Red Hat Promises Security and Reliability through Docker Partner Network

Red Hat (RHT) took yet another big step toward commercializing Docker containers with the launch of a new partner program, Red Hat Connect for Technology Partners, that the open source giant said will help coordinate containerized app development and delivery across the ecosystem.

In pitching Red Hat Connect for Technology Partners to the channel, the company is emphasizing the importance of the new program in balancing the excitement and rapid innovation that containerization is bringing to app deployment with the need for strong security and reliability. Red Hat’s vision is to take “application containers to the same state of enterprise readiness and support as the company did for Linux nearly 13 years ago,” it said in a statement.

It plans to do that by releasing a set of tools and resources, called the Red Hat Container Development Kit (CDK), that will help partners build containerized applications for the Red Hat ecosystem. In addition, the company will offer the Red Hat Container Certification to certify “that a container’s content is from trusted sources and that both it and the container itself are secure, free of known vulnerabilities, and will work on Red Hat infrastructure,” according to the company.

The parter program announcement, which comes a week after Red Hat launched a new Linux-based operating system platform, Atomic Host, designed for Docker containers, is another reflection of the company’s belief that containerization is now ready for prime time. The partner program will make it easier for companies across the open source ecosystem—especially Red Hat’s slice of it—to commercialize products and services related to Docker, which is massively popular within the open source and cloud communities, but which has not yet experienced widespread enterprise adoption.

“Containers represent a massive shift in how enterprises consume applications, but in doing so the critical aspects of the traditional application lifecycle, namely security and certification, must be retained as well,” said Paul Cormier, executive vice president, Products and Technologies at Red Hat. “With the industry’s first certified, secure, end-to-end container ecosystem, Red Hat now leads the way in enabling Linux containers for the enterprise, from conceptualization to development to delivery, maintaining the key innovations of the technology without sacrificing the basic enterprise needs of application security and provenance.”