5 ways cloud services can help your business

Organizations recognize that cloud computing is critical to the future of their business. However, choosing the right service can be overwhelming, and you want to make sure cloud investments are useful to the overall business strategy. This checklist highlights key considerations when investing in cloud services.

1. Unify your platform for building applications

Cloud hyperscalers offer a wide range of services for building applications. To build a cloud-native application platform, teams must wade through many choices to determine which services to use and how they can best work together. Red Hat® Cloud Services wants to help remove these complexities with a unified platform approach to building applications.

Red Hat Cloud Services delivers a streamlined and consistent user experience across any combination of cloud services. Using Red Hat OpenShift®, teams have native integration with leading cloud hyperscalers. Red Hat OpenShift Application Services delivers a consistent experience when building applications that are natively integrated with OpenShift. Together, Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift Application Services work consistently in a highly distributed, hybrid cloud environment.

2. Streamline experiences for LOB developers

Developers are the main drivers of innovation and support for your business goals, so Red Hat's top priority is to deliver a streamlined developer experience—from design to production. Red Hat Cloud Services offers these developer-centric features:

  • Self-service provisioning: Red Hat provides developers and lines of businesses (LOBs) with self-service capabilities, so they do not have to wait in a queue to be provisioned by IT.
  • Quickstarts: Red Hat Cloud Services quickstarts help minimize the learning curve and streamline the adoption of new technology.
  • Developer-first interface: Developers only see the tools and functionality they need to build, test, and deploy applications because user features are separated from administrative tasks.
  • Developer-centric tooling: Red Hat Cloud Services is designed to reflect the developer's point of view to ultimately help the developer be more productive.
  • Consistent experience: Red Hat provides a consistent developer experience across any selection of cloud services (public or private), with a uniform development environment, monitoring, metrics, and alerts across all Red Hat services.

3. Build data-driven applications

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have become critical for organizations as they build applications that convert data to business value. However, access to data, inadequate compute resources, and library interdependencies are some of the challenges of starting with AI/ML. 

Red Hat OpenShift Data Science performs complex AI/ML modeling to accelerate the delivery of intelligent applications. Red Hat OpenShift Data Science lets developers integrate container-ready models into intelligent applications more easily. Red Hat Cloud Services helps data scientists and developers more rapidly develop, train, test, and iterate ML models.

4. Deliver faster applications

While it may not be too difficult to download and install KubernetesApache Kafka, and the other technologies for a productive development environment, getting these services truly ready for production takes a significant amount of time and effort. But with Red Hat Cloud Services, everything is taken care of for you, so you can deliver applications faster.

Red Hat takes responsibility for the infrastructure, keeping the services “always on and always available.” For managed services, Red Hat guarantees a service-level agreement (SLA) of 99.95% uptime. Services are always up to date, upgraded, and more secure, so developers can concentrate on innovation. Red Hat Cloud Services is backed by Premium Support, enterprise-grade tech support from top experts in cloud computing, and supportive Kubernetes communities.

5. Take a cloud-agnostic approach

The freedom to use your own combination of cloud providers is essential; otherwise, you could be locked into one cloud provider’s stack. Red Hat is cloud-agnostic, giving you the freedom to use multiple cloud services in any combination—Microsoft Azure, AWS, IBM, Google, and even on-premise—while enjoying a smooth, consistent developer-first experience across all public and private cloud environments.

Get Red Hat's experience with cloud computing, Kubernetes, and event-driven architecture—all the technologies you need to build your applications for today's distributed enterprise.

Looking for more?

Read this overview, “Managed services for cloud-native development” for more insight into how Red Hat Cloud Services can help you navigate your journey to cloud-native applications.