Google deepens partnership with Red Hat, will support OpenShift Dedicated

Google and Red Hat today announced that they’re working together to bring the OpenShift Dedicated application deployment platform to the Google public cloud.

This collaboration between the two companies will be happening “in the coming months,” according to a statement. Storage and analytics services from the Google Cloud Platform infrastructure as a service (IaaS) will natively work with OpenShift Dedicated, the statement reads.

The two companies have worked together in the past. In 2014, Google started supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) — a flavor of Linux that’s popular among enterprises — on the Google Cloud Platform. And Red Hat was one of the first few companies to work on the Kubernetes open-source container-cluster management project that Google initiated.

Red Hat launched OpenShift Dedicated last month. It’s a tool that companies can use to build, deploy, and manage applications using Red Hat’s OpenShift platform as a service (PaaS), with support for Docker containers and Kubernetes — but it’s made to run on public clouds rather than on-premises data centers. Until now, it could only be deployed to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the biggest public cloud available today. Now the Google cloud will support it, as well.

And that’s important for Google in its competition with AWS, and also important for companies that trust Red Hat but want to have an option other than AWS. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Red Hat recently partnered to make RHEL “the preferred choice for enterprise Linux workloads” on the Azure cloud. Microsoft has not announced support for OpenShift Dedicated.

Beta testers can sign up here.