Enterprises using Red Hat’s OpenShift Dedicated managed container application platform technology will soon be able to build and host their applications on Google’s Cloud Platform.
The two companies last week announced a deepening of their existing relationship under which they will work together to integrate OpenShift Dedicated with Google’s Cloud Platform services.
The effort will involve tying Google’s big data, storage and cloud analytics services with OpenShift Dedicated. The goal is to give Red Hat customers access to the full capabilities of Google’s cloud services natively, Martin Buhr, product manager of Google Cloud Platform, wrote in a blog post announcing the expanded relationship between the two companies.
Over the short-term, the integration will provide enterprises using OpenShift Dedicated with access to Google’s Kubernetes container orchestration technology. Eventually, the integration will yield other benefits as well, Buhr said.
Among them are improved security and lifecycle services so developers and partners can build and implement microservices-based applications in more efficient ways. The integration of the two environments should also enable some of the dynamic scheduling capabilities of containers that enterprises are looking for to manage changing workloads, Buhr noted. In addition, integrating Google Cloud Platform with OpenShift Dedicated will enable hybrid deployments and better application portability across the two environments.
“Both Google and Red Hat have been hearing a consistent story from enterprise customers, who’ve told us that they plan to move containers from experimental projects to supporting production workloads,” Buhr said. “We’ve heard these requests and believe the combination of Google Cloud Platform and Kubernetes plus Red Hat OpenShift will help.”
The latest development builds on an existing relationship between Google and Red Hat in the cloud computing space. In 2014, the two companies announced a partnership to enable organizations with on-premise Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions to move to the Google Compute Engine cloud hosted environment. Google has also been on what Red Hat describes as its Certified Cloud Provider program since November 2013.
The partnership with Red Hat also continues an effort by Google to broaden the appeal of its cloud platform for enterprises looking to host emerging container application environments in the cloud.
The company for instance, has tried to tap into some of the explosive interest in Docker’s container technology. Last January, Google announced beta availability of a new Container Registry service designed to let developers build and host Docker containers on Cloud Platform. In June, the company followed up with the beta launch of a Container Engine aimed at helping DevOps teams more easily implement and manage container applications on Google cloud.
In addition to its support for Docker, Google also supports an initiative known as the Open Container Project, an effort to develop an industry-wide container technology standard. As part of the effort, Google is working with Docker, CoreOS, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon and several others to develop a container image and runtime standard.