OpenShift is the New 'Enterprise Linux'​

Matt Asay is right, AWS is defining the future of enterprise IT and OpenShift is how Red Hat will make its mark on that future. I would even take this a step further: OpenShift is more than a container platform or a PaaS. OpenShift, which includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), extends its role as a common application runtime into the new world of orchestrated, multi-container applications and microservices architecture.

OpenShift delivers the common platform for traditional and cloud-native containerized applications across the hybrid cloud. We're witnessing the next phase in evolution of application abstraction: from traditional enterprise OS deployments, over hybrid models and pet containers, single-node deployments, to the integrated, fully containerized and orchestrated scale-out cluster. In that world of application-centric IT, OpenShift provides customers and the ISV ecosystem with an open alternative to the vertical integration of proprietary public and private cloud. OpenShift, as an extension and superset of traditional RHEL, is the future cloud-native operating system.

The historic role of Linux in the enterprise and specifically RHEL was to break the vertical integration of mainframe and proprietary UNIX (hardware, operating system, and software) and offer a standardized, stable, extensible, enterprise-supported application runtime serving an open ecosystem across hybrid infrastructure including commodity, standard platforms.

The hybrid infrastructure evolved from enterprise server hardware over virtualization to cloud. The role of Linux remains relevant across all of them: today RHEL provides both ISVs and enterprise customers a stable runtime to operate the same binary applications across all footprints of the hybrid cloud and enables them to consume open source with enterprise quality.

Containers are re-defining the OS by decomposing it into independent host-environments and service/application runtimes. This is roughly equivalent to microservices relative to middleware or traditional microkernel concepts relative to operating systems. Also, we can clearly state a tendency to scale-out architectures. It has become clear that the future of the enterprise operating system is a distributed one of clusters running orchestrated containerized services. While docker / OCI define the package format for containerization, Kubernetes provides the ‘meta-kernel’ to orchestrate the cluster and its applications. This scale-out cluster offers a framework solution for traditional enterprise functions such as H/A and a service architecture for common application components and lifecycle. One thing that differentiates Kubernetes and some of its competing projects from previous generations of cluster orchestrators, is that for the first time we have a single scale out cluster runtime that can run ANY kind of application. No longer do we have multiple large single purpose (HPC, Hadoop, Cassandra, etc.) scale out clusters. This is a compelling reason for why I expect that open source communities/technologies will continue to rally around Kubernetes as the new platform and why many commercial distributions of these technologies (ISVs) are choosing to build on OpenShift as their commercial platform.

The base of OpenShift is Red Hat’s enterprise-ready distribution of Kubernetes: It is built on RHEL as the host and RHEL is the core runtime inside the containers, they are engineered together by the same Red Hat development organization. This means that applications running on OpenShift inherit the same stability and performance provided by RHEL. This connection is critical and differentiates OpenShift from its competitors, because despite of what some enterprising startup-marketers are trying to make you believe, the kernel, the build-tool-chain, the core remain the root of stability and security. Container portability is a great concept, but running random binaries from the internet on top of a non-hardened host still a good way to cause the most interesting software crashes and data-corruptors.

The paradigm shift towards containers is closely connected to the overall market trends around cloud, devops, and agility. At the center of this stands Amazon Web Services (AWS) with their apparently unstoppable charge to redefine the IT industry. In the world of AWS, everything is just a service running in their cloud; blackbox services on leased hardware, with complete vertical integration, re-invent the mainframe. The pull for customers - both on the Operations and the Developer side - is almost irresistible. At a time where every business is a software business with the time to market for applications is the defining success criteria, the sheer efficiency of the AWS model trumps concerns over risks of public cloud.

For the rest of the software industry, this model presents an existential threat; the traditional models of selling software to end-customers or even managed services may be marginalized. It also presents a challenge for open source, as one way of looking at AWS is to see it as the equivalent of a hosted Linux distribution. Even cloud vendors like Google and Microsoft - the latter after a drastic strategic pivot centering their strategy around Azure - are racing to keep up with the AWS feature and scale expansion.

Of course, none of this means that the existing software industry will disappear tomorrow, that customers will abandon their existing enterprise deployments, or that private cloud suddenly isn’t important anymore. It does mean though that the future of IT is defined by the cloud. The 55% year-over-year revenue growth trending towards $10 billion AWS showed in their Q3/FY16 results speak for themselves. And there are plenty of witness statements to support the expectation that AWS is here to stay.

The core value of cloud and specifically AWS is at a higher level than the traditional OS: it is ease of access, integration, and ultimately agility. But in the case of AWS and other proprietary cloud stacks, this comes at the price of vertical integration, black-box services, and potential lock-in - in contrast to the general trend for enterprise development to build on Open Source stacks. This contradiction creates an opportunity for an independent Open Source runtime that enables services from an open ecosystem to run across hybrid infrastructure and to use services provided by infrastructures like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and others. OpenShift expands RHEL from binary runtime of an individual service up to a higher level of integration and offers a comparable experience with increasingly better capabilities than AWS alone, without the vertical integration and vendor lock-in.

AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud are the new EMC, HP, Cisco, Sun, and Oracle. And like RHEL provided an open alternative to the vertically integrated, proprietary mainframe and UNIX systems, and allowed customers to choose from an open ecosystem and hybrid infrastructure, OpenShift offers an alternative to the vertically integrated proprietary cloud. In this context, OpenShift is the new RHEL.

By expanding RHEL from the traditional binary application runtime on a single server into a scalable platform for orchestrated, multi-container applications and micro-service architecture, OpenShift delivers the common runtime for traditional and cloud-native containerized applications across the hybrid cloud infrastructure options. It enables ISV partners and customers to run their applications unmodified across bare metal, virtualization, private and multiple public clouds. It also empowers ISVs to at the same time deliver their applications in the traditional way to customers who run their own instances for distributed infrastructure, IoT, autonomous systems and offer them in managed or SaaS model - again using the same platform with not changing their applications.

OpenShift is the new RHEL means that in the same way that RHEL was and continues to be the center of gravity for Red Hat's platform strategy in the traditional enterprise IT world, OpenShift is the center of gravity for Red Hat's platform strategy in the hybrid cloud world. Red Hat itself is buying into this model with an online-first strategy: for a growing number of products, I expect the path to the customer will lead through a service phase on OpenShift Online Training. The motivation for this is on one hand, to build the operational experience to be able to with a straight face tell customers how to run their IT in the cloud-age. On the other hand, it enables Red Hat to speed up delivery through early production or even CI/CD releases into a controlled environment. It means that Red Hat is working to align the productization model for many of its products with the current cloud practices.

So yes, Matt Asay is right. OpenShift is crucial for Red Hat’s future. But much more than that, OpenShift is Red Hat’s opportunity to expand its RHEL success story into the cloud world and provide the one credible alternative to the single provider, vertically integrated cloud. OpenShift can do this by building on the shoulders of RHEL, its commitment to open source and enterprise track-record. It offers customers and the ecosystem with a stable integration point for the future of application-centric IT.

This doesn’t mean every customer who uses RHEL needs to run out and buy OpenShift. As they look to private and public cloud, OpenShift delivers in the new world the same attributes for which RHEL is best known (reliability, open source innovation, security, etc.). In addition to that, OpenShift helps bridge the gap between Development and Operations..

To quote Red Hat’s VP and GM of OpenShift, Ashesh Badani: "OpenShift (and Kubernetes in general) will be for customers in their hybrid cloud world what RHEL (and Linux in general) brought to the Fortune 500s and their use of open source in the datacenter. Red Hat embraces this continuity and focuses on delivering integrated value to our customers."