Red Hat raises its cloud game

Open-source software vendor Red Hat has launched a bunch of arcane products and initiatives so baffling they must be doing something clever.

Red Hat made its name using Linux to make enterprise-grade software. As the business world, including telecoms, is increasingly inclined to stick as much as it can into the cloud, IBM-owned Red Hat is keen to grab as big a piece of that action as possible. Hence the theme of its latest virtual summit.

Before we continue, this lowly telecoms hack must confess to being way out of his comfort zone covering enterprise software, so expect a fair bit of unquestioning regurgitation of the company’s claims. We genuinely pity the communications people charged with turning this arch-geekery into digestible copy.

Possibly the most significant announcement concerns its OpenShift hybrid cloud platform, which makes a virtue of using Kubernetes to manage containers (see?). The updated version is so good Red Hat has stuck a ‘Plus’ on the end of it, to signify the addition of impressive-sounding things like advanced cluster management.

“As Kubernetes and container use in production scale, we need the tools and strategies that manage and secure these deployments to grow and evolve as well,” said Ashesh Badani, SVP of Cloud Platforms at Red Hat. “Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus further extends the already robust capabilities of OpenShift to provide the greater security, oversight and governance that organizations need to more securely build, run and manage applications consistently at scale across the hybrid cloud and the modern application lifecycle.”

As if that wasn’t enough, Red Hat also unveiled some new managed cloud services, possibly to help other people who don’t know one end of a container from the other. “To take full advantage of the open hybrid cloud, IT leaders need to be able to use the technologies that they need in whatever IT footprint makes sense for them,” said Matt Hicks, EVP of Products and Technologies at Red Hat.

“Red Hat managed cloud services effectively drops many barriers that have kept organizations from harnessing the full potential of the hybrid cloud. We believe eliminating the traditional overhead of managing cloud-scale infrastructure will spark a genesis moment for customers and open up a future of possibility where those barriers once stood.”

Amen to that, Matt. The most interesting telecomsy announcement seems to be the decision of Turkish operator group to build its new AI services architecture and application hub on OpenShift. This apparently gave it the platform to try all sorts of cloud and AI cleverness out before taking it to market.

“Using Red Hat OpenShift as a flexible, consistent foundation, we have created a ‘playground’ for data science, making the frameworks and tools available to anyone, so we can invite contributions from all over the Turkcell organization,” said İnanç Çakıroğlu, Director of Artificial Intelligence and Analytic Solutions at Turkcell. “This has enabled us to create and deliver brand new AI-powered services to market approximately twice as quickly as we could before.”

You can’t say fairer than that.