Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, announced new offerings to help organizations of all sizes and industries optimize, scale or simply protect IT operations in the face of shifting global dynamics.

Red Hat has long championed technology evolutions and wants to enable customers to build any application and deploy everywhere with the consistency and flexibility an open hybrid cloud foundation provides. Building on this vision, Red Hat’s new offerings are designed to improve the delivery, accessibility and stability of critical services and applications on a worldwide scale on the backbone of the hybrid cloud.

More than ever before, Red Hat sees a need for IT to evolve to meet rapidly expanding demand for always-on digital services and ever-present connectivity. Nearly every industry, including healthcare, logistics, retail, financial services, government, education and more, is adapting in real-time to meet demand for faster, more widespread access to essential applications and services while maintaining operational stability. In the telecommunications industry, for example, traffic has spiked by more than 50% in some global regions. This surge has led telecommunications and service providers to expand capacity and speed up 5G deployments and edge computing, in turn driving examinations of network and cloud infrastructure readiness.

Paul Cormier, president and CEO, Red Hat says, “Perhaps more than ever before, the unique needs of every organization are in sharp focus - some need to scale operations immediately to meet relentless services demand while others seek to strengthen and maintain core IT operations. Rather than only provide technologies to address one need or the other, Red Hat provides a flexible, fully open set of solutions to our customers, meeting them where they are with what they need. This could be the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform to drive greater operational stability or the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform to help rapidly scale services for critical demands, all backed by our expertise, experience and commitment to helping global communities at large, not just our immediate customers.”

Red Hat believes that the necessary technologies for meeting these needs are not tied to legacy software stacks or rooted in expensive proprietary technologies. Instead, the answers will be driven by open source innovation, enabling organizations to take advantage of cloud-native platforms everywhere, from the edge and on-premises datacenters to multiple public clouds. With open source technologies like Linux and Kubernetes, organizations not only have access to innovation that can help them build what's next and keep them at the forefront of their industries, but also automate, adapt and scale existing operations across IT environments with greater flexibility than proprietary vendors can provide.

Traditional and cloud-native applications, unified and managed from the core to the edge

Red Hat’s leadership in open source communities is not for marketing or convenience. In Kubernetes, Red Hat was an early contributor alongside Google and remains the second-leading corporate contributor to Kubernetes. Red Hat is helping to advance the key technologies in Kubernetes and related communities which are enabling this cross-industry IT evolution.

With Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat pioneered an enterprise Kubernetes platform that has enabled customers to embrace cloud-native approaches while also supporting existing traditional applications. Red Hat OpenShift is trusted by customers across industries because of this differentiated approach. To help further eliminate the barriers between traditional and cloud-native applications, Red Hat is introducing capabilities that enable new workloads on OpenShift and that meet customers where they are.

Red Hat announced:

OpenShift virtualization, a new feature available as a Technology Preview within Red Hat OpenShift, derived from the KubeVirt open source project. It enables organizations to develop, deploy and manage applications consisting of virtual machines alongside containers and serverless, all in one modern platform that unifies cloud-native and traditional workloads. While some vendors seek to protect legacy technology stacks by dragging Kubernetes and cloud-native functionality backwards to preserve proprietary virtualization, Red Hat does the opposite: Bringing traditional application stacks forward into a layer of open innovation, enabling customers to truly transform at their speed, not at the whims of proprietary lock-in. Read more about OpenShift virtualization’s new container-native virtualization capabilities here.

Red Hat OpenShift 4.4, the latest version of the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, which builds on the simplicity and scale of Kubernetes Operators. Rebased on Kubernetes 1.17, OpenShift 4.4 introduces a developer-centric view of platform metrics and monitoring for application workloads; monitoring integration for Red Hat Operators; cost management for assessing the resources and costs used for specific applications across the hybrid cloud; and much more. Read more about what’s new in Red Hat OpenShift 4.4 here.

To address the management challenges of running cloud-native applications across large-scale, production and distributed Kubernetes clusters, Red Hat is also introducing a new management solution. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, soon available as a Technology Preview, provides a single, simplified control point for the monitoring and deployment of OpenShift clusters at scale, offering policy-driven governance and application lifecycle management. Read more about Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes here.

Delivering a foundation for innovation, everywhere and anywhere

Innovation is more than simply delivering new technologies. As with Red Hat’s entire open hybrid cloud portfolio, these solutions are backed by a complete ecosystem of supporting software, hardware and services and by Red Hat’s extensive expertise in integrating and operating open innovation. Red Hat also delivers production confidence by maintaining a long-life, enterprise-class lifecycle for its entire product portfolio including these newly launched offerings.

These advancements are not contingent on a single piece of hardware or a sole cloud provider, as Red Hat delivers innovation fully across hybrid and multicloud footprints, including:

Every major public cloud provider in Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure as well as many specialized cloud providers.

Managed solutions through OpenShift Dedicated, Azure Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Service enabling organizations to gain the benefits of enterprise Kubernetes without the burden of infrastructure management.

Support for multiple computing architectures, including x86, IBM Power and mainframes.

Beyond these new technologies, Red Hat has invested in helping organizations get the most from existing infrastructure. This includes:

Enhancements to Red Hat Insights, Red Hat’s proactive security and risk management as-a-service offering, which makes it easier for IT teams to detect, diagnose and remediate potential problems before they impact production systems or end users. Insights is not an add-on, as it is available across every supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription by default.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform also helps to address the complexities of expanding network demand and infrastructure footprints by automating time-consuming manual tasks, helping IT teams to more effectively meet customer and end user needs beyond service uptime.

Red Hat training and certification are also available to IT teams seeking to quickly expand skillsets as connectivity needs evolve. From learning the basics of enterprise Kubernetes to gaining certification in telecommunications architecture, Red Hat’s expertise is available to help IT professionals gain new expertise and experience to better address the growing importance of the network.