This article is based on announcements made at Red Hat Summit (2018) and originally reported by SiliconAngle. Some product names and partnership structures have since evolved.
Hybrid clouds are a necessary step — and often a transitional one — for enterprises evolving toward greater reliance on public cloud infrastructure. Rather than a hard cutover, most organizations spend years running workloads across on-premises data centers and one or more public clouds simultaneously. Succeeding in that in-between period requires investing in four key capability areas: container orchestration, integration middleware, DevOps pipeline tooling, and management automation.
Announcements from the 2018 Red Hat Summit illustrate how vendors were responding to this demand, through partnerships with Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and through the integration of CoreOS technologies acquired by Red Hat. Each partnership targeted a distinct layer of the hybrid cloud stack.
Kubernetes Orchestrates Containerized Apps Across Hybrid Clouds
Container orchestration sits at the foundation of any hybrid cloud strategy. Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for scheduling and managing containerized workloads, and its portability across on-premises and public cloud environments makes it a natural fit for hybrid architectures.
At the 2018 Red Hat Summit, Red Hat and Microsoft announced a jointly managed OpenShift Container Platform offering on Microsoft Azure — at the time described as the first fully managed Kubernetes-based platform to support both Linux and Windows Server container workloads in a single hybrid environment. Red Hat OpenShift on Azure was designed to let customers connect on-premises OpenShift clusters to Azure services more rapidly and securely.
Key capabilities announced for Red Hat OpenShift on Azure included:
- Public cloud onramp: Deployment of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Microsoft Azure Stack, providing access to Azure services such as Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure SQL DB from on-premises environments.
- Heterogeneous container support: Flexibility to move cloud-native applications between on-premises orchestrated containers and the Azure public cloud, with support for Windows Server containers alongside Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The solution also aimed to support automated, real-time load balancing across containers running in private clouds, Azure, and AWS.
- Developer integration: RHEL Linux credits for Visual Studio Enterprise and Visual Studio Professional subscribers, plus access to OpenShift container management features from .NET, Java, and other popular frameworks.
- Joint vendor support: Fully co-managed by Red Hat and Microsoft, with colocated support teams covering containerized applications, operating systems, infrastructure, and orchestration layers including Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Azure, Microsoft Azure Stack, and Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service.
Middleware Threads Through Hybrid Clouds
Building, connecting, and managing hybrid cloud applications requires a supporting layer of middleware that has been optimized for containerized microservices. Without this layer, integrating data services, messaging systems, and application runtimes across environments becomes a significant operational burden.
Red Hat and IBM announced an expansion of their partnership at the same summit, integrating OpenShift with IBM’s hybrid cloud middleware portfolio. Specifically, IBM committed to extending IBM Cloud Private and IBM Cloud Private for Data to run on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
The stated goals of the Red Hat and IBM partnership included:
- Deploying containerized apps to a common hybrid cloud foundation integrating Red Hat OpenShift with IBM Cloud Private.
- Providing a unified container platform in which IBM Cloud Private delivers a single view of all enterprise data.
- Running containerized versions of IBM Cloud Private services as Red Hat Certified Containers.
- Leveraging IBM Cloud Private’s self-service big-data catalog and operational management tools on Red Hat OpenShift across all hybrid cloud footprints, including the IBM public cloud.
- Running containerized instances of IBM’s AI, IoT, and blockchain services with IBM Cloud Private on Red Hat OpenShift.
The partners also announced that IBM PowerAI would be available on RHEL for on-premises deployments, and outlined plans to accelerate containerized versions of Red Hat solutions on IBM Power Systems. IBM was simultaneously executing a broader program to migrate its middleware and application portfolio to containers for hybrid cloud deployment.
DevOps Drives Operationalization of Containerized Apps in Hybrid Clouds
DevOps practices — continuous integration, automated testing, and streamlined deployment pipelines — are essential for managing the pace and complexity of hybrid cloud application delivery. Without them, organizations risk accumulating operational debt as they scale their containerized workloads.
Red Hat and Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced a joint solution set targeting DevOps adoption in hybrid cloud environments, covering infrastructure, tooling, and professional services:
- Infrastructure: HPE Synergy software-defined infrastructure was positioned as a single platform for running containers on virtual machines and bare metal alongside traditional non-containerized applications.
- Tooling: The HPE Synergy Composer tool, used in conjunction with Red Hat Ansible Tower and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, was designed to automate container provisioning and quality-of-service management within a DevOps workflow. It also covered persistent storage provisioning, backup, and restore on HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble storage arrays, with support for public cloud storage via HPE Cloud Volumes and HPE Cloud Bank Storage. Reference architectures and Ansible playbooks were included for tasks such as high availability, networking, load balancing, OS security, and QoS.
- Professional services: The HPE Pointnext team offered migration services to help customers adapt their existing DevOps practices to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for cloud-native apps in hybrid environments.
Automation Keeps the Hybrid Cloud Humming
At the scale of enterprise hybrid clouds, manual management is not viable. Automation is the mechanism by which teams maintain visibility, enforce policy, and reduce operational toil across environments that span on-premises data centers and multiple public clouds.
Red Hat used the 2018 Summit to announce how it planned to integrate CoreOS technologies — acquired earlier that year — into its existing portfolio. The three announced integration tracks were:
- Kubernetes automation: Red Hat announced integration of CoreOS Tectonic, an enterprise Kubernetes distribution, into OpenShift to automate container deployment, scaling, orchestration, and oversight. The CoreOS Operator Framework — a pattern for packaging and managing stateful Kubernetes applications — was also being integrated, with more than 60 software partners reported to have committed to supporting it at the time of the announcement.
- Registry automation: CoreOS Quay, an enterprise container registry, was being integrated into OpenShift to automate geographic replication, security scanning, rollbacks, and image pruning.
- Hosting automation: CoreOS Container Linux, a container-optimized operating system, was being integrated into OpenShift to automate container hosting tasks and align with the broader RHEL and Fedora ecosystems.
Is Hybrid Cloud a Destination or a Waypoint?
The investments described above demonstrate significant industry commitment to hybrid cloud infrastructure. However, analysts at the time — including researchers at Wikibon — argued that hybrid cloud architectures are better understood as a transitional phase than a long-term destination. The costs, operational complexity, and architectural rigidities of maintaining data assets partitioned across on-premises and public cloud environments impose real constraints on agility and economics.
As an organization’s hybrid cloud deployment grows more complex — integrating orchestration platforms, middleware layers, DevOps toolchains, and automation frameworks from multiple vendors — the operational overhead can compound. At some point, the simplicity, provisioning speed, and pay-as-you-go economics of public cloud-native architectures become comparatively attractive. This tension does not invalidate hybrid cloud investment, but it does mean that engineering teams should design their hybrid tooling with eventual cloud consolidation in mind rather than treating heterogeneous environments as a permanent operating model.
The four capability areas examined here — orchestration, middleware, DevOps tooling, and automation — remain relevant to any organization navigating this transition. The specific products and partnerships will continue to evolve, but the architectural problems they address are durable.