James Marcinek
Red Hat Architect
and Business Development Manager
Red Hat was founded in March of 1993. In the early days, Red Hat was primarily known as a Linux operating system and it was not well accepted by many companies. Even now, I recall one of my former CIOs saying he would never consider using Linux, even though the use of UNIX was starting to decline. Today, Red Hat is the premiere Linux distribution for enterprises around the world. Red Hat is a trusted leader in bringing innovation to customers using open-source technology with a portfolio that is used by over 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies.
Red Hat Subscription Model
Red Hat offers its products using a subscription model, having flexible options to meet consumption needs for everyone. Some subscriptions, like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are based upon the number of sockets for physical servers or the number of virtual machines. Another RHEL subscription option, at the hypervisor level, also by socket allows an unlimited number of virtual guests, allowing customers to decide the best choice for them. Other Red Hat subscriptions may be based on physical cores or capacity. In the case of Ansible Automation Platform, subscription is based on the number of managed nodes.
Red Hat Portfolio Summary
The cornerstone of Red Hat’s portfolio is still its flagship Enterprise Linux which is trusted by organizations around the world. There are several offerings to support common deployments:
- High Performance Computing
- SAP
- Distributed computing
- IBM POWER
- IBM System Z
Red Hat has several key emerging technologies like OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) and Ansible Automation Platform. Red Hat also has several middleware products:
- Red Hat JBoss is a platform for highly transactional, web-scale Java applications. JBoss includes everything needed to build, run, deploy, and manage Java applications across your organization.
- Red Hat Integration is an extensive body of integration and messaging technologies to bridge applications and data over hybrid infrastructures and bundles several products.
Red Hat’s software defined storage and cloud products help businesses work more efficiently and support growth:
- Red Hat Ceph storage is a highly scalable and easy to use software defined storage solution.
- Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundations (ODF) is built from Ceph and provides a place for permanent container data to reside.
- Red Hat OpenStack Platform is a cloud solution that provides virtualization and organizes resources into clouds, allowing organizations to manage and access what they need, when they need it.
Red Hat’s portfolio has something to offer to fit every organization in some capacity. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key Red Hat products.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
When it comes to an industry trusted operating system that’s always innovative, dependable, with outstanding support, RHEL has options to fit all customers’ needs. Red Hat continues to innovate and modernize their Enterprise Linux distribution. In May of 2022, RHEL 9 was released. With this latest version, operations and development teams have a hybrid-cloud platform that makes it easier to build and deploy cloud-native applications across the hybrid cloud. Included in RHEL 9.0 are tools which enable developers to continue to modernize applications, like the latest versions of:
- Python 3.9
- LLVM
- GCC 11
- Rust compiler
- G compiler
- Improved Image Building capabilities
Red Hat has also made improvements in security:
- Security logging
- OpenSCAP profiles
- OpenSSL 3
- Web console support for Smart Card Authentication
These features enable organizations to maintain and control their compliance. Red Hat didn’t stop there:
- Web console performance metrics
- Web console live kernel patching
- Link Time Optimization (LTO)
- Performance Co-Pilot (PCP)
- System roles for Postfix, High Availability and Firewall
Red Hat has also released Red Hat Satellite Server version 6.11 which helps organizations efficiently manage not only Red Hat software, but in-house and 3rd party software. This gives you the ability to publish and promote software using SDLC best practices. Included with RHEL is Red Hat Insight Analytics which pro-actively identifies security and performance issues. Smart Management subscriptions is offered as an add-on or bundled with the operating system subscription.
