For the first time ever, Red Hat will align its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), development and release dates with a third-party: Amazon Web Services (AWS). This alliance underlines just how important the cloud is to Red Hat as it moves from being a Linux distributor first to being a cloud services provider first.
This move also shows that the hybrid cloud is alive and well. The AWS and Red Hat strategic partnership will integrate AWS services with Red Hat’s OpenShift. For users, this will mean you’ll be able to access AWS services directly from Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
Specifically, you’ll be able to seamlessly configure and deploy such AWS services as Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, and Elastic Load Balancing. While you will be able to use these AWS services from application programming interfaces (API), you won’t need to be a programmer to use them. Instead you can access them from directly within the OpenShift console.
Of course, you’ve long been able to run OpenShift on AWS. Indeed, since 2008, you could run RHEL on AWS. And, recently, Red Hat made it possible to run OpenShift on the Google Cloud Platform. What’s new here is that AWS and OpenShift have been integrated into one hybrid platform.