Red Hat Inc. has teamed up with the three biggest names in the cloud market on a new initiative to lower the entry barrier to Kubernetes.

The company, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC, on Thursday launched a Kubernetes-focused online marketplace called OperatorHub.io. It will offer a catalog of automation workflows meant to ease the task of running the technology at scale.

Kubernetes is the go-to framework for managing software containers, the basic building blocks of many modern application projects. Containers enable software to move seamlessly between different types of infrastructure, which simplifies development and can help lower costs. But tapping the technology’s benefits is often a challenge for enterprises because of the complexity of Kubernetes.

To take the hassle out of using the framework, a growing number of companies are adopting a technology called the Operator Framework. It’s an open-source toolkit that makes it possible to create workflows for automating the day-to-day tasks involved in running a Kubernetes application. But despite the widening industry interest, ready-made workflows have been hard to come by, which is what Red Hat hopes to tackle with OperatorHub.

“An important goal for Red Hat is to lower the barrier for bringing applications to Kubernetes,” Diane Mueller, Red Hat’s director of community development, wrote in a blog post. “We hope that the introduction of OperatorHub.io will further lower this barrier by making it easier for application owners to find the [Operators] that they are looking for.”

Beyond just aggregating Operators in one place, Red Hat’s goal with the marketplace is to establish a common set of quality and reliability standards for this part of the container ecosystem. OperatorHub will only feature workflows that check certain important boxes. Among others, Operators have to be built in accordance with the Operator Framework’s own specification and provide sufficient documentation for developers.

On launch, the marketplace features a dozen workflows from companies that include AWS, MongoDB Inc. and Red Hat itself. They’re designed to automate tasks such as setting up containerized databases and maintaining cloud-based Kubernetes deployments.

“With the introduction of OperatorHub.io, we look forward to continuing to work across the industry in enabling the creation of more Operators as well as the evolution of existing Operators,” Mueller wrote.

Photo: Leonid Mamchenkov/Flickr