Red Hat expanded managed support of its bread-and-butter OpenShift platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS) allowing for an enterprise-focused Kubernetes service that is jointly managed by both vendors. The move follows up on a similar launch last year with Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

The Amazon Red Hat OpenShift product allows customers to more easily build and deploy OpenShift applications and clusters on the AWS cloud and in a hybrid-cloud environment. Those containerized applications will be able to natively integrate with AWS’ more than 170 cloud-native services and be managed through the traditional AWS interface. This will include billing and support conducted through a customer’s AWS client.

Sathish Balakrishnan, VP for hosted platforms at Red Hat, explained in a blog post that the move combines the support models from both vendors to help enterprises more fully embrace a cloud-native future.

“Contrary to some industry vendors, we do not see enterprise Kubernetes as being truly successful if it’s based on legacy virtualization infrastructure or layered into a Frankenstein’s monster of proprietary technologies,” Balakrishnan wrote, taking a not-so-subtle dig at rival VMware. “Red Hat views the cloud-native platform for the enterprise as fully open and highly-scalable in a model that embraces upstream innovation safely for use in production.”

Red Hat announced a similar product last year with Microsoft. That Azure Red Hat OpenShift platform was the first co-managed OpenShift offering with a public cloud provider.

The expanded AWS support also builds on past integration work between Red Hat and AWS. That included an OpenShift update in mid-2017 providing users access to AWS services through OpenShift or in an on-premises environment.

Red Hat has been busy updating and expanding the reach of its OpenShift platform.

The vendor last month added new virtualization capabilities into OpenShift that will also include a new cluster management service.

OpenShift is also central to parent company IBM’s push into the hybrid-cloud space. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has stated that he wants the company to add a greater presence in the hybrid-cloud space to its already established positions in the mainframe, services, and middleware ecosystem, and that the Red Hat ecosystem was a big part of that.

“There’s a unique window of opportunity for IBM and Red Hat to establish Linux, containers, and Kubernetes as the new standard,” Krishna wrote in a LinkedIn message to IBM’s employees shortly after taking over as CEO last month. “We can make Red Hat OpenShift the default choice for hybrid cloud in the same way that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the default choice for the operating system.”

IBM is also using OpenShift to power its recently announced IBM Telco Network Cloud Manager platform. That 5G-focused platform provides operators with automation capabilities to orchestrate virtual network functions (VNFs), which typically run on virtual machines (VMs), and container network functions (CNFs), which typically run in containerized environments.