Source: containerjournal.com (original reporting, May 2020)
Red Hat and AWS Expand Their Partnership with a Jointly Managed OpenShift Service
Red Hat has extended its strategic alliance with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to include a jointly managed Kubernetes service built on Red Hat OpenShift. Under the arrangement, AWS is responsible for managing the underlying public cloud infrastructure, while Red Hat takes ownership of a fully managed OpenShift control plane running on top of it. Billing flows through a customer’s existing AWS contract, removing the need to manage a separate Red Hat invoice.
Sathish Balakrishnan, then Vice President for Hosted Platforms at Red Hat, described the offering at the time of launch. He noted that Red Hat already had comparable jointly managed arrangements with Microsoft Azure and IBM, as well as a separately available product called Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated, which Red Hat deploys and manages on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) on behalf of customers.
Why Organizations Are Turning to Managed Kubernetes
The appeal of a managed OpenShift service reflects a broader industry shift in how enterprises consume Kubernetes. Several factors are driving this trend:
- Operational complexity. Kubernetes involves a significant operational surface area—cluster provisioning, networking, storage, upgrades, and security patching. Many organizations prefer to delegate that responsibility rather than absorb it internally.
- Talent scarcity. Skilled Kubernetes engineers remain difficult to hire and retain. A managed service lets teams consume the platform without needing deep in-house expertise from day one.
- Skills transfer. Some organizations use a managed service as a stepping stone: they consume OpenShift as a service while their internal teams learn the platform, with the option to take over management later.
- Resource constraints. At the time of the launch (mid-2020), the economic disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic had left many IT departments understaffed, accelerating interest in offloading platform management.
Red Hat’s Broader Managed Service Ecosystem
The AWS partnership sits within a much larger managed service ecosystem that Red Hat has built around OpenShift. At the time of the announcement, Red Hat already had relationships with more than 300 IT services providers that make OpenShift available as a managed offering. The strategy reflects Red Hat’s goal of making OpenShift available across every major public cloud and hybrid environment as the runtime fabric of a broad hybrid cloud computing strategy.
Customers can choose how they engage with the platform:
- Directly through Red Hat (OpenShift Dedicated or the relevant cloud-provider managed service)
- Through a hyperscaler such as AWS, Microsoft, or IBM under a jointly managed model
- Through a third-party IT services provider that wraps OpenShift in its own managed offering
DevOps Considerations for Managed OpenShift
One practical challenge that teams face when adopting any managed Kubernetes service is aligning their existing DevOps workflows to the constraints and opinions of the managed platform. OpenShift takes an opinionated stance on how applications are built and deployed—for example, it enforces stricter security contexts than vanilla Kubernetes by default. However, the platform does expose extension points that allow teams to integrate their preferred CI/CD tooling, policy engines, and observability stacks through plug-ins and Operators.
Engineering teams evaluating a managed OpenShift service should assess:
- Which cluster configuration options are exposed to tenants versus locked down by the managed provider
- How upgrade schedules are communicated and whether teams can defer patch windows
- How existing Helm charts, Operators, or custom controllers will behave under OpenShift’s security policies
- What observability and logging data is surfaced to tenants versus retained only by the provider
The Broader Kubernetes Adoption Curve
The launch of this service reflects a maturing Kubernetes market. Enterprises are increasingly treating Kubernetes not as a technology to evaluate, but as infrastructure to consume. The remaining open question—relevant to both managed service providers and platform teams—is what percentage of new workloads will be refactored into microservices architectures versus lifted and shifted as monoliths onto containerized infrastructure.
Microservices architectures are better suited to Kubernetes’s scheduling and scaling model, but they carry higher initial development and operational complexity. Organizations that move monolithic applications to containers gain portability and some operational consistency, but they may not realize the full flexibility benefits that a cloud-native architecture enables. Both paths are increasing the overall footprint of Kubernetes clusters in production—and, by extension, demand for managed services that absorb the operational overhead of running them.
Summary
Red Hat’s jointly managed OpenShift service with AWS gives enterprise teams a straightforward path to production-grade Kubernetes without staffing a dedicated platform engineering team. By consolidating billing through an existing AWS contract and distributing operational responsibility between the two vendors, the offering lowers the barrier to adopting OpenShift at scale. As managed Kubernetes services from multiple providers mature, the key differentiators will increasingly be operational transparency, upgrade control, and how well the platform integrates with a team’s existing DevOps toolchain.