Introduction of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP 4.6)

Introduction of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP)

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) is a platform for developing and running containerized applications. It is designed to help developers and operations personnel to easily build, deploy, and manage applications, allowing the supported applications to expand from a small number of machines to thousands of machines that can serve millions of clients. Based on Kubernetes, OCP provides powerful and flexible platform management tools and processes. By using open-source technologies of Red Hat, OCP allows you to deploy containerized applications from a single cloud to multiple clouds.

Compared with other platforms of Red Hat OpenShift, OCP provides enterprises with complete control over their Kubernetes environments. You can install and deploy OCP by using installer-provisioned infrastructure (IPI) or user-provisioned infrastructure (UPI). This document provides detailed instructions on how to install and deploy OCP 4.6 on Alibaba Cloud. For more information about how to install OCP, see the official installation guide from Red Hat.

Red Hat – Driving Business Innovation with Open Source

This article shows the dialog between Michael Ferris, VP Technical Business Development and Business Architecture at Red Hat, and Andrew Habgood, ‎Director, Cloud Partners & Alliances, APAC at Red Hat to get a better understanding of the value of the partnership with Alibaba Cloud from a business perspective.

Red Hat and Alibaba Cloud has just signed a strategic partnership. Could you elaborate more about this partnership?

Michael: Absolutely! So Alibaba Cloud has joined the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program. This is going to enable Alibaba Cloud to be a validated, trusted, and supported platform for Red Hat customers to consume our technologies in Alibaba Cloud, worldwide. We partnered together to ensure that as customers enable their hybrid cloud and move application workloads back and forth from on premise into the public cloud, that Alibaba Cloud is a trusted provider for all of those customers globally.

Is there any specific implementation plan or roadmap for this partnership?

Michael: So certainly the things we’re doing now is working together over the next several months to enable the technologies that we have in Alibaba Cloud. Following those technology efforts, we’re actually going to be enabling first Red Hat Enterprise Linux for consumption by customers on demand in the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace. And then we’re also going to extend the relationship and allow customers using other Red Hat products, anything from our middleware solutions with JBoss, our automation and management capabilities with CloudForms and Ansible by Red Hat, and certainly even capabilities in the OpenShift platform for container platforms. We’re going to allow customers to move those into Alibaba Cloud through a process we call Cloud Access. This is going to allow customers to have a direct relationship with Red Hat for support and the financial elements of their Red Hat solutions, and then have a relationship with Alibaba Cloud for the technology and the infrastructure and any other services that they use in Alibaba Cloud. Together we can be able to service the customers, sort them as they scale-up and scale-out across multiple deployments.

How important is this partnership for the Asia Pacific market?

Andrew: I think the Alibaba partnership is hugely important for Asia Pacific. There are certainly markets in Asia Pacific that have been reluctant to aggressively move to cloud because of data sovereignty and other issues, and Alibaba Cloud will help them achieve and resolve some of those constraints. We’ve had significant interests, and I know Alibaba Cloud has also had significant interests, from enterprise customers in the Asia Pacific region about moving to a mutual offering. Now that we can finally announce the offering, it’s great and we think there will be some real excitement in the market.

Why did Red Hat choose to partner with Alibaba Cloud?

Michael: It’s all about customers. For several years now, we’ve had an increasing number of customers coming to Red Hat who want to be able to take advantage of Alibaba Cloud’s leadership, both in technology but also global infrastructure. These requests accumulated to the point that it made sense for us to engage with Alibaba Cloud and ensure that it was a trusted destination for our customers. And then we can promise the customers that as they consumed Red Hat products there, we can jointly support, certify, and even have third parties such as Red Hat’s extended ISV ecosystem part of the relationship together with Alibaba Cloud.

Finally, what are the top three trends in open source in the coming years?

Michael: It depends on upon where we’re going. We see certainly the first and probably most aggressively thing that’s happening in the market right now is really all about containers. And certainly our investments in OpenShift and providing a container platform that customers can span both on and off premise is very important. That leads me to the second major thing that we’re seeing in this space, which is hybrid computing. This applies to both at the container level but also the infrastructure level, where customers want to be able to take existing workloads, whether they’re containerized or not, and move them on and off premise. Which then leads to really the third capability that we’re seeing heavy amount of use, which is how do you innovate rapidly using a bevy of open source projects, but you want to be able to ensure they are supported and certified. Red Hat’s engagement with multiple projects from for example artificial intelligence, as Alibaba Cloud is doing, through elements such as big data, really ensures that they have a full ecosystem of support for their open source needs.

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Introduction of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP 4.6)