Accelerate innovation with Red Hat on Azure- Latest Announcements from Red Hat Summit 2023

Microsoft continues to strengthen its partnership with Red Hat as a “platinum” sponsor at Red Hat Summit to engage customers on future proofing their businesses with more license flexibility, closer joint engineering, and better joint support. Jeremy Winter, Corporate Vice President, Azure Cloud Native from Microsoft will deliver the keynote on Day 1 on the topic of ‘Innovation doesn’t rely on your IT budget’. This will showcase Microsoft’s advancements in open innovation and how the Red Hat on Azure product portfolio helps businesses innovate without significant investment.

The Microsoft and Red Hat partnership has made great strides to make customers’ journey to the cloud frictionless. Flexible licensing options let customers switch seamlessly between license schemes like Pay As You Go (PAYG), Bring Your Own Subscription (BYOS), private offers and prepay plans (Reserved Instances, Spot Virtual Machines etc.). Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux lets you bring your Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) subscriptions directly to Azure providing seamless license mobility between on-prem and the public cloud. The Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) program allows enterprise customers to decrement their Azure spend commitment by purchasing approved third-party software and services through a transacted listing in Azure Marketplace. Similarly, the joint solutions also satisfy customers’ Red Hat Hybrid Committed Spend (HCS).

The partnership has also grown closer in how we engineer products. All Red Hat products on Azure are now developed by joint teams - engineers and product managers from both companies, working together to make sure the Red Hat experience on Azure is amazing. The support teams from both companies now work together in a single tracking system, so customers can reach out to either company and receive the same best-in-class support experience.

Microsoft Azure and Red Hat: The Enterprise Cloud and The Enterprise Linux

We’ve made it even easier to manage your workloads on Azure, on prem, or any combination of environments with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure, now available on the Azure marketplace. Customers are already blending Ansible automation and governance with Azure Arc, for “the best of both worlds” to get the capabilities of Azure on prem, the manageability of Ansible in the cloud, and enterprise-grade monitoring and security of both the products.

At Red Hat Summit, we’re announcing multiple enhancements to the Red Hat offerings on Azure for customers to leverage best-in-class enterprise open source with the power of the cloud.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.8 and 9.2 are already available and fully supported on Azure. Joint engineering between Microsoft and Red Hat doesn’t just ensure that RHEL runs smoothly on Azure. It also backs our commitment that the latest-and-greatest versions are available on Azure within a week of release. New versions receive the same best-in-class joint support experience from day one.
• SQL server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux is compatible with the latest version of RHEL 8 (RHEL 8.8) with support for RHEL 9 with SQL Server 2022 coming soon. SQL server on RHEL provides a fast, reliable, and security-focused operating environment. You can immediately get started with pre-installed SQL Server 2022 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 using the Azure Marketplace images for-production workloads. Microsoft SQL Server has been supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux since 2017, and together the solutions like the SQL Server system role, SQL Server database best practices available through Red Hat Insights and many more such solutions make a relational database management system that provides a scalable foundation and a consistent application experience across bare-metal, virtual machine, container, and hybrid cloud environments. Staying current on the latest versions not only provides extra security and alignment with the newest trends, but data managers can reap the benefits of faster performance for varying workloads 
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP 9.0 is available on Azure. The new capabilities in RHEL are dedicated to helping organizations attack the complexity of the hybrid cloud, with features that deliver a more repeatable, scalable, easy to manage Linux estate that mission-critical SAP workloads require. RHEL 9.0 provides enhancements that make the life of a system administrator so much easier with our system roles. Several of these roles are specific to SAP and they automate the preparation of the OS applying SAP’s recommendations and the deployment of the SAP workloads.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux with High Availability is back as a release priority on Azure after more than a year (we heard you and brought it back!). Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with High availability is a scalable, high-performance, enterprise operating system for secure and highly available compute clusters. RHEL with HA for Azure is the combination of Azure’s compute with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat’s High availability software, and it is now a part of every new RHEL version released on Azure.
• The new Azure Community Gallery is launching with Fedora and CentOS stream! Community Gallery is a way for open source and other non-commercial projects to release on Azure, with open source-compatible license terms and community-friendly tooling. The “Community gallery” feature is already in preview and will GA shortly with your favorite Red Hat community distros as launch partners. It will enable open-source publishers and customers to share non-commercial images and/or software packages to the customers in Azure community. First party publishers such as Red Hat will be able to publish their daily builds to quickly test and get feedback.
• Microsoft is announcing that Azure AMD-based confidential virtual machines can now use a RHEL 9.2 Tech Preview image as the guest operating system (OS) for their AMD-based confidential VMs. This ensures that any sensitive data processed by their RHEL guest OS is encrypted both in use and in memory. Azure AMD-based confidential VMs provide a strong, hardware-enforced boundary that hardens the protection of the guest OS against host operator access and other Azure tenants. These VMs are designed to ensure that data in use in memory is protected from unauthorized users using encryption keys generated by the underlying chipset and inaccessible to Azure operators.

List of confidential VMs on Azure supporting RHEL 9.2

• Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) on Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) is now available on the Azure Marketplace. JBoss EAP is an industry-leading application server that powers some of the most mission-critical workloads in the world. ARO is a fully managed OpenShift service, jointly developed, run, and supported by Microsoft and Red Hat. The combination of ARO with JBoss EAP offers a powerful and flexible platform for enterprise Java customers on Azure. JBoss on ARO solution makes it easier to move JBoss EAP workloads to ARO by automating common boilerplate provisioning tasks.
• Microsoft Azure Container Storage, now in preview is a new and unique volume management service built natively for containers. It provides a consistent experience across different types of storage offerings, including Azure Disk Storage, Azure Elastic SAN, and ephemeral disks —such as NVMe drives on virtual machines. With Azure Container Storage, developers can deploy and manage storage as code through Kubernetes APIs, simplifying the process of deploying persistent volumes and reducing the time and effort required to set up storage infrastructure. The solution is optimized to enhance the performance of stateful workloads on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) clusters by accelerating the deployment of stateful containers with persistent volumes and improving quality with reduced pod failover time through fast attach/detach. Additionally, by efficiently deploying and managing persistent volumes on backend storage options, customers can reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with container storage.
• Azure Arm-based VMs enable users to deploy cloud native applications with exceptional price performance, such as Amadeus has done for their applications using OpenShift.  The VMs unlock new potential in performance scalability and cost reduction. Amadeus has leveraged Azure Arm-based VMs deployed on OpenShift to transform their on-premise infrastructure to cloud native, increasing flexibility and reducing cost for throughput-oriented applications with minimal application refactoring efforts.

Learn more

Visit the Microsoft Red Hat on Azure page to learn more about our offerings and join us at our booth #222 at Red Hat Summit 2023!