Today’s guest blog comes from Jim Totton, Vice President and General Manager, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat



Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host is now available as a technology preview on Google Compute Engine for customers participating in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic special interest group (SIG). The inaugural SIG is focused on application containers and encompasses the technologies that are required to create, deploy and manage application containers.



Google and Red Hat actively collaborate on container technologies, approaches and best practices. Both companies are committed to standards for container management, interoperability and orchestration. As a gateway to the open hybrid cloud, application containers enable new possibilities for customers and software providers, including application portability, deployment choice and hyperscale and resilient architectures - whether on-premise or in the cloud.



At Red Hat Summit in April, Red Hat announced our vision for Linux Containers and expanded the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 High Touch Beta program to include Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host – a secure, lightweight and minimal footprint operating system optimized to run Linux Containers. Moving forward, Red Hat will work closely with these participants, with assistance from Google, to support them as they explore application containers. This will help us both gather important requirements and feedback on use cases for these technologies and enable the hybrid cloud for our joint customers.



We also announced today that Red Hat and Google are collaborating to tackle the challenge of how to manage application containers at scale, across hundreds or thousands of hosts. Red Hat will be joining the Kubernetes community and actively contributing code. Earlier today on our blog, we wrote:




Red Hat is embracing the Google Kubernetes project and plans to work to enable it with container management capabilities in our products and offerings. This will enable Red Hat customers to take advantage of cluster management capabilities in Kubernetes, to orchestrate Docker containers across multiple hosts, running on-premise, on Google Cloud Platform or in other public or private clouds. As part of this collaboration, Red Hat will become core committers to the Kubernetes project. This supports Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud strategy that uses open source to enable application portability across on-premise datacenters, private clouds and public cloud environments.



Both Google and Red Hat recognize the importance of delivering containerized applications that are secure, supported and exhibit a chain of trust. Red Hat's Container Certification program, launched in March 2014, supports this commitment and is designed to help deliver containerized applications that “work as intended” to trusted destinations within the hybrid cloud for software partners and end-customers.



Follow the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Blog to stay informed about Red Hat’s work on technologies required to create, deploy, and manage application containers.



-Contributed by Jim Totton, Vice President and General Manager, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat