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Alibaba Cloud to offer, host Red Hat software

Chinese internet giant has joined Red Hat's cloud partner ecosystem and will offer the latter's open source products to Alibaba Cloud customers as well as host Red Hat customers on its cloud platform.
Written by Eileen Yu, Senior Contributing Editor

Alibaba Cloud says it will begin offering Red Hat products to its customers as well as host the latter's customers on its public cloud platform.

The cloud computing business of Chinese e-commerce giant, Alibaba Group, said it had joined Red Hat's Certified Cloud and Service Provider programme, which comprised technology partners that had been tested and validated to run the latter's open source offerings.

Alibaba said Red Hat products soon would be made available on its cloud marketplace, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a pay-per-use model. "In addition, in the coming months, Red Hat customers will be able to move eligible, unused Red Hat subscriptions from their datacenter to Alibaba Cloud," the Chinese vendor said.

It added that this meant customers would be able to migrate their on-premise Red Hat subscriptions to Alibaba's public cloud, whilst maintaining a direct relationship with the US open source software vendor.

The partnership would offer Red Hat access to a sizeable potential clientele in China, where Alibaba was the largest public cloud provider and customers included CITIC Group, China Huaneng Group, and PICC Finance.

Alibaba in August said its cloud business had crossed 1 million paying customers for the first time, clocking 2.43 billion yuan (US$359 million) in revenue for the quarter.

On its part, Red Hat said Asia was its fastest-growing region, though its smallest in terms of revenue contribution. Noting that this momentum was likely to continue, CEO Jim Whitehurst told ZDNet in September 2016 that developing nations in the region were embarking on many net new infrastructure projects, rather than replacement for existing technology, and open source would be involved in a large share of such projects.

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