It's All About the App, as Red Hat Drives Containerized Application Delivery

Red Hat's 2014 Summit kicked into high gear Tuesday, with innovations for its Linux Container vision of streamlined application delivery, interoperability announcements with container provider Docker, and broad customer support for its OpenStack-powered product offerings focused on delivering an open hybrid cloud. The event conversation can be followed on Twitter hashtag #RHSummit.

Containerized Application Delivery

Red Hat launched several new Linux Container innovations, to support its vision for streamlined application delivery and orchestration across bare metal systems, virtual machines and private and public clouds via containers and Docker technology. As a new community-driven innovation, Atomic will develop technologies for creating lightweight Linux Container hosts, based on next-generation capabilities in the Linux ecosystem. The tools that result from Project Atomic will allow creation of a new variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, set to debut with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. The Atomic container host provides the essential functionality for running application containers like Docker, while maintaining a small footprint and allowing for atomic updates

GearD is a new OpenShift Origin community project to enable rapid application development, continuous integration, delivery, and deployment of application code to containerized application environments. An expansion of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 high-touch beta program to include Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host and Docker container technologies that will enable select customers to evaluate these new container technologies in enterprise environments. GearD was created to provide Integration between application containers and deployment technologies like Git to allow developers to quickly go from application source code to containerized application stacks deployed onto production systems.

Open source containers help to separate infrastructure services from the application, allowing portability across not only different clouds, but also physical and virtual environments. This means that the container consumes only the needed services and it delivers upon the extreme flexibility promised by the open hybrid cloud. As an increasing number of enterprises embrace DevOps philosophies, Red Hat expects container technologies will play a significant role in how organizations deliver and manage applications. Pairing the Red Hat enterprise Linux platform and an extensive ecosystem of support and services, with an enterprise class, container-specific host will deliver on the comprehensive vision of containerized application delivery for the open hybrid cloud.

"As the cloud enters the computing mainstream and applications, not infrastructure, become the focus of enterprise IT, the operating system takes on greater importance in supporting the application and the infrastructure, without sacrificing the basic requirements of security, stability and manageability," said Paul Cormier, president, Product and Technologies at Red Hat. "Our newly-announced container offerings, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host, will drive this vision forward, helping enterprises embrace streamlined application delivery through the power of Linux Containers and Docker, and enabling the free movement of applications across cloud, virtual and physical environments, a key tenet of the open hybrid cloud."

Red Hat and Docker interoperability

Container solution provider Docker and Red Hat announced a deeper relationship that builds on the existing technology collaboration between the companies. As part of the expanded collaboration, Docker and Red Hat will work together on interoperability between Docker's hosted services and Red Hat certified container hosts and services. Red Hat has worked to extend Docker for inclusion in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with new production-grade file-system options, integrated systemd process management, and use of SELinux to provide military-grade security. Red Hat has also packaged Docker for Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and launched the Red Hat Container Certification in March 2014.

"Red Hat has a long history of developing, investing in and fostering innovative technologies, including Linux Containers, an open source methodology that has seen numerous, fundamental contributions from Red Hat over the years," said Brian Stevens, executive vice president and CTO, Red Hat. "The Docker technology, which helps eliminate the barriers facing enterprise adoption of containers — ease of use, application packaging and infrastructure integration — was very exciting to us. We believe that integrating Red Hat and Docker technologies offers both powerful developer capabilities and a lightweight application packaging approach for enterprise workloads across industries. By working together, we can bring an extended set of capabilities to not only Red Hat customers, but to the open source and Linux community at large."

OpenStack Momentum

Red Hat announced significant momentum for its OpenStack-powered product offerings focused on delivering an open hybrid cloud. After introducing several enterprise OpenStack offerings last summer, companies have used the products to create scalable private clouds with streamlined management for proof-of-concept deployments and enterprise deployments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, currently available in version 4.0, delivers an integrated and optimized foundation for building OpenStack clouds, bringing together trusted Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat’s OpenStack technology.

“We're thrilled by the early momentum behind Red Hat’s OpenStack-powered offerings since general availability in July of last year. We’ve seen OpenStack move from an enterprise promise to enterprise reality, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure have emerged as industry-leading offerings for secure, scalable private clouds. These customer successes underscore the value Red Hat is offering through a solution engineered together with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenStack, as well as establishing the standard for the largest OpenStack partner ecosystem to provide an open alternative to customers' private cloud needs."

The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT needed to create an on-premise cloud with on-demand compute and self-service functionality for the hundreds of post-doctorate medical and biochemistry research students they serve. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform was selected as the base for a private cloud pilot that accommodates the volume of sample data used by researchers creating a tumor map to help treat prominent cancers earlier and more effectively. The two-week installation was based on Cisco hardware running Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform gave us the strong foundation we needed for building our internal cloud from the ground up, and we look forward to moving to a fully supported version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as our core operating system," said James Weatherell, Linux enterprise engineer III, The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. "We hope to continue to meet our researcher demand for OpenStack-powered capabilities in our datacenter to provide the most innovative, on-demand research space for collaborative work towards cancer treatment.”