Red Hat has slashed the costs to use OpenShift Dedicated, its Kubernetes-as-a-service platform, by up to 50 percent.
OpenShift Dedicated is hosted and managed by Red Hat. It offers clusters run in a virtual private cloud on AWS.
Starting on December 12, 2018, the Raleigh-headquartered open source company has cut cost of an OpenShift Dedicated cluster by 25 percent and the cost of additional nodes by 50 percent, it said.
The company, recently acquired by IBM, has also rolled out new features, saying it wants to offer a “more effective platform for building new cloud-native workloads”.
Prices for the service start (for a single availability-zone cluster) at $36,000/year for cloud accounts managed by Red Hat, and $16,000 for customers who want to use existing cloud provider discounts and settings.
The move comes amid rapid growth – and increased competition – in Linux container and cloud-native applications, with a recent survey from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), showing that many of the deployments underpinning these Kubernetes workloads are taking place in public clouds.
The trend has been driven in part by desire among developers and IT to build, manage and secure applications without the fear of technology or infrastructure lock-in.
(A container is a unit of software that packages up code and all its dependencies so the application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another).
Red Hat also provides a enterprise Kubernetes platform for on-premise and hybrid cloud containerised workloads, but faces growing competition from managed public cloud containers services…
See also: Everybody and Their Dog is Rolling Out New Kubernetes Feature
Red Hat’s Sathish Balakrishnan said: “[These moves are] designed to provide more flexibility to customers and help make it easier for them to deploy containerised applications on enterprise Kubernetes in the public cloud.
Other new offerings on OpenShift Dedicated include cluster deployment across multiple availability zones (AZ); expanded EC2 instance types, including memory-optimized, compute-optimised or general purpose, which can be sized to meet specific needs.
Red Hat has also added encrypted persistent volumes, cluster console for more admin-level cluster status, node visibility, access control management and a cluster-wide event stream and improvements to the dedicated-admin role, such as the ability to modify the default project template
Balakrishnan added: “We feel that these pricing updates combined with the enhanced features make Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated an even more effective platform for building new cloud-native workloads and bridging existing workloads to public cloud instances.”
See also: Now IBM’s Bought Red Hat, Who Does Google Buy?
