RedHat Atomic Platform

At last week's, the Red Hat Summit in Boston Massachusetts. One of the keys to the summit outside of Cloud Base which is the combination of OpenShift, OpenStack and Management  and the announcement of the Atomic Host component. It's ironic that is coming on top of DockerCon and the Open Container Project. Red Hat had introduced the atomic platform to the enterprise in early March.

Combining containers with Cloud Base especially OpenShift brings a whole new paradigm to the industry. The key of the Atomic Host is that it will mitigate a lot of concerns that enterprises have about using containers. In talking to major customers who want to enter into this market, they are relieved that Red Hat has committed to a complete and integrated container base infrastructure solution. The key to this release is addressing the security concerns, management concerns, and ongoing product enhancements that are upstream from the container community. The enterprise life cycle is going to be critical to Atomic being accepted in a hybrid cloud.

In downloading, and using the Red Hat Enterprise ready container and already having worked with Docker. There were several key takeaways. The first it is very obvious that Red Hat took into account of reducing overhead and simplifying maintenance. It was built from RHEL 7. It was clear that Red Hat puts security at the top of the priority list for containers. In my observation, it addressed lifecycle concerns by enabling automated security updates in a container. It uses technology that goes beyond Heart Bleed, Shellshock and Ghost. It contains tools that addressed security and reliability.

I was delighted to see that their implementation included an image management mechanism that allowed contain a rollback. The images are in Docker format. It allows Kubernetes to create a business application using discrete services across clusters of RHEL 7 hosts. Through SELinux C groups and name spaces, it enabled the isolation of each container and a multi-container environment.

What was extremely exciting as this will transform application delivery with containers. Application portability will enable Atomic to be deployed in a VMware, Microsoft, and Amazon and Google platforms. This is the future of applications.