Ansible Automation Platform
I love using Ansible! It’s a great product and tool IT experts should be using. It helps to automate recurring tasks without having to create custom scripts. Having an automation background and having spent many hours creating custom scripts I wish this tool was around much earlier in my career! Some key take aways on Ansible:
- Powerful
- Easy to use and adopt
- Agentless
- Not just for Linux
- Easy to read (YAML)
Built upon the Ansible engine/core, Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) is designed to run playbooks written in YAML (Yet Another Markup Language). AAP enables end-to-end workflow automation, whether it’s for:
- Configuring network devices
- Deploying infrastructure
- Deploying applications
- Responding t
- security threats
- And more
I would say that Ansible can be used for everything! One of Ansible’s great features is its idempotency. This allows a playbook to be run many times with only the end state of the affected device to be changed. If the device is already in the desired state, the change isn’t made, so running a playbook multiple times, won’t adversely affect a system, with a well-built playbook!
Ansible is quick to adopt compared to other automation tools. Having experience using Puppet Enterprise, I can confidently say that Ansible is easier to learn and adopt. Once you learn Ansible, it will quickly become your go to method of automation! Compared to Puppet Enterprise Ansible is easier to learn and more importantly, easier to get others to adopt. Some of the environments where Ansible can be used:
- Linux
- Windows
- Network
- Storage
- Security
- IBM POWER
- IBM System Z
- Containers
- Cloud
The reality is there are Ansible use cases available for whatever your organization requires. There are probably existing certified Ansible roles or collections available to accomplish what you want, so why re-invent the wheel? Once automated with Ansible, customers can build and contain their intellectual property across silos into easily read playbooks. As time goes on these can be improved when your Ansible skills increase. If you haven’t considered using Ansible, ask the following questions:
- How is your organization keeping all the various configurations and scripts that sustain it?
- Are they in a unified format, easy to read, repeat and ready to employ?
- Is your documentation currently set in text files or word docs that you must copy and paste?
If there’s one thing to take away from this article, investigate using Ansible, it will make your life easier and improve your organization. If you’re not using Ansible, watch out, your competition is!
OpenShift Container Platform (OCP)
As more organizations start to modernize their business solutions to cloud based workloads, it’s important to use a solution that provides flexibility and choices. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) is leading the digital transformation of many organizations around the world, allowing you to run your container workload on:
- Physical Servers
- Virtual Machine
- Private Cloud
- Public Cloud
- Edge Cloud
The foundation of Red Hat OCP is based on Kubernetes and containers which orchestrates and packages software, making it portable. Red Hat OCP is more though. It adds features that are crucial to running workloads in production:
- Software Defined Networking (SDN)
- Registry
- Storage Plug-ins
- And more!
Red Hat OCP is built upon Core-OS giving customers the ability to run OCP on hardware that is best suited for the workload:
- x86_64
- IBM POWER
- IBM System Z
Red Hat has several offerings:
- Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Engine provides a subset of the features present in OpenShift Container Platform, built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS
- Kubernetes orchestration
- Kubernetes Cluster Services
- Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) provides an enterprise-ready Kubernetes environment for building, deploying, and managing container-based applications
- Platform services t
- manage workloads
- Applications services t
- build cloud native applications
- Developer services for productivity
- Data services for data-driven insights
- Red hat OpenShift Platform Plus
- Includes everything in OpenShift Container Platform AND
- Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes (ACM) for multi-cluster management
- Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes (ACS) for cluster security
- Red Hat Quay provides a global registry
- Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundations (ODF) for cluster data management
Whether you want to manage OCP or use cloud services from your cloud provider, Red Hat has options for all organizations. Whether you run container workloads in one cloud or across a multicloud environment, OCP isolates application developers and administrators from differences between these providers.
Summary
Red Hat and Mainline are partnered to deliver enterprise open-source software solutions that deliver efficiency, agility, and innovation to your business. Whether your workloads are legacy based or if your organization is well on its digital transformation journey, Red Hat has a trusted portfolio of open-source based products driving innovation for customers around the globe!
More Information
Mainline is a Red Hat Premier partner and a Red Hat Apex partner, the highest partner levels in Red Hat’s partner program. We deliver infrastructure software and automation solutions to enterprises across the United States and Puerto Rico. For more information on how Red Hat solutions can help accelerate your initiatives, contact your Mainline Account Executive directly or contact us here.
Learn more about Mainline’s partnership with Red Hat.
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