Linux for cloud computing

Businesses are increasingly adopting cloud computing—moving enterprise workloads into the cloud and increasing agility, improving innovation, and providing the elasticity to expand and contract resources as needed. 

Hybrid cloud environments, which combine some cloud infrastructure with some on-premise infrastructure, and multicloud environments, which combine multiple public clouds, both provide the benefits of public cloud resources while meeting specific workload, security, and compliance expectations on-premise. This makes the choice of a cloud operating system (OS) tremendously important.

A cloud-based OS—like a traditional operating system—manages the operation, execution, and processes of all cloud resources, including virtual machines (VMs) and virtual infrastructure, as well as hardware and software resources. 

Given the many variables involved, moving to the cloud is a complex undertaking. This is especially true when moving to hybrid and multicloud environments. New interactions and multiple integrations combine to make management more challenging. 

Once you’ve moved to the cloud a few important questions often arise: How do you keep everything connected and running? How do you make sure your preexisting on-premise infrastructure interacts smoothly with the new virtual components? How do you maintain oversight, visibility, and cybersecurity? Should you consider automation?And how on earth do you manage it all? Choosing the right OS plays a big role in answering these questions—and in the amount of complexity involved. 

With critical enterprise workloads being increasingly moved to the cloud, it’s important to have an OS that provides the capabilities and sets the permissions needed to assure optimum performance of your fundamentals and web applications, on demand in real time. As you adopt hybrid or multicloud environments—often using more than one public or private cloud service, as well as software-as-a-service (SaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions—consistency across platforms and providers is crucial.

What makes Linux ideal for cloud environments is its open source development model, which provides the flexibility and freedom to choose technologies—like Kubernetes and edge computing— that best meet organizations’ business goals. And because Linux is open source, it’s easier to avoid being locked into any specific vendor and therefore easier to adopt different infrastructure types and operating models.

Linux has a long history in cloud computing and virtualization, working within the open source community to create cloud systems and help them grow. Linux offers  everything for cloud workloads that it brings to traditional IT deployments. Today, thanks in great part to the flexibility that comes from being open source, Linux remains the operating system of choice in cloud environments.

For organizations that need enterprise features, there are many options. An enterprise Linux solution for cloud environments goes beyond the benefits of flexibility, helping them meet the critical needs of their organization’s applications and workloads. An enterprise Linux system provides:

• Open source innovation.
• Consistency across infrastructures, environments, and use cases.
• Container portability.
• Massive scalability.
• Continuous security.

Standardizing on an enterprise Linux solution reduces the complexity of cloud migration by providing consistency across platforms. Organizations can migrate workloads to any hybrid cloud environment, knowing that processes, practices, and skills that exist in an on-premise environment will also work in the cloud.

Something else to consider: Linux comes in different distributions (Linux distros), each with different benefits, subscription models, operational costs, support models, and integrations with existing infrastructure or third-party technologies. The Linux distribution an organization adopts in the cloud should optimize cloud operations while maximizing security, performance, scalability, manageability, and overall reliability.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has become the world's leading Linux operating system, providing consistency across all infrastructure footprints—from the datacenter to the cloud to the edge—and helping you easily manage all apps and workloads with a single tool. In more ways than one, Red Hat is Linux. We’re the second-largest contributor to the Linux kernel and have over 25 years of experience and expertise in the industry. 

For developers and devops working at the command line level, Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers quick and easy access to reliable OS images in the cloud as well as the toolchains, libraries, container tools, and runtimes needed to streamline the path from development to production in public, private, multicloud, and hybrid clouds.

Organizations of all sizes turn to Red Hat Enterprise Linux to manage their cloud environments because it provides an intelligent, stable, and security-focused foundation for agile business operations in the cloud. As the most deployed commercial Linux distribution in the public cloud, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is certified for use with all major cloud providers and cloud marketplaces, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud, as well as on hundreds of other public cloud and service providers, and thousands of other types of software and hardware. You can bring your own subscription, pay as you go, use cloud provider committed spend, and you can even work directly with Red Hat to build a custom plan tailored to your specific needs. For example, Red Hat and Microsoft work in close collaboration to help ensure solutions are optimized for cloud performance on Azure.

Our Red Hat cloud solutions aren’t just limited to our cloud products. Our OS, storage, and application services products are all engineered to support cloud computing. We want to help you get the most out of your investments today and safely invest in your applications for tomorrow—knowing they can all run anywhere.

Learn more and get started with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud.