Red Hat unveils Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform

Red Hat hasintroduced Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform, an integrated infrastructure platform designed to run, orchestrate and scale multi-container-based applications and services. This new offering is available through an early access program.

Based on the world’s leading enterprise Linux, Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform provides the foundation for production scale container deployments, utilizing the same core enabling technologies as Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise 3, including Docker as a Linux container format, and Kubernetes for container orchestration. With the addition of Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform, Red Hat will offer the world's most comprehensive integrated family of open source container-enabling platforms, from bare-metal Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to a scale out container orchestration platform, to full Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions – all utilizing the same core technologies, and enabling container-based applications to be fully portable across a hybrid cloud fabric.

Containers are quickly making inroads in today's enterprise environment, with 67 percent of respondents in a recent Red Hat-sponsored survey of global IT decision makers and professionals planning production roll-outs of container-based applications over the next two years. Such organizations are using containers to re-imagine the way that they deliver applications to increase efficiency, portability, scalability, and – ultimately – accelerate time-to-solution. As organizations move toward container implementations on both cloud-native services and traditional applications, they need a secure and reliable foundation upon which they can consistently run and orchestrate multi-container based applications at scale.

Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform will provide this foundation for executing multi-container applications. It is designed to enable organizations to orchestrate consistently across traditional and cloud-native applications and scale to meet changing business demands. Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform will offer:

• A managed, scale-out cluster of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host instances - Red Hat’s container-specific operating system built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, allowing for expansive deployments of container-based applications.
• The Docker container runtime and packaging format - to simplify the creation and deployment of Linux containers.
• Container orchestration with Kubernetes - which enables enterprises to deliver modern applications composed of multiple containers orchestrated automatically across a cluster of hosts, including software-defined networking and storage plugins.
• Enhanced container security - inherited from Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s military-grade security and the inclusion of powerful security tools like SELinux.
• Cluster-wide infrastructure services - including log aggregation and APIs for scaling applications and services.
• An easy on-ramp to full developer and application lifecycle management capabilities - through the adoption of OpenShift Enterprise 3, which includes Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform.

Commitment to Container Security and Certification
Security and certification of what’s inside the container continue to be of utmost importance to enterprises working with Linux containers, especially given that today more than 30 percent of verified container images available for public download are shown to contain known vulnerabilities, like Heartbleed and Shellshock. This is a concern that Red Hat addressed with the March launch of Red Hat container certification, a unique program for validating container contents and provenance, giving enterprise users confidence that their certified containers will work seamlessly and securely across all Red Hat platforms - including Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host, and now Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform, and OpenShift Enterprise 3.