Originally reported by datacenternews.us, May 2020.
Red Hat and AWS Deepen Their Partnership with a Managed Kubernetes Offering
Red Hat and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have extended their long-standing collaborative partnership to release Amazon Red Hat OpenShift, a jointly engineered, managed, and supported Kubernetes service delivered through AWS. The announcement, made in May 2020, targets enterprise organizations seeking to accelerate cloud-native application development without sacrificing security, compliance, or operational consistency.
What Is Amazon Red Hat OpenShift?
Amazon Red Hat OpenShift is a fully managed service built on Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform, OpenShift Container Platform. It brings together Red Hat’s container and Kubernetes expertise with AWS’s cloud infrastructure and services. The goal is to give IT teams a single, integrated experience for deploying and operating containerized workloads at scale on AWS.
Key operational features announced for the service include:
- Managed Red Hat OpenShift cluster creation and lifecycle management
- Native integration with the AWS Console for cluster visibility and control
- On-demand, hourly billing consolidated into a single AWS invoice
- Unified support through AWS, covering both the infrastructure and the OpenShift platform
- Native access to more than 170 AWS cloud-native services from within containerized applications
Why This Matters for Enterprise Kubernetes Adoption
One of the persistent friction points for enterprises adopting Kubernetes is the operational complexity of managing the platform alongside the underlying infrastructure. A jointly managed service removes much of that burden, allowing development and platform engineering teams to focus on application delivery rather than cluster administration.
Sathish Balakrishnan, Red Hat Vice President of Hosted Platforms, explained the rationale at launch:
“We often see IT decision-makers seeking prescriptive guidance around the changing requirements of IT operations and application development in a containerised world. By blending Red Hat’s and AWS’ decades of enterprise IT knowledge and experience into Amazon Red Hat OpenShift, IT organisations will be able to launch cloud-native systems that can retain enterprise-grade security, be more agile and see improved performance while driving cost efficiencies.”
Sathish Balakrishnan, VP of Hosted Platforms, Red Hat
Key Benefits for Enterprise Teams
According to Red Hat, the primary benefits of Amazon Red Hat OpenShift include:
- Enterprise-grade Kubernetes: Access to the same OpenShift platform used by more than 2,000 enterprise customers globally at the time of announcement.
- Deep AWS integration: Native connectivity to AWS managed services, enabling teams to build applications that leverage the full AWS portfolio without leaving the OpenShift environment.
- Hybrid cloud readiness: Consistent APIs and tooling across on-premises OpenShift deployments and the AWS-managed version, supporting hybrid cloud architectures.
- Open-source foundation: Built on upstream Kubernetes and Open Container Initiative (OCI) standards, avoiding proprietary lock-in at the platform layer.
Red Hat’s Stance on Enterprise Kubernetes Architecture
Balakrishnan was explicit about Red Hat’s architectural philosophy, pushing back against approaches that layer Kubernetes on top of legacy virtualization stacks or proprietary middleware:
“Contrary to some industry vendors, we do not see enterprise Kubernetes as being truly successful if it’s based on legacy virtualisation infrastructure or layered across proprietary technologies. Red Hat views the cloud-native platform for the enterprise as fully open and highly-scalable in a model that embraces upstream innovation safely for use in production.”
Sathish Balakrishnan, VP of Hosted Platforms, Red Hat
This positions Amazon Red Hat OpenShift as a direct counter to managed Kubernetes offerings that rely on hypervisor-based node isolation or vendor-specific control plane components.
Availability
At the time of the original announcement in May 2020, Amazon Red Hat OpenShift was entering an early access program. Interested organizations were directed to the Red Hat OpenShift website to register for preview access. For the current availability status and regional support, consult the official Red Hat OpenShift and AWS product pages, as the service has continued to evolve since this initial launch.
Watch: OpenShift on AWS Overview
Summary
Amazon Red Hat OpenShift represents a significant step in making enterprise Kubernetes accessible to organizations that want the power of OpenShift without the operational overhead of self-managing the platform. By combining Red Hat’s Kubernetes expertise with AWS’s infrastructure scale and managed service tooling, the offering addresses two of the most common enterprise objections to Kubernetes adoption: operational complexity and integration with existing cloud services. For DevOps and platform engineering teams evaluating managed Kubernetes options on AWS, it is a solution worth evaluating alongside Amazon EKS and other alternatives.