Announcing Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS

Serving millions of customers and providing cloud services for more than 15 years has taught us that one size does not fit all. AWS gives customers the most choice to run their containerized applications, and we are continuing that approach to provide Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), available in preview today. ROSA will provide a fully managed OpenShift service with integrated cluster creation, consumption-based billing model, single invoice through AWS, and joint support from AWS and Red Hat.

How Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS will work

Red Hat and AWS have collaborated to make it easy to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux on AWS since 2008, and we are expanding on that collaboration for Red Hat OpenShift on AWS. You can now acquire Red Hat OpenShift licensing through AWS, and then quickly deploy managed OpenShift clusters in your account. By working together, we’re now able to provide ROSA with a set of features for the best OpenShift experience on AWS. Let’s take a look:

AWS Console integration and streamlined OpenShift cluster creation
You can get started with the Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS through the AWS Management Console, and a new CLI and API to provision clusters in your account. Once created, you can manage your clusters through the familiar OpenShift Console, or with the OpenShift Cluster Manager.

Standard Red Hat OpenShift clusters consumption experience
In order to move quicker, customers find value in being able to leverage familiar skills and tooling. This new service will have the same, familiar OpenShift APIs, so you can lean on existing skills and tools for operating your clusters. Customers will continue to receive OpenShift updates with new feature releases and share a common source for alignment with OpenShift Container Platform. ROSA will support the same versions of OpenShift as Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated and OpenShift Container Platform to achieve version consistency everywhere. ROSA adds a new API for cluster creation to alleviate the burden of manually deploying the cluster in your existing VPC and account, without getting in the way of how you use it.

Out of the box integration with AWS infrastructure
Developers can easily deploy applications with dependencies on AWS services by leveraging the OpenShift Service Catalog and AWS Service Broker, an implementation of the Open Service Broker API. The AWS Service Broker provides an intermediate layer that allows users to deploy services using native manifests and the OpenShift Console. AWS Service Broker supports a subset of AWS services, including Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon EMR, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS).

Managed service experience provided by both AWS and Red Hat
We want to avoid customers going through multi-page manuals to stand up a production grade OpenShift cluster on AWS. Having their precious engineering resources spend cycles managing clusters for regular maintenance isn’t the best way to keep them busy. Those engineering resources could (and should) be used to create value to the business instead.

Consumption-based pricing with no upfront costs
Our customers tell us that a consumption based model is one of the main reasons, yet definitely not the only one, for which they moved to the cloud in the first place. Consumption based pricing allows them to experiment and fail fast, and customers have told us they want to align their Red Hat OpenShift licensing consumption with how they plan to operate in AWS. As a result we are providing an hourly, pay-as-you-go model and annual commitments for customers that are able to take advantage of up-front commitments.

Integrated AWS billing experience
While this is a service jointly managed and supported by Red Hat and AWS, you will only have to deal with a bill from a single vendor, AWS. Each AWS service supporting your cluster components and application requirements will be a separate billing line item just like it is currently, but now with the addition of your OpenShift subscription. For example, all the infrastructure related components (instances, load balancers, storage, etc) will be reported as standard AWS line items while the Red Hat OpenShift subscription will be listed with other AWS Marketplace subscriptions. We think this is positive news for our joint AWS and Red Hat customers because they can now have a unified single vendor experience for adoption and continue to build on their existing Red Hat relationship through AWS Marketplace Private Offers.

Looking forward

We are very excited to be working with Red Hat to bring you Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, and are looking forward to launching the service as GA in the near future. We have an exciting roadmap planned to provide deeper integration with AWS, make getting started easier, and a better permissions and authentication experience. We plan to enhance the getting started experience through the AWS Management Console by making it easy to create ROSA clusters, manage them, and streamline authentication later in 2021. In addition, we are exploring opportunities to improve the IAM permissions experience, integration with AWS EC2 Networking, Amazon Controllers for Kubernetes, and Amazon’s official Kubernetes networking and storage plugins for a more integrated experience.

If you are interested in what you read, you can fill out this form for early access and updates when we launch.