Red Hat Launches an OpenShift-Based Marketplace to Aid Multicloud Portability
Red Hat’s Marketplace has opened for business, allowing organizations a wide choice range of vetted software and platform choices for multicloud environments, according to the company.
While ostensibly built to facilitate organizations’ growth paths as they change or add new applications and platforms to manage on multicloud environments, Marketplace, in many ways, is similar to Apple’s App Store, as customers adopt the vendor’s platform while benefiting from a filter that helps to ensure software quality.
With Marketplace, customers use OpenShift as a gateway to access what Red Hat describes as a large selection — totaling 60 — of curated and pre-approved software products. Red Hat says it certifies all software available on Marketplace to run on Red Hat OpenShift, while providing and offering commercial support. Built on the open Kubernetes Operator Framework and an IBM-supported and managed infrastructure, commercial support for automated installations, upgrades, backup and storage and disaster recovery services is provided, Red Hat said.
Organizations that choose to adopt Marketplace Select are able to, among other options, to track software usage and spending among separate tenants or organizational departments across all cloud environments running under the OpenShift umbrella, including multicloud and hybrid cloud environments.
The project was largely created to future-proof DevOps’ teams investments in cloud native platforms running with OpenShift. While organizations have often shifted to public cloud services in order to, among other things, to boost the cadences of software development and deployments, cross-compatibility between platforms would often pose a problem as organizations expanded their multicloud operations, often across different geographical locations.
“DevOps teams turned to public cloud for speed. Cloud-managed services and pay-as-you-go pricing helped them get from pilot to production faster,” Jeoff Wilks, director of product management for Red Hat Marketplace, told The New Stack. “Now suppose the company is expanding globally — the app built for Amazon Web Services (AWS) now needs to run on Alibaba. Suddenly they’re in a world of hurt because the services they depend on aren’t portable.”
The capabilities one cloud provider might offer can often thus create issues in the future when seeking to extend platforms and applications across multicloud environments. “All the upfront convenience created downstream liabilities. Or suppose they built a DevOps architecture on Azure and then the business acquired a company that runs on AWS,” Wilks said. “They optimized for one cloud provider, and complex global business simply doesn’t behave that way.”
The main problem Marketplace helps DevOps teams solve involves challenges associated with portability, Wilks said. The Kubernetes operator framework managed from Marketplace and under OpenShift allows software vendors, for example, to offer products with built-in management logic including automated deployment, upgrades, backup and failure recovery and scaling already included, Wilks said.
“Operators are fit into CI/CD integration pipelines and manage themselves, just like DevOps teams have come to expect from SaaS services — but are portable across clouds,” Wilks said. “Red Hat Marketplace adds a growing ecosystem of portable, managed software certified for OpenShift, with usage-based pricing and cost visibility, and one starting point for support across vendors. So now, DevOps can move fast and not break things later.”
The current list of containerized software products on offer under Marketplace cover 12 categories, including AI/ML, database, monitoring, security, storage and developer tools, from Anchore, Cockroach Labs, CognitiveScale, Couchbase, Dynatrace, KubeMQ, MemSQL, MongoDB and StorageOS.
Amazon Web Services, Dynatrace and Red Hat are sponsors of The New Stack.
Feature image from Pixabay.
