Alibaba Cloud to offer Red Hat open source
Fri 13 Oct 2017
Alibaba Cloud has joined the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider Program, the tech giant has announced. Through the partnership, Alibaba cloud will offer Red Hat open source solutions to Alibaba’s global customer base.
Red Hat open source solutions will be available to Alibaba Cloud customers in the coming months, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux offered as a pay-as-you-go model in the Alibaba Cloud marketplace.
In order to join the Red Hat Certified Provider Program, Alibaba had to meet testing and certification requirements validated by the team at Red Hat to confirm that the environment would meet the needs of their customers for scalable and reliable infrastructure deployments at a consistently high standard.
Through Alibaba, China’s largest public cloud service provider, Red Hat open source cloud solutions will be available to a wider audience than ever before. Red Hat will also offer Red Hat Cloud Access to customers wishing to move unused Red Hat subscriptions from their on-premises data center to an Alibaba account. Using Red Hat Cloud Access, customers can maintain service and support throughout an Alibaba or hybrid cloud deployment.
Mike Ferris, Vice President of Technical Business Development and Business Architecture at Red Hat believes that partnering with Alibaba will help to provide Red Hat customers with greater flexibility and more choice in infrastructure design. “Our customers not only want greater performance, flexibility, security and portability for their cloud initiatives; they also want the freedom of choice for their heterogeneous infrastructures. They want to be able to deploy their technologies of choice on their scalable infrastructure of choice,” he said.
“By working with Alibaba Cloud, we’re helping to bring more choice and flexibility to customers as they deploy Red Hat’s open source solutions across their cloud environments.”
Alibaba is not only the leader in the Chinese cloud market, it is a growing presence in the global market as well. In August, the company announced that it had over one million cloud customers, generating $359 million in revenue for that quarter alone. While still behind market leader Amazon and second-place Microsoft, at 2.9% of the global cloud market, Alibaba is gaining on third-place Google, which currently holds 5.9% market share.
