To grasp the current landscape of IT and Cloud technologies, let's focus on findings from the 2022 Flexera's State of the Cloud survey. According to this survey, 63% of organizations were running 25% of their workloads in the Cloud at the time of the study. These workloads are distributed across both public and private Cloud infrastructures. At the same time, organizations maintain on-premises systems while adopting a hybrid Cloud approach. Approximately 58% of respondents in the survey are actively pursuing a hybrid Cloud strategy, which involves running workloads on both on-premises servers and public Cloud platforms, sometimes across multiple public Cloud providers. Also, organizations are not just migrating existing applications and data to the public Cloud but are increasingly deploying new applications directly into these environments. According to the survey, there is an expected nearly 10% increase in respondents deploying new applications directly in the public Cloud over the next few years.
Standardizing on an operating system provides organizations with a consistent foundation for migrating their workloads, whether they choose to deploy them on-premises or in the Cloud. This approach enables them to handle tasks in a standardized way, reducing complexity in their environments.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is purpose-built to serve as a common platform for your workloads. It ensures consistent reliability, security, and manageability across all deployment environments, regardless of where you run it.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Microsoft Azure
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a reliable operating system designed for mission-critical workloads such as SAP HANA, with robust Java development capabilities on JBoss, facilitates streamlined automation through tools such as the Ansible Automation Platform. It also supports the deployment of Cloud-native applications through Azure and OpenShift. Microsoft Azure is the only Cloud provider offering Ansible, OpenShift, and JBoss as managed services, all billed through your Azure account. This integration results in a reduced administrative burden and a streamlined billing process.
RHEL Subscription
A RHEL subscription contains more than just a Linux kernel. It includes components such as service and support, security fixes, and compatibility with various hardware ecosystems. Also, RHEL subscriptions provide proactive analytics through insights, offering diagnostics, vulnerability management, and malware detection. Also, it includes compliance features and resource optimization tools to ensure you are using the appropriate instance types on your chosen Cloud providers. 80% of enterprises mention a lack of resources or expertise as a primary Cloud challenge. By leveraging RHEL on Microsoft Azure, you benefit from the support of Red Hat's award-winning support organization, working in coordination with Microsoft's support teams.
CentOS Linux
A few years ago, the CentOS Governing Board announced they had shifted their focus from CentOS Linux, a traditional Linux distribution, to CentOS Stream, which operates as a rolling distribution. CentOS Stream serves as the next minor release of RHEL, where software undergoes development and hardening from the Fedora community before becoming part of RHEL. This process ensures that the software in CentOS Stream is refined into a stable and enterprise-ready form.
Convert2RHEL
Convert2RHEL is a tool designed to convert RHEL-like systems such as CentOS Linux, Oracle Linux, and other distributions derived from RHEL into RHEL. This tool enables users to transform a CentOS Linux 7 system into a RHEL 7 system by running a migration script. This capability is crucial for third-party Linux migrations to RHEL, offering a straightforward process to ensure compatibility and continuity.
Built-in automation with RHEL System roles
RHEL system roles are Ansible roles designed to streamline repetitive tasks typically involved in setting up new systems. For example, if you need to deploy a large number of new systems and ensure consistent configurations across them, RHEL system roles provide a package of roles that make this process repeatable and efficient, whether for new or existing deployments.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Many people believe that Cloud automation is limited to the deployment and retirement of resources. However, customers reveal that Cloud automation contains much more. It involves orchestrating resources and operationalizing Cloud operations, ensuring connectivity and orchestration across systems. Also, it includes governance to ensure that Cloud activities are consistent, repeatable, and aligned with objectives.
When considering the values that the Ansible Automation Platform offers customers, the primary value it offers is increased speed. It significantly reduces the need for manual interventions, allowing organizations to accelerate project completion and clear backlogs of initiatives. By standardizing and codifying automation processes, the platform minimizes human error and builds consistency. This results in repeatable, scalable, and reliable operations across environments. Also, the Ansible Automation Platform leverages a common language, enhancing collaboration and efficiency across various domains.
