Containers?

We live in interesting times, IT continues to evolve and innovation continues to be predominately driven by passionate OpenSource community projects. Kubernetes has been around since 2014/2015 and following its release to the OpenSource community - has grown significantly whilst sticking to its core principals of being a "platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts".

Red Hat, like many organisations, has been focused on developing our own solution based on Kubernetes AND supporting the upstream OpenSource project. Our solution is called OpenShift and there are significant differences between what we sell here at Red Hat and the raw Kubernetes project. I'm not going to repeat information you can freely access from independent analysts and consultants on the internet but I would encourage you to read a few to familiarise yourself. Gilad David Maayan published a really good article earlier in 2020 on the topic which highlights 7 critical differences.

So, to Pat Gelsinger's quote in May - what are my thoughts?

Well, first of all - I agree with the quote that we are rapidly heading towards 5 players in the marketplace and from my perspective, each has a part to play and values to bring to an organisations' modernisation and cloud strategy. In reality, there is a key question to ask - do you want to deliver a multi-cloud or multiple-cloud strategy to your business?

If you consider each of the 5 players capabilities individually and your decision is to (upfront) decide where a workload will run and code accordingly then you are following a multiple-cloud approach. For may organisations, this is an ok approach - the public cloud vendors have their own inherent strengths and weaknesses, you probably already have a sizeable vmWare deployment for your 'private cloud' (on-premise) workloads and you may be talking with IBM or other large solution partners about their own solutions that can be run in a container platform that may or not be their own.

If you are after flexibility around where a workload can be executed, want some scalability to cope with periodic demand and want to simplify your application development/operations to drive efficiencies through automation to cut cost and risk then you're probably more interested in what a multi-cloud strategy has to offer.

You're probably already aware that Red Hat OpenShift runs pretty-much everywhere so as a solution, offers an easy path to delivering a multi-cloud strategy. A key reason why IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019 was to access OpenShift to run their CloudPak's in any environment so that their customers could realise benefits around cost and risk in doing so. OpenShift is THE platform for any organisation that needs to run workloads anywhere - efficiently and securely BUT that's not the whole story.....

Implementing OpenShift doesn't just transform the platform you run your workloads within - its implementation transforms People. It encourages greater collaboration between the business and IT, improving processes to driver a speedier time to market, enables automation to better maintain your applications and services to reduce risk and ultimately - positively impacts the experience you deliver to your customers - be they internal or external.

Forrester Research recently named Red Hat as a Leader in 'The Forrester Wave?: Multicloud Container Development Platforms, Q3 2020'.

With an increasing Hybid Cloud adoption, Red Hat OpenShift serves as a single platform for application innovation. 'Build Once, Deploy Anywhere', Red Hat OpenShift makes deploying complex Hybrid IT infrastructure much easier. Around 2000+ organizations across the globe are using #RedHat #OpenShift to solve their business challenges with breakthrough creations that serve customers and drive differentiation.

To read the full report visit: https://lnkd.in/evQjvgZ

#ForresterWave #Multicloud #HybridCloud