Red Hat and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

The announcement today from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), including formalized governance and new investments, marks a key moment in the continued evolution of modern application development and deployment. The CNCF launches with a goal of promoting the development of cloud native applications that are container-packaged, dynamically scheduled and microservices-oriented.

Red Hat believes that containers have the power to transform both cloud native and traditional, "mode 1" applications. Red Hat has a long history of contribution to Linux containers technology and supporting these technologies in our products. Today’s announcement is just the latest milestone on a journey that started more than two and half years ago, to drive new container standards and help customers use standard container-based packaging and automation to accelerate application delivery.

In early 2013, Red Hat was one of the first companies to recognize the potential of Docker to transform application packaging and delivery. We officially embraced the Docker project later that year and announced our plans to bring this technology to enterprise customers. We brought this technology to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and also to a new container-optimized, enterprise Linux distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host.

Red Hat likewise saw tremendous potential in Kubernetes to automate the orchestration, scheduling and management of container-packaged applications at Web scale. We joined Google in the Kubernetes launch in June 2014 and have contributed significantly to this ever since. We are excited to see the CNCF take on governance of the Kubernetes project and look forward to continue being part of this ecosystem.

Today we see a number of key technology trends converging and driving many of the conversations we are having with our customers. We speak to many customers who are building out new microservices-based application architectures, as they evolve from existing monolithic and n-tier applications. They see that containers provide a more efficient way to package and deploy these microservices components and container application platforms as a better way to manage them at scale. We therefore see tremendous synergy between the microservices and containers trends.

Many organizations are also looking to evolve their development and deployment processes, shifting from traditional waterfall development and agile methods to DevOps. While DevOps is first and foremost a cultural transformation of people and process, containers and immutable image-based deployments are being viewed by many as a key enabler for DevOps and continuous delivery.

Cloud computing is ultimately one of the biggest trends impacting customers, as they increasingly look to move application workloads to the public cloud and build out their own private cloud environments. Hybrid cloud is the reality for many of our customers who increasingly want the flexibility to deploy their applications wherever they choose to run them, which include physical, virtual, private and public cloud environments. The ability to containerize application workloads and enable portability across all of these infrastructure footprints is one of the most exciting characteristics of containers.

Containers are at the heart of each of these trends, technologies like Docker and Kubernetes are key enablers, and we are excited that the CNCF is helping to pave the path forward. Red Hat is delivering these technologies today in fully supported, enterprise-grade solutions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Atomic, OpenShift and more. With our relentless focus on driving open source innovation, leading with our upstream contributions and delivering trusted solutions to enterprise customers, Red Hat plans to be there every step of the way.