What Red Hat Revealed About Cloud‑Native Development and Hybrid Cloud at Forum 2018

Cloud Native Application Development

Cloud‑native refers to a set of application patterns that enable enterprises to deliver software quickly, continuously, reliably, and at scale. It combines micro‑service architecture, DevOps practices, and container‑based agile infrastructure. Red Hat defines three core characteristics:

Containerized packaging: Applications run inside containers, providing isolation, reuse of code and components, and simplified maintenance.

Dynamic management: Centralized orchestration schedules and manages workloads dynamically.

Micro‑service orientation: Services are clearly defined, decoupled, and communicate through well‑defined APIs.

Red Hat compares traditional and cloud‑native applications and outlines eight practical steps for cloud‑native development:

Foster a DevOps and open‑source culture with clear guidelines.

Accelerate modernization by migrating existing applications to container platforms, using APIs to expose legacy components and replacing them incrementally via routing solutions such as OpenShift, 3scale, or Istio.

Adopt an application service catalog optimized for cloud and containers to speed development.

Select appropriate tools and frameworks for each task across multiple runtime environments.

Provide self‑service, on‑demand infrastructure that gives developers access while maintaining IT operational control and visibility.

Leverage enterprise‑wide IT automation to accelerate delivery.

Implement CI/CD pipelines and advanced deployment techniques to reduce risk and enable updates without extensive operations effort.

Design highly modular, micro‑service‑based architectures and explore alternative patterns.

Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

In an era where multi‑cloud, hybrid‑cloud, and public‑cloud coexist, Red Hat discusses migration, deployment, and business innovation on the cloud, asserting that cloud computing is the foundation of the digital economy.

What Is a Hybrid Cloud Platform?

A modern platform that unifies private‑cloud and public‑cloud infrastructures, allowing management of all environments, sharing resources such as storage and networking, and providing container orchestration while adhering to open, industry‑standard APIs.

Ensure certification support for standard operating environments and both public and private application platforms.

Consider data storage, backup, recovery options, and private‑cloud infrastructure.

Align migration with corporate security policies and regulatory requirements.

Seek or build a unified management solution that spans chosen public cloud providers and private‑cloud platforms.

What Is Private Cloud?

Brings all data‑center resources under control, offering automation and infrastructure similar to public cloud.

Defines permissions based on privacy settings and management responsibilities.

Provides on‑demand scaling of IT resources to meet user demand, covering compute, storage, and networking.

Standardizes multiple business units on a single IT foundation for modern web‑scale applications and containers.

What Is a Container?

Containers are lightweight, single‑process executable packages built on Linux or Windows that isolate applications and their dependencies from the host OS, enabling portable, flexible environments across clouds while embedding security throughout the application lifecycle.

Why Run Containers in the Cloud?

Support modern development methods such as DevOps and micro‑services.

Provide a consistent standard operating environment across various Linux distributions.

Achieve portability by decoupling applications from underlying infrastructure.

OpenShift Container Platform

OpenShift is an enterprise container application platform built on Docker and Kubernetes. It enables rapid, easy deployment of applications on any architecture—public or private cloud—through standardized templates, reducing business impact and improving return on investment.

Integration with AWS allows OpenShift to consume 18 AWS services via a centralized Service Catalog, guiding users through service creation workflows.

NetApp Hybrid Cloud

NetApp HCI delivers fully decoupled performance and capacity, providing independent control, application‑level QoS, and second‑level changes. It reduces costs, adds capacity, and reinvests savings into multi‑cloud management, automation, or containers.

Started in December 2016; latest version v18.10 (Kubernetes 1.8/OpenShift 3.8).

Native container‑platform integrated persistent storage service.

Supports the full range of NetApp enterprise storage products.

Extends functionality for additional enterprise‑grade storage features.

Red Hat Infrastructure Migration Solution

The migration solution lowers costs, increases capacity, and leverages containers to redirect saved funds into multi‑cloud management, automation, or further container adoption. Customers typically achieve 40‑50% cost savings within three years.

For detailed technical material, refer to the Red Hat Forum 2018 documentation.