Why OpenShift Is The New OpenStack For Red Hat

Back in the day, Red Hat saw a million-dollar opportunity in OpenStack. It went full steam in making sure that OpenStack is tightly integrated with its enterprise operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fast forward to 2018, and the company has shifted its focus to the Kubernetes-based container platform, OpenShift. At the recently held annual user conference, the company highlighted the progress it is making with OpenShift.

After multiple false starts, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform finally took off. It is transforming into a viable PaaS offering for enterprises. When it comes to containers, the company is gaining mindshare and market share.

Here are a few reasons why Red Hat is on the right track with its strategy.

Active contribution to the Kubernetes project

After Google, Red Hat is the second most significant contributor to the Kubernetes project. According to Stackalytics, an analytics engine that tracks the engagement on Github, Red Hat’s contribution is at 14%, which only next to Google with 39% of commits.

Clayton Coleman, the Lead Engineer for OpenShift, is one of the top individual contributors of Kubernetes. He helped shape up some of the core building blocks of the open source container management platform.

Red Hat is actively involved in defining the critical enterprise capabilities of Kubernetes such as cluster federation, OpenStack cloud provider and service catalog.

Though Red Hat is criticized for forking Kubernetes, it is making significant contributions to the project. Some of the enhancements to OpenShift will be eventually made available to the upstream Kubernetes, which will benefit the community.

Read the entire article at Forbes

Janakiram MSV is an analyst, advisor, and architect. Follow him on Twitter,  Facebook and LinkedIn.