecosystem, and the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 sees our network of partners expand. Red Hat oversees the industry’s largest commercial open source ecosystem - our customers have access to more certified applications, more hardware configurations and more cloud providers than ever before. Across all of these footprints, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 simply runs.

We’re also working to make Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 more accessible to the IT industry at large. Now, developers building the next great containerized application can easily find the Red Hat Universal Base Image, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8-derived container image, without a subscription. That’s it. We’re making the industry standard operating system available to everyone building containers, regardless of whether you are our customer or not. Whenever applications built with the Red Hat Universal Base Image are run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, they enjoy the benefits of a supported, validated application.

The open source community behind Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 has evolved along with the product. Fedora remains the spark of innovation for not just RHEL, but also the broader Linux world and CentOS continues to foster innovation on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now, we are also pursuing a vision of keeping the operating system “Always Ready” for regular delivery and more readily able to adapt to the fast innovation that the community and our partners pursue.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is the operating system to power the hybrid cloud. No other OS provides the stability, reliability, enhanced security, innovation and support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. None. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 supports the IT of today while helping you innovate for the future.

And that future is, without a doubt, Kubernetes.

Enterprise Kubernetes, redefined

Kubernetes has won. It’s now the de facto standard for container orchestration in enterprise IT, helping containerized applications achieve the lofty goals of composite applications and microservices-based architecture. But just like Linux decades ago, the work with Kubernetes is just starting. It’s complex, deployments are sprawling and, given the allure of cloud-specific options, it’s easy to get locked into a single infrastructure, limiting future innovation.

All of these are challenges that we intend to address with Red Hat OpenShift 4. You already know that the leading enterprise Kubernetes platform spans the hybrid cloud, from the datacenter to public cloud infrastructure. You know that it enables you to more seamlessly move applications and services from one footprint to another. This isn’t new.

What’s new is that OpenShift now does the heavy lifting of Kubernetes by itself.

Red Hat OpenShift 4 functions like public cloud infrastructure, building on Kubernetes Operators to automate the rote-but-critical tasks of updating and managing the entire cloud-native stack. Operators encode human operational knowledge into software, self-guiding not just the installation of technologies but also the management and maintenance. This is enterprise Kubernetes as it should be - self-managing, self-updating and allowing IT teams to innovate at scale.

It’s not just IT operations teams that can benefit from the latest version of Red Hat OpenShift. Developers now have automation for building and deploying applications, letting them focus solely on creating better applications, faster. From serverless to Service Mesh, Red Hat OpenShift 4 helps developers build what’s next on the platform to support their organization’s IT future.

We’re extending this support for Operators to the application layer as well, making it easier to build Kubernetes applications that work like a cloud service. Red Hat OpenShift 4 now embeds OperatorHub, a community of curated Kubernetes Operators that “just work” across Kubernetes deployments, within the platform. We are also introducing Red Hat OpenShift Certified Operators, making Red Hat OpenShift 4 the first Kubernetes offering to deliver not just an Operator catalog, but a set of validated, tested Operators alongside community versions.

We’re also deepening our collaboration with Microsoft with the launch of Azure Red Hat OpenShift, bringing the power of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to Microsoft’s public cloud. Azure Red Hat OpenShift is an 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.

Beyond what we are launching right now, today you’ve seen us demo our vision for the next-generation of on-premises hybrid cloud infrastructure. Our technical demonstration showed what we can accomplish when the silos between virtual machines and containers and even the walls between Windows and Linux are gone. That’s the future of enterprise Kubernetes and OpenShift: A single platform to rule the hybrid cloud, regardless of workload.

Around the world, more and more organizations are recognizing the enterprise-grade innovation of Red Hat OpenShift. Today, we announced that more than 1,000 organizations worldwide are using Red Hat OpenShift as their enterprise Kubernetes platform. Nearly 50% of the Fortune Global 100 lean on OpenShift to drive digital transformation operations, showing that when it comes to production Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift is leading the way.

You don’t have enterprise Kubernetes without enterprise Linux. To provide the solid base for enterprise open source that our customers expect, we built Red Hat OpenShift 4 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS. An embedded variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS offers a lightweight, fully immutable and container-optimized operating system while maintaining the enhanced security and stability features of enterprise Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an economic driver

There are various ways to show just how impactful Linux is to innovation, but it’s typically harder to show just how important Linux is to the bottom line. We want to change this, so we worked with IDC to examine just how impactful Red Hat Enterprise Linux is to global business. And what we found is that there are literally trillions of reasons to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

According to an IDC study commissioned by Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is expected to impact $10 trillion in global business revenues in 2019. That’s trillions with a “t.” But it gets better - IDC estimates that Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers are expected to see economic benefits of more than $1 trillion each year through 2023. For our partners, there’s opportunity as well, to the tune of $135 billion in net new Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem revenue by 2023.

Linux isn’t just a datacenter standard; it’s an economic reactor on a global scale.

Mixing open source rocket fuel

We’ve shown you the future of enterprise Linux and the hybrid cloud with Kubernetes. You’ve seen just how important RHEL is to the global economy. And it’s not just from us - our customers are telling their stories. Whether it’s migrating from proprietary virtualization silos, transforming financial services or launching the future of defense, global organizations are turning to open source...and they’re looking to Red Hat to help guide them through digital transformation.

No, we aren’t landing astronauts on the moon or winning the space race. But we’re still building rockets, only ours are fueled by open source.