A decade of open innovation: Red Hat continues to scale the open hybrid cloud with Microsoft

More than 10 years ago, Red Hat began a collaboration with Microsoft rooted in a simple but powerful recognition: enterprise customers need trusted, interoperable platforms that offer true choice. What started as a shared commitment to openness has grown into a deepening alliance that has guided thousands of organizations as they build, run, and scale workloads across on-premises environments and Microsoft Azure. 

The goal remains consistent: provide organizations the flexibility to move at their own pace. This includes digital sovereignty, which extends beyond data location to operational control and technology choice. Whether running in Azure sovereign regions or on-premises, customers can follow a consistent approach to security and compliance.

Delivering the enterprise standard for open hybrid cloud

Open hybrid cloud lets customers choose where and how workloads run. Enterprise innovation depends on security, reliability, and support.

RHEL remains the foundation of the enterprise hybrid cloud. With the recent release of RHEL 10.2, customers gain access to updated capabilities for Azure deployments, underscoring Red Hat’s commitment to a fully supported, optimized RHEL experience on Microsoft’s cloud platform. RHEL 10.2 enhancements focus primarily on enhanced security, advanced AI, and streamlined IT operations. Specifically, it introduces a tech preview of Sealed Image Mode (enabled by bootc), which uses customer-controlled Secure Boot keys to sign container images. This establishes a complete chain of trust by cryptographically verifying every component before and during runtime, mitigating the risk of booting a tampered image. Red Hat Certificate System 11.0 features quantum-resistant signatures (ML-DSA) and zero-touch provisioning to proactively protect against current and future attacks.

Expanding regional availability

Where workloads run is as important as how they run. Data residency, sovereignty, and latency requirements often shape platform decisions, especially in regulated industries. Azure Red Hat OpenShift is now available in 36 countries and continues to expand globally, with availability in regions such as in Mexico Central, New Zealand North, Malaysia West, and Indonesia Central and Austria East.. This allows applications and AI workloads to run closer to users and data while maintaining compliance and a consistent operating model across regions.

Streamlining the path from migration to modernization

A successful hybrid strategy requires a consistent experience across the lifecycle. Red Hat focuses on reducing operational and commercial friction through:

• Azure Red Hat OpenShift: As a jointly engineered and supported managed service, Azure Red Hat OpenShift continues to evolve. Red Hat and Microsoft remain committed to the platform's ongoing development, with a roadmap focused on expanding enterprise capabilities, improving the developer experience, and enabling more of the workloads organizations are looking to modernize.
• Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on Azure Red Hat OpenShift: Enabling Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on Azure empowers organizations to modernize virtualized workloads alongside containerized applications, moving away from legacy virtualization platforms while maintaining operational continuity on a single, consistent platform.
• Managed identities and workload identities: Using Azure Red Hat OpenShift, organizations can authenticate and securely integrate Azure services without static credentials, improving security posture, and simplifying identity management for cloud-native workloads.
• Azure Red Hat OpenShift confidential containers: Extending hardware-based confidential computing to containerized workloads on Azure Red Hat OpenShift allows organizations in regulated industries to run sensitive workloads with enhanced isolation and verifiable integrity.
• RHEL and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform enabled on Azure Arc: Azure Arc bridges on-premises RHEL environments with Azure-native management, providing visibility across a mixed fleet. Meanwhile, Ansible Automation Platform provides the orchestration layer for complex migration workflows.

Furthermore, Red Hat technologies are available in the Microsoft Marketplace, and eligible purchases can be applied to a customer’s Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), helping consolidate spending and simplify procurement.

The next frontier: AI on a supported platform

The momentum of our collaboration is now extending into the era of AI. We are committed to making open AI capabilities more accessible and governable for the enterprise. A flagship example of this scale is Microsoft and Red Hat’s work with Banco Bradesco, one of Latin America’s largest financial institutions, which we recently celebrated as part of the Red Hat Ecosystem Innovation Awards. By building on Azure Red Hat OpenShift, Bradesco has moved beyond experimentation to manage over 500 AI initiatives in production. As Rafael Romualdo Wandresen, Senior Bridge Manager at Bradesco, noted: "Performance at scale is non-negotiable. The developed solution gives us the speed and resilience to power AI-driven banking at scale.” 

Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides a fully managed, enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform. This model is already in use in regulated lending. Topicus runs its Akkuro platform on Azure Red Hat OpenShift, enabling consistent deployment for document‑driven credit decisioning while meeting strict data sovereignty requirements and supporting repeatable deployment across regions.

Recent highlights of this expanding collaboration include:

• Red Hat AI Inference on AKS: Now in technology preview, this allows teams to deploy and serve open source large language models (LLMs) on Azure Kubernetes Service with enterprise-level performance and security for AI workloads.
• Azure Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server for Red Hat OpenShift AI: This bridge between our ecosystems, currently in developer preview, enables developers to connect AI agents to Azure data sources directly from within their OpenShift AI environments.
• Expanded NVIDIA GPU support: Microsoft has expanded GPU support for Azure Red Hat OpenShift to include additional machine types optimized for large-scale AI inference and agent-based systems.

Our collaboration is proof that when two industry leaders commit to open standards and customer-centricity, the result is a platform that is more than the sum of its parts. We invite you to learn more about Red Hat’s collaboration with Microsoft  as we continue to build the future of the enterprise, one open hybrid cloud at a time.