The strength of Ansible lies not only in its capabilities, partnerships, and certified content across various domains but also in its ability to orchestrate across these domains. When deploying applications or services in the Cloud, connectivity to the broader IT ecosystem is essential. The Ansible Automation Platform serves as a common and consistent language that spans all these environments.
Cloud migration breakdown
From a migration perspective, customers are often migrating from on-premises to the public Cloud. They may also be moving between Cloud providers as their business needs evolve or the services they require shift. Also, some are migrating from traditional computing architectures to embrace a Cloud-native approach.
Ansible helps your organization through these stages, regardless of your maturity level. Whether you are starting with basic tasks like backup and restore, progressing to environment scanning and recreation, or adopting an infrastructure-as-code approach, Ansible facilitates migration and orchestration. It enables you to update systems of records within your environment throughout the process.
Ansible can help organizations adopt cloud native
Ansible offers robust capabilities and integrations, particularly in traditional and Cloud-native contexts like OpenShift. It plays a key role in orchestrating and automating tasks such as building container images, composing architectural components, and managing deployments across Cloud environments or regions. This capability simplifies connectivity to the services deployed within your Cloud environment.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure Marketplace
With Ansible, you can acquire Azure Marketplace as a managed application. The goal is to enable customers to achieve automation quickly, going from zero to automation in minutes. By deploying directly from the Marketplace portal, you can start managing your Azure environment and broader ecosystem immediately. This managed application is fully integrated, optimized, and installed within your Cloud, providing direct support. It's fully supported by Red Hat in collaboration with the Microsoft SRE team. Red Hat SREs works with Microsoft SREs to support the infrastructure in your Azure Cloud, managing the Ansible Automation Platform as a set of services. This solution is integrated into Microsoft Azure billing, providing a single bill for Ansible and the infrastructure, which counts towards your committed spend agreements. This offering is not limited to Ansible for the Azure environment, it includes the full Ansible Automation Platform subscription. This allows you to automate your private Cloud environment and data centre. If you are using Azure Arc, you can integrate Ansible to automate system resources. This includes handling network and security tasks, managing IT services, orchestrating service workflows, and conducting monitoring and analytics operations.
Azure Red Hat OpenShift
Managing a hybrid Cloud environment involves complexities, especially when resources are limited, hindering rapid application development and modernization. Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) addresses these challenges as an Azure-native, turnkey application platform. It enables customers to build and deploy clusters on demand. These clusters are monitored and managed jointly by Microsoft and Red Hat, providing an integrated support experience. At the core of ARO is Red Hat OpenShift, which provides a trusted Kubernetes platform. Red Hat improves this platform with productive features such as IDE runtimes, building pipelines, monitoring security and service mesh, and more. These features deliver a complete application platform fully integrated with all the components needed to build, deploy, and manage your containerized applications.
Benefits of ARO
Focus on innovation: As a managed offering, ARO relieves you from managing the infrastructure, enabling your teams to concentrate on other innovative projects.
Accelerate time to value: You will also accelerate time to value through developer tools and services provided by Azure and Red Hat.
Hybrid cloud flexibility: By delivering a consistent experience both on-premises and in the Cloud, it enables hybrid Cloud flexibility.
In this joint application platform, you will have access to integrated development tools from Azure and OpenShift, and you will receive a single invoice from Microsoft and Red Hat. Also, you can use your Microsoft Azure consumption commitment spend as well. ARO deployment is facilitated directly from the Azure portal. Red Hat prioritizes security, monitors CVEs, and proactively identifies updates and fixes to mitigate potential issues before they impact users. ARO users can leverage a wide range of compliance offerings available through Azure. They also receive joint support and engineering collaboration from both Microsoft and Red Hat. By submitting a single ticket for support between the two companies, users benefit from faster issue resolution processes.
A high-level overview of some of the tools available for developers.
Collaborating with Microsoft Azure and Red Hat enables you to maximize your return on investment. Both companies prioritize the performance and resilience of the products your organization relies on, ensuring high standards of service and support.
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Microsoft Ignite Sessions
