OpenStack is major theme of this week’s Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, with the open source stalwart revealing that several dozen organizations – including Harvard, MIT and network virtualization specialist Midokura – have adopted its distribution since launch. Surprisingly, however, the focus of the event is turning out to be containers, which provide a fast and lightweight alternative to traditional virtualization solutions at the expense of some advanced functionality.

Red Hat has long supported the technology through the Linux Container project, further committing to the movement last September by teaming up with dotCloud to integrate the latter’s open-source Docker tool into its flagship Linux distro (RHEL) and its OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) stack. The firms also said at the time they would repackage the solution for Fedora OS and add integration with the libvirt API to provide advanced networking capabilities.

A lot has changed since the partnership was signed. Red Hat introduced a dedicated certification program for containerized Linux applications and dotCloud changed its name to Docker in response to the accelerating adoption of the software, which it says has been downloaded more than one million times to date. The pair on Tuesday checked another box on their joint to-do list with the addition of “broad” Docker support to OpenShift that allows users to deploy containerized apps in the cloud without having to perform any under-the-hood tinkering.

A growing list of integration points

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The integration is complemented by a new OpenShift Origin project called GearD that utilizes container technology to allow for application mobility across bare-metal and virtualized environments, including private and public clouds. The initiative underscores Red Hat’s vision for hybrid interoperability and also extends its DevOps focus, according to OpenShift director of engineering Matt Hicks. The solution is designed with both developers and admins in mind, featuring a built-in linking framework that simplifies dependency management for composite applications consisting of multiple components (such as databases and load balancers) scattered across different containers. The project also provides tight integration with Git, a number of popular Linux management tools and last but not least, Docker.

To make things even simpler, Docker said that it will offer Red Hat customers developer support services as well as a “special starter program” that encompasses professional assessment, help with the installation process and training on how to use the tool in OpenShift and Enterprise Linux environments. Like the PaaS, the latest version of the operating system is built with containers in mind.

The release candidate (RC) for RHEL 7, which launched on Monday and will most likely emerge as the final product, packs out-of-the-box Docker compatibility and a host of other improvements over the previous edition, including support for file systems up to 500 terabytes in size and Active Directory integration. Red Hat is warming up to Linux arch-nemesis Microsoft as part of its hybrid cloud push, previously adding .NET and SQL Server to the list of available technologies on OpenShift.

On top of everything else, the beta program for RHEL 7 RC has been expanded to include Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic, a container host that combines the core components of the platform – including the systemd process manager and the SELinux security and encryption capabilities – with Docker. The integrated solution will be supported through the newly announced Project Atomic upstream community initiative.

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