Focus on innovation with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Google Cloud

Across industries, organizations are moving to the cloud to achieve digital business goals. In fact, 70% of organizations embrace hybrid cloud strategies, using at least 1 public and 1 private cloud.¹ 

Your choice of operating system (OS) and cloud provider are strategic decisions. Your OS forms the foundation for your entire environment. Security, management, portability, and life cycle planning all start with the OS, and your cloud provider greatly influences your ability to scale flexibly, maintain availability, and deliver resilient services.

Standardizing on a single operating foundation across your datacenter and cloud environments can greatly simplify your path to the cloud. Rather than splitting operations and management into multiple domains, your teams can use a single set of tools and platforms to deploy, run, secure, and move applications and workloads across multiple footprints.

Even so, not all combinations of OSs and cloud providers offer the features, capabilities, and resources to operate effectively and efficiently in hybrid and multicloud environments. Consistency, security, manageability, interoperability, and support across your entire environment are critical for making the most of your cloud investments.

Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® on Google Cloud delivers value for your organization by  providing a flexible, stable, and reliable foundation for hybrid and multicloud environments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a cloud-ready, security-focused OS with a consistent, tailored experience across footprints. Innovative, high-performance cloud infrastructure from Google Cloud gives you global capacity, intelligent security, and advanced machine learning (ML) capabilities. Standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for both on-site datacenter and Google Cloud environments can help improve productivity, security, and operations as you adapt to a more digital world.

No matter where you are in your cloud journey, Red Hat and Google Cloud can help you gain control of cloud complexity. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Google Cloud gives you access to:

• Reliable infrastructure focused on performance and sustainability.
• Flexible consumption models and purchasing options.
• Award-winning support and expertise.
• Proactive analytics and management tools and services.
• Security certifications, tools, and resources.
• Developer tools and programs.
• Optimized offerings for SAP deployments.

Red Hat solutions are designed for hybrid and multicloud environments—you can deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux wherever it makes the most sense. Red Hat and Google Cloud offer multiple purchasing options to fit your organization’s procurement processes:

• Purchase subscriptions from Red Hat and use them on-site or on Google Cloud via Red Hat Cloud Access.
• Obtain Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances from Google Cloud Marketplace.
• Use your Google Cloud committed use discounts (CUDs) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances on Google Cloud.
• Use the Red Hat Hybrid Committed Spend program for price discounts and flexible payment options for workloads running both on-site and on Google Cloud.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Google Cloud is integrated into Google Cloud and preconfigured for optimal performance with Google Cloud-specific profiles. Built-in tooling provides a new level of power, access, visibility, and control over Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments without the need to install or configure additional packages. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Google Cloud readily integrates  with the underlying environment and provides an exceptional “ready-to-use” performance standard that lets users focus on future initiatives,  potentially saving hundreds of hours of work. 

• Save time with a pretuned image that’s ready to run. Organizations that spin up and spin down images frequently benefit from having persistent settings so images are the same every time a new one is spun up.
• Monitor Red Hat Enterprise Linux within Google Cloud resources and applications. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Google Cloud instances are integrated into Google Cloud Observability using the OpenTelemetry standard. The cloud-optimized integration gives administrators a new ability to collect, analyze, and visualize performance and diagnostic data.
• Use built-in management tools to speed operations.
  • Google Cloud Command Line Interface (gcloud CLI) allows for discovering and managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux images and instances.
  • Provides proactive alerts of impending outages, security events, or overspending with Red Hat Lightspeed (formerly Red Hat Insights) so you can manage cloud and on-premise environments from a single interface.
  • Get access to Red Hat’s decades of Linux expertise with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lightspeed. It provides proactive guidance on how to build, deploy, and manage RHEL via AI technologies.
• Simplify building, deploying and managing workloads in the cloud.
  • Image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses container-native tooling so organizations can deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a bootc container image, streamlining cloud-native application development and IT operations into a single pipeline.
  • Image attestation and top-down memory encryption through secure boot, confidential compute, and a confidential hypervisor provides streamlined deployment and enhanced security from boot to runtime.
  • Enhance security by reducing attack surface with immutable system images.
  • Streamline operations with optional automated updates and rollbacks—just like your smartphone.

Regardless of how you purchase Red Hat Enterprise Linux, your organization is backed by Red Hat’s award-winning support organization and Google Cloud support teams. Red Hat works with cloud partners to provide expertise, knowledge, and joint support to ensure you successfully accomplish your goals with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Google Cloud. You receive the same high-value experience whether you obtain Red Hat Enterprise Linux directly from Red Hat or through Google Cloud.

