Red Hat’s CIO On COVID-19, Cloud And Being A Big Red Hat Customer

‘When there’s a shock to the system, it really serves as a leveling mechanism to how people operate,’ Red Hat CIO Mike Kelly tells CRN.

Red Hat CIO On Maintaining IT Operations Through Crisis

Large technology companies like Red Hat weren’t exempt from the unprecedented IT challenges brought on by the coronavirus crisis.

But the open source software giant, a subsidiary of IBM, was well-prepared to cope with the pandemic’s disruptions thanks to a preexisting work-from-home culture, a longstanding hybrid approach to infrastructure, adoption of multiple public clouds, and an agile development environment built on its own OpenShift Kubernetes platform.

“When there’s a shock to the system, it really serves as a leveling mechanism to how people operate,” Red Hat CIO Mike Kelly explained to CRN.

Red Hat took that shock in stride—not needing to change much to maintain IT operations.

The ease with which Red Hat adjusted to the challenges of the outbreak can serve as a lesson to companies that had delayed their digital transformations.

“I don’t envy those folks,” Kelly told CRN.

Remote Work Is Old Hat

Red Hat embraced a work-from-home strategy long ago, not to endure a black swan event like a pandemic, but simply to tap into a larger pool of talent, Kelly told CRN.

The IBM subsidiary headquartered in Raleigh, N.C. looks to hire qualified candidates from every geography, even if they aren’t in reach of its 65 offices around the world.

In an industry fiercely competing to recruit highly skilled professionals, work-from-home is “about meeting the talent where they are,” Kelly said.

To make that distributed workforce work effectively, Red Hat has adopted products like Google G Suite and BlueJeans video conferencing, as well as implemented methods for imaging and distributing devices to its remote employees, Kelly told CRN.

When the pandemic forced the company to shift all non-essential operations to remote work, “we didn’t have to do much,” Kelly said.

Hybrid Inside and Out

Red Hat is a leader in developing hybrid cloud technologies that deliver portability and agility to large enterprise customers. Internally, Red Hat’s IT team is also a big believer in the hybrid approach to cloud adoption.

The pandemic no-one anticipated “legitimized our strategy that cloud, in particular hybrid cloud, is a really important thing to operate your business,” Kelly said.

To deploy that model, Red Hat eats its own proverbial dogfood, using the OpenShift Kubernetes platform to span multiple public clouds and private data centers.

OpenShift gives CIOs like himself “the ultimate in flexibility,” Kelly said, for leveraging the diverse capabilities and resources offered by cloud providers.

“OpenShift allows me to take advantage of all the feature function [of public clouds] and maintain how I want to run my operation,” Kelly said. “The benefit is that neutrality of the platform.”

What’s In A Multi-Cloud?

Red Hat has forged close technological alliances with all public cloud providers. It’s also a big customer of those cloud giants, Kelly said.

Years ago, Red Hat decided on a multi-cloud strategy to support its own custom application development projects, Kelly said.

“We said we like the idea of public cloud, it’s a great thing, however, there are multiple ones, so how do we take advantage of the feature function set of each of them, because they are unique, that’s how they differentiate themselves,” Kelly said.

Sometimes an app that Red Hat’s building for internal use calls for some AWS S3 storage; others look to tap into the capabilities of Google Cloud’s BigQuery data warehouse, or TensorFlow AI framework.

“ Depending on what the application is determines how much of the public cloud we would adopt,” Kelly said.

And Red Hat has been pushing forward with that multi-cloud strategy, even exiting a data center, throughout the pandemic, he said.

The Managed Platform

To take advantage of the diverse capabilities offered by public cloud giants, Red Hat’s IT team uses OpenShift as a multi-cloud enabler.

Red Hat runs several deployments of its own Kubernetes platform, but the primary one supporting all internal development projects it simply calls the “managed platform,” Kelly said.

That platform operated by Red Hat’s IT department powers custom applications supporting Red Hat’s business operations, often complementing large enterprise applications Red Hat procures from other software vendors, he said.

With the managed platform, “anyone can come in and build a containerized app where we take advantage of our relationships with AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Cloud and IBM Cloud,” Kelly told CRN.

Red Hat’s recent evacuation of a data center amid the pandemic serves as an example of how to leverage OpenShift to move custom apps to the cloud.

First, Red Hat lifted-and-shifted the low-hanging fruit of apps already running on the managed platform, Kelly said.

The team then had to consider applications running in different configurations and determine if it could migrate those apps to the managed platform, first re-architect them so they could be migrated, or retire them.

“That’s been the mainstay of our strategy,” Kelly said. And “during the pandemic we’re still executing on our hybrid cloud strategy.”

CIO-CTO Nexus

Red Hat bifurcates its internal application portfolio “around apps we buy” from vendors like Salesforce, Oracle and Workday, and “apps we have to build,” Kelly said.

Because those “apps we have to build” are built on OpenShift, Red Hat is a big Red Hat customer.

“We try to be a good champion of our product, but not be a blind adopter of it,” Kelly said.

“Our job is to run our company and not to run our software.”

But as a big customer under the same roof, “we do inform product development on a lot of those things,” Kelly said.

There’s a lot of cooperation within Red Hat between the offices of CTO and CIO, and Kelly maintains a close working relationship with CTO Chris Wright.

Wright is “quite renowned in the upstream [open source] communities,” Kelly said, and “a lot of people on my team participate in those projects.”