Red Hat and IBM announce a hybrid-cloud software marketplace

Sick of looking for programs to run on your Kubernetes-based hybrid cloud? Want to run AI/ML, Big Data, or just a conventional DBMS on Kubernetes without sweating the installation and maintenance details? Red Hat and its owner/partner IBM have a new one-stop-shop for you: Red Hat Marketplace.

Marketplace offers a broad selection of independent software vendors (ISVs) software. All these programs run on top of Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat’s Kubernetes distribution. These programs are not tied to the IBM Cloud. You can run them on any private or public cloud which supports OpenShift.

For now, there are over 50 business programs available on the Marketplace. These include AI/ML, Database, Monitoring, and Big Data. It includes software from ISVs such as Anchore, a container security and monitoring firm; MongoDB, the popular general-purpose DBMS, and StorageOS, which provides persistent storage for Kubernetes. More are coming shortly.

All these programs are, as you’d imagine, certified for Red Hat OpenShift and offered with commercial support. They’re also built on the open Kubernetes Operator Framework. This enables you to run them on OpenShift as if they were a cloud service. That means they come ready-made with capabilities such as automated install and upgrade, backup, failover, and recovery.

There’s also a private version of the Marketplace: Red Hat Marketplace Select. With this, besides having easy access to curated, pre-approved software, you can track your people’s usage and spending of all the software deployed across hybrid cloud environments.

If you want, you can use metering for all your Marketplace software. With this, you can see exactly how your staff is using the programs. With this information, you can minimize waste and address the financial risks associated with end-of-year software audits. As part of this, you get a greater choice of pricing models. For example, Red Hat Marketplace allows products to be offered with hourly pricing.

For users, Lars Herrmann, Red Hat’s senior director of Technology Partnerships, said in a statement, the Red Hat Marketplace software “is tested, certified, and supported on Red Hat OpenShift to enable built-in management logic and streamline implementation processes. This helps customers run faster with automated deployments while enjoying the improved scalability, security, and orchestration capabilities of Kubernetes-native infrastructure.”

It’s a convincing argument. Kubernetes is great for orchestration containers, but no one’s ever claimed it was easy to use. With OpenShift and these ready-to-run programs, companies can quickly get their applications up to speed on the cloud.

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