At Red Hat Summit 2018, I had the pleasure of working with Scott Guthrie to demonstrate the new managed OpenShift on Azure that we were building into the Azure platform in partnership with Red Hat. Here at Red Hat Summit 2019, I’m thrilled to announce that the fruits of this collaboration have reached general availability. This means that enterprises can use OpenShift for their most critical production workloads and know that both Red Hat and Microsoft are standing behind the service to ensure your success.
The strength of this partnership has been built on the foundation of our work to develop joint support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Our learning and growth from that work has demonstrated the unique customer value that we can deliver to enterprises when we work together. It’s a clear demonstration of the power of open source to enable our customers to achieve more. When you are running on Azure Red Hat OpenShift, whether you need support for the OpenShift components on the cluster or the underlying infrastructure, you can have the confidence that you are working with a single, integrated support team composed of Red Hat and Microsoft experts collaborating to understand and accelerate a successful digital transformation of your business. Likewise, you can operate with the confidence that—from the hardware to the software—the service is operating in a robust and compliant manner that ensures the security and privacy of both your corporate and user data.
Azure Red Hat OpenShift: A refresh
If you missed the announcement at Summit last year, Azure Red Hat OpenShift is a fully managed implementation of Red Hat OpenShift deeply integrated into the Azure control plane. This means that you can create clusters in the Azure portal, via the Azure command line tools, or even your own custom code via programming languages SDKs. This also makes integrating cluster creation, scaling, upgrading, and deleting into your existing tools and CI/CD pipelines seamless and easy.
Azure Red Hat OpenShift is a one-of-a-kind solution in the public cloud, offering the best of OpenShift with pro-active 24/7 management and support from both Microsoft and Red Hat. With the general availability of the service, it’s a great time to see how the combination of Microsoft and Red Hat working together can make enterprise software development more agile and reliable, while still living within the confines of enterprise software requirements.
Easy management and integration
Because this is a fully managed service, there are no VMs for you to manage. Patching, upgrading, repair, and disaster recovery are all handled for you as part of the service. This management leaves your application DevOps teams free to focus on operating your applications and not the underlying infrastructure. Likewise, core security technologies like Azure Active Directory are automatically integrated into the OpenShift’s Kubernetes-based control plane so that all the enterprise policies around two-factor access, geo-location, and more automatically apply to people deploying and managing software in your cluster.
Finally, because we understand that cloud native is a journey, Azure Red Hat OpenShift easily integrates with existing virtual networks so that you can achieve connectivity to VM-based infrastructure that hasn’t moved to containers, Azure services that support Virtual Network Service Endpoints, or even via ExpressRoute and VPN to databases and services that are running on-premise.
What’s next
But, just like cloud native and Kubernetes, Azure Red Hat OpenShift is a journey, not a destination. As we look past the General Availability of the service, our teams are actively working to add support for more capabilities like private clusters, bringing your own key (BYOK) for encryption at rest, certificate rotation, Windows Server containers integration, and more. Please provide feedback on UserVoice.
If all of this seems awesome (and it is!) please:
- Head over to our documentation and frequently asked questions for step-by-step tutorials on how to create and manage an Azure Red Hat OpenShift cluster
- Head over to the Azure Red Hat OpenShift pricing page for detailed pricing information including support for Azure Reservations to save money