HOW EDGE IS DIFFERENT FROM CLOUD AND NOT

As the dominant supplier of commercial-grade open source infrastructure software, Red Hat sets the pace and it is not a surprise that IBM was willing to shell out an incredible $34 billion to acquire the company. It is no surprise, then, that Red Hat has its eyes on the edge, that amorphous and potentially substantial collection of distributed computing systems that everyone is figuring out how to chase.To get a sense of what Red Hat thinks about the edge, we sat down with Joe Fernandes, vice president and general manager of core cloud platforms at what amounts to the future for IBM’s software business. Fernandes has been running Red Hat’s cloud business for nearly a decade, starting with CloudForms and moving through the evolution of OpenShift from a proprietary (but open source) platform to one that has become the main distribution of the Kubernetes cloud controller by enterprises. Meaning those who can’t or won’t roll their own open source software products.Joe Fernandes: For Red Hat, the edge is really an extension of our core strategy, which is open hybrid cloud and which is around providing a consistent operating environment for applications that extends from the datacenter across multiple public clouds and now out at the edge. Linux is definitely the foundation of that, and Linux for us is of course Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which we see running in all footprints.It is not just about trying to get into the core datacenter. It’s about trying to deal with the growing opportunity at the edge, and I think it’s not just important for Red Hat. Look at what Amazon is doing with Outposts, what Microsoft is doing with Azure Stack, and what and Google is doing with Anthos, trying to put out cloud appliances for on premises use. This hybrid cloud is as strategic for any of them as it is for any of us.