Why Red Hat offers a unique DevOps application platform for the enterprise

Anyone familiar with Red Hat at all will most likely know us for our leadership in Linux over the past 20+ years with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They may know about our leadership in other open source communities like Kubernetes or Ansible, which drive solutions like Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible Automation Platform. But DevOps solutions aren’t usually at the top of the list of what you associate with Red Hat. While RHEL, OpenShift and Ansible form the core pillars of our Open Hybrid Cloud strategy, our goal has always been to deliver a platform to accelerate application development and deployment across the Hybrid Cloud. And delivering an integrated DevOps solution as part of our hybrid cloud platform is very much part of that strategy.

The combination of OpenShift, which is built on RHEL, and Ansible provides a comprehensive end-to-end solution for DevOps that is integrated with a cloud native application platform for building, deploying and managing applications across data center, public cloud and edge environments. This integrated DevOps application platform provides support for standard development environments and application and infrastructure configurations, automated deployment of those configurations as code, and the consolidation of those workloads into containers or virtual machines, ready for deployment on our OpenShift Kubernetes platform or on other cloud, container or virtualization platforms automated by Ansible.

OpenShift Brings DevOps to Kubernetes

OpenShift is how Red Hat brings Kubernetes to our enterprise customers, however OpenShift is much more than just Enterprise Kubernetes. Our goal has always been to deliver a cloud native application platform powered by Kubernetes, Containers and Linux. In order to do that, we have invested to bring DevOps to Kubernetes. This aligns with the evolution we see in the cloud native community, where the Kubernetes project continues to stabilize and reduce its rate of change, while also becoming the foundation for a growing number of CNCF projects that are driving cloud native innovation on top of and around Kubernetes.

This is also reflected in the growing number of cloud native open source projects Red Hat has invested in and the capabilities we have brought to the OpenShift platform. These include OpenShift Pipelines for CI/CD powered by Tekton, OpenShift GitOps powered by ArgoCD for managing application and infrastructure deployments via Git, Red Hat Quay as an enterprise container image registry, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes powered by StackRox for scanning those images, and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for managing your fleet of clusters and the applications that run on them via single interface. This also extends to other projects like Istio, which powers OpenShift Service Mesh, Knative, which powers OpenShift Serverless, and Eclipse Che, which powers Red Hat DevSpaces, among others. This also includes newer projects we’ve participated in like Backstage, which will be the foundation for Red Hat Developer Hub and SigStore, which is a key component of Red Hat’s Trusted Software Supply Chain solution, both of which were recently announced at Red Hat Summit 2023.

Through OpenShift, Red Hat offers a DevOps platform as an extension of our cloud native application platform, bringing DevOps capabilities to a Kubernetes environment. As the leading Enterprise Kubernetes distribution, Red Hat OpenShift also offers a comprehensive, scalable and compliant platform to run those workloads across a hybrid cloud environment.

Ansible Extends DevOps Automation Anywhere

Ansible offers the ability to extend the Red Hat platform to any application, whether they deploy to Kubernetes or not. While Ansible can be used together with OpenShift or any Kubernetes platform, the majority of existing applications do not run on Kubernetes or packaged as containers. Ansible can be used to automate the configuration of virtual machines, bare metal servers and container-based systems, across data centers, public clouds and edge environments. Thus it can cover the gaps between OpenShift and more traditional systems that still require configuration management at scale, and validated deployments of software that has been tested and verified.

While Red Hat has always been the open source, open platform company that can integrate with just about any tool or environment, when it comes to DevOps, we also offer our own opinion on how things should look at scale. Thus, while we’re happy to work with any automation solution, it is Ansible that has become the leading automation solution in the enterprise and is likely the best tool to handle configuration management in Red Hat environments, simply because those environments have already been tested and validated with Ansible.

Recently Gartner placed Red Hat in the Challengers Quadrant section of its 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for : DevOps Platform report, based on our ability to execute and completeness of vision.

Want to learn more about what Gartner thought of our platform? Check out the report, here http://redhat.com/devopsplatformMQ.

YouTube playlist of Red Hat DevOps demo Red Hat DevOps Platform in action - YouTube 

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for DevOps Platforms, 5 June 2023, Manjunath Bhat Et Al. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant  is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.