Red Hat shared that Salesforce is moving 200,000 systems, representing the entirety of its software estate, to the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in an effort to standardize its global hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Salesforce previously ran these systems on CentOS Linux 7, which Red Hat discontinued at the end of 2021. It was primarily the CentOS end-of-life transition that "compelled the platform change" for Salesforce, Red Hat VP/GM of RHEL Gunnar Hellekson told SDxCentral.

The customer relationship management (CRM) software vendor was also looking to "move to a platform that would reduce their ongoing maintenance burden," Hellekson said.

The stability of RHEL will help Salesforce increase the efficiency of its IT operations, improve developer productivity and allow for greater innovation in terms of customer experience, according to the vendors.

Salesforce's strategy is to standardize and then automate all systems that support the company's thousands of software offerings running across multiple public cloud and on-premises environments, and this process greatly accelerated the company's migration to RHEL.

Salesforce started with "canary deployments" – incrementally migrating 5,000 systems at a time – and "took advantage of the automation they already had in place" to reach complete systems migration. This process only took a matter of months, he said.

Some benefits of this migration will be visible to Salesforce almost immediately. "Standardizing on the operating system platform has dividends all by itself," Hellekson pointed out.

Developer time spent managing infrastructure, for example, is "one of the most precious things for Salesforce – and really for any customer. ... If that talent has to have expertise in multiple operating platforms, then all that does is diminish the value or diminish the efficiency of that talent."

Standardizing on one operating platform, however, allows enterprises to "make the maximum possible use out of the infrastructure and infrastructure talent investment they have already made. That return happens right away," Hellekson said.

Security is the other immediate value proposition for a company like Salesforce that standardizes its systems on RHEL. Red Hat claims to "take care of the security" at the operating system layer and below, offering significant "peace of mind" for customers. "We take the security of RHEL very seriously," he said.

Red Hat's regular and predictable update cadence was another point of attraction for Salesforce. Red Hat releases major updates every six months and every three years, "whether we need it or not," which makes it easier for companies running mission-critical applications to bake these updates into their long-term planning.

As major players in the enterprise infrastructure and software-as-a-service markets, Red Hat and Salesforce, respectively, carry commitments to customer experience, though the two vendors approach it from varying angles.

"For us, a good customer experience means that enterprise-grade infrastructure frees people up to go worry about business problems. And as it turns out, Salesforce needs exactly that kind of infrastructure so they can free up resources to spend time and attention on solving customer problems," Hellekson said. "It's a very nice marriage that way."