You can choose from several levels of support to meet the needs of different teams—and your budget. For example, you may choose self-support for development systems and premium 24x7 support for production systems. Red Hat support teams collaborate with Red Hat engineering and product teams and Google Cloud to solve issues with less hassle. Specialty-based routing ensures support calls and tickets go directly to the right experts. Red Hat compiles helpful documentation on the Red Hat Customer Portal based on solutions from past support cases. Red Hat Customer Portal also publishes reference architectures, best practices, product documentation, videos, collaborative discussion, labs, and tools.

Standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Google Cloud lets you use the same set of management tools to administer your datacenter and cloud environments, saving time and effort. Red Hat Lightspeed is included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and it is a unique suite of hosted services that are woven into your existing Red Hat experience, and it helps you manage and optimize your hybrid cloud environment and supercharge your subscription with proactive, AI-powered management and advanced security capabilities. 

Gain visibility into business, operations, and security risks to identify and mitigate issues across your infrastructure before they affect your organization’s bottom line. Red Hat Lightspeed works across on-site and cloud environments, so you can manage everything from a single interface. To further simplify operations, you can link your Red Hat account to your Google Cloud account and choose to automate your cloud-based systems and workloads upon provisioning with Red Hat Lightspeed and other Red Hat services.

Red Hat Lightspeed offers key capabilities for hybrid and multicloud environments.

• Subscriptions service. Track and optimize your Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription use across your entire environment.
• Resource optimization service. Right-size your Google Cloud deployments using central processing unit (CPU), memory, and input/output (I/O) performance metrics that tell you whether your systems are optimized, undersized, oversized, under pressure, or idling.
• Image builder service. Create, manage, and deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux images consistently and rapidly across your datacenter and Google Cloud environments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes certified gold images to speed deployment.
• Vulnerability service. Scan your systems for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) and access prioritized remediation guidance.
• Compliance and policies services. Set policies and track adherence to compliance requirements across systems, regardless of where they run.
• Malware service. Detect malware in your systems, regardless of where they are deployed.
• Advisor service. Rapidly identify operational risks, as well as issues identified by Google Cloud, across large-scale environments and access prioritized remediation guidance.
• Deviation service. Identify configuration drift that can lead to performance, availability, security, and compliance issues.
• Patch service. Manage patching across all Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems in your environment.

Read the overview and learn how to use Red Hat Lightspeed in your Google Cloud environment.

Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Google Cloud gives you a compliance-focused foundation with security-focused infrastructure and intelligent security features for defending data and applications against threats and fraudulent activity. Built-in operating security features like live kernel patching, security profiles, security standards certification, and a trusted software supply chain help you meet demanding security and compliance expectations. Extensive testing of security profiles for all new versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Google Cloud ensures that they run as expected in hybrid and multicloud environments, and a modular package structure reduces your attack surface and protects your systems in the cloud. Default settings based on best practices configure your systems for increased cloud security from the start. Automated tools, regular updates and patch releases, and support expertise safeguard your environment. The Red Hat Lightspeed compliance service tracks your organization’s adherence to compliance requirements across your environments and provides remediation guidance to help you maintain compliance over time. An identity management tool is included so you can adopt zero trust architectures more easily.

Google Cloud publishes security best practices, including deployable blueprints and landing zones, guidelines for increasing cloud security, and recommended configurations and architectures. Google Cloud uses a zero trust model, providing single sign-on, access control policies, access proxies, and user- and device-based authentication and authorization to help you meet regulatory and policy objectives. Google Cloud also encrypts data in transit between datacenters and at rest so it can only be accessed by authorized roles and services.

Adopting a common platform—like Red Hat Enterprise Linux—for development, test, and production environments shortens the time to launch for new applications, and it reduces  incompatibility and other issues at launch. Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers access to reliable OS images in the cloud, as well as the toolchains, libraries, container tools, and runtimes for streamlining the path from development to production. Updates are delivered via application streams, allowing developers and IT architects to experiment with the latest tools, runtime languages, and databases while still maintaining earlier versions of production applications.

Red Hat also offers developer resources, programs, and subscriptions so organizations can develop on Red Hat Enterprise Linux more easily and cost-effectively:

• Red Hat Developer program
• Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals
• Red Hat Developer Subscription for Teams 

These programs can be used both in your datacenter and in your Google Cloud  environment.

Standardizing on a flexible, stable, and reliable OS across hybrid and multicloud environments can simplify your journey to the cloud. Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Google Cloud gives you a consistent, manageable, and security-focused foundation for getting the most value from your cloud investments.

Learn more about how Red Hat and Google Cloud collaborate strategically to support customers across a wide range of environments and workloads.