Embracing multicloud container development platforms to drive cloud-native innovation

With the world increasingly becoming digital-first, organizations are aggressively moving towards the cloud—or clouds, to be precise. Modern IT teams often find themselves utilizing more than one cloud to solve a problem. In fact, leveraging a hybrid or multicloud strategy is becoming the new norm.

Given this, how can  an organization stand out from the competition? Through cloud-native innovation.

Red Hat’s perspective for going cloud-native

Red Hat focuses on cloud-native infrastructure and applications to embrace the advantages of the cloud computing delivery model. Technology needs are evolving rapidly, and a combination of factors such as the global pandemic, geopolitical friction and economic slowdown have led to an increasing need for advanced technologies. Businesses are slowly realizing that technology is not a differentiator anymore. It has become critical for enterprises to continue developing new features and products and maintain the "wow" factor for their customers. This is where the cloud plays a key role in building future-ready enterprises. It creates adaptive, creative and more resilient organizations. 

Quality application delivery generally relies on application development, infrastructure, IT processes, people and skills. This is why enterprises today need to embrace multicloud container development platforms to drive cloud-native innovation. 

Transitioning from cloud-first to cloud-native-first

The concept of cloud-native is fundamentally changing what we previously expected of “the cloud” while simultaneously driving enterprise modernization. Almost every organization across the world is going cloud-native in the new normal. Containers are critical to support dynamic internet workloads, especially in a world where much of the workforce is working remotely. Combined with microservices, low-code and DevOps, containers help accelerate personalized value delivery at scale. Serverless workflow helps hyperscale application development. The recognition of these technologies and their related benefits are driving cloud-native adoption worldwide. 

Cloud practice modernization

Organizations today are following a mix of approaches to go cloud-native. Some adopt a modernize-and-move approach, while others focus on shifting before modernizing. Regardless of the approach, organizations must modernize their cloud practice and embrace multicloud container development to achieve transformational outcomes from their cloud initiatives.

Working with Red Hat to adopt hybrid cloud

Red Hat has extensive experience working within the open hybrid cloud space to architect, develop and operate a hybrid mix of applications, delivering a truly flexible cloud experience and accelerated application delivery. Red Hat OpenShift is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform built for an open hybrid cloud strategy. It provides a more consistent application platform to manage hybrid cloud, multicloud and edge deployments. 

The top three challenges faced by enterprises that are attempting to go cloud-native are skills gaps, organizational structure and portability. Enterprises need to train their people to architect, develop and operate cloud-native apps. The organizational structure will need a revisit to enable the adaption of methods such as agile and DevOps. Finally, the most critical aspect is portability, which is the ability to port applications from on-premise environments to public clouds if the need arises. Enabling lift-and-shift and scalability is a very important aspect here. 

How OpenShift addresses these challenges

Red Hat OpenShift addresses multiple facets for successful container adoption. Working with Red Hat is a transformative journey that spans across organizational transformation, application onboarding, release engineering and platform engineering. Our approach is to align the business key performance indicators (KPIs) to IT strategy, hence the focus on building a minimum viable product (MVP) through an iterative process. This enables harnessing value at scale and it is essentially achieved through three stages—establishing a pilot, expanding the ecosystem based on the success of the pilot and finally, evolving the capabilities.

Red Hat’s approach is to play the roles of consultant, trainer and support person throughout this journey. The greatest benefit of this approach is that it is not a sudden shift to going cloud-native but a very systematic and modular journey with clearly defined milestones. This enables customers at varying stages of maturities to join this journey at any point. 

To discover the possibilities on this transformational journey, watch our on-demand webinar: Embracing Multi-Cloud Container Development Platforms to Drive Cloud-Native Innovation.