Red Hat has signed a strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to scale availability of Red Hat open source solutions in AWS Marketplace, building upon the two companies’ long-standing relationship.
Red Hat intends to help empower organisations with hybrid cloud platforms, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI), Red Hat OpenShift AI and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation, on AWS infrastructure to address critical business needs for application modernisation, virtual machine (VM) migration and artificial intelligence (AI) deployments.
As many organisations today face uncertainty and rising costs in the management of their virtual infrastructure, they are navigating significant migrations for VMs across complex IT landscapes. At the same time, organisations are increasingly prioritising AI to maintain differentiation and stay competitive. To help address these needs, Red Hat is providing a unified experience for customers to more easily migrate VMs and containerised workloads side-by-side to the cloud with greater consistency and scalability, while also providing the modern platforms and infrastructure to support next-generation AI workloads.
This effort includes bolstering support for Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, a fully managed turnkey application platform, to help customers more seamlessly use OpenShift Virtualisation in their AWS environments. This helps to streamline VM migrations and application modernisation initiatives, and includes support for Windows virtualised workloads on OpenShift Virtualisation via Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS. In addition, Red Hat OpenShift will run as a self-managed offering on AWS EC2 bare metal instances to offer customers greater flexibility in deploying virtualised and containerised workloads.
Red Hat OpenShift, with the inclusion of OpenShift Virtualisation and the migration toolkit for virtualisation, allows for easier migration of VMs. The solution is designed with the cloud in mind for full automation from day one deployments and includes auto-healing and reconciliation, applied to both containers and VM workloads. By running OpenShift Virtualisation on AWS EC2 bare metal instances, VM workloads can maintain similar levels of performance and redundancy while running on a more modern platform, allowing VMs and containers to interact directly with underlying hardware and infrastructure to minimise administrative overhead and eliminating the need for a traditional hypervisor layer.
Lastly, when migrating at scale, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform can work with the migration toolkit for virtualisation to reduce the time it takes for large migrations. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Service on AWS, available in AWS Marketplace, makes automation quicker and easier, allows migration at scale and automates day 2 operations for the VM workloads after migration.
As part of the collaboration, Red Hat is enhancing the availability of solutions such as RHEL AI and Red Hat OpenShift AI in AWS Marketplace, including “bring your own subscription” (BYOS) and private offers, supporting NVIDIA accelerated computing and software, including the validation of Nvidia AI Enterprise software platform and Nvidia NIM, a set of easy-to-use microservices designed for secure, reliable deployment of high-performance AI model inferencing. Red Hat has offerings for additional AI accelerators and GPUs from leading chip providers like AMD and Intel. This will help provide organisations with ready-made AI capabilities that can then more easily be scaled using Red Hat OpenShift AI on AWS, either self-managed or through the services’ built-in capabilities.
Stefanie Chiras, senior vice-president: partner ecosystem success at Red Hat, says: “The collaboration between Red Hat and AWS continues to be built on enabling customer choice, starting with where they can run their workloads across the hybrid cloud. Now, we’re extending this choice and flexibility to not just ‘where’ an organisation runs their applications, but also ‘how,’ from containers to virtual machines, all using the same platform. And, as AI becomes the next critical enterprise IT decision, we’re making optionality a reality in accelerated compute infrastructure, enabling customers to select the hardware accelerators that make the most sense for their unique hybrid cloud AI strategies and workloads.”
Chris Grusz, MD: technology partnerships at AWS, comments: “AWS and Red Hat share a common vision: empowering organisations to make strategic decisions today that will fuel innovation tomorrow. Our collaboration is focused on supporting customers throughout their cloud journeys, addressing both immediate infrastructure needs and future-facing technologies like AI. By combining Red Hat’s open source solutions with AWS’s unparalleled scale and support, we’re creating a powerful combination that streamlines application modernisation, facilitates seamless cloud migrations, and accelerates AI adoption. This synergy enables organisations to navigate the complexities of digital transformation more efficiently, ensuring they remain agile and competitive in an increasingly technology-driven landscape.”