Why are Red Hat & Google Cloud Extending their Partnership?

World’s premier open source solutions provider, Red Hat, has unveiled an expanded partnership with Google Cloud, designed to help organisations pick up the pace on application modernisation and cloud migration.

At the heart of the move is the introduction of Red Hat OpenShift directly into the Google Cloud console. 

Alongside this comes tighter integration with native services and the full release of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud.

The announcement reflects a shared ambition to deliver a complete application platform where enterprises can confidently build, deploy and scale containerised, virtualised and AI-led workloads. 

By improving interoperability and making access simpler, both companies are sharpening their focus on organisations grappling with increasingly complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

“Red Hat’s hybrid cloud vision is built on consistency – the ability to run any workload, anywhere, with the same operational model,” says Mike Barrett, Vice President and General Manager of Hybrid Cloud Platforms at Red Hat.

“This extended collaboration with Google Cloud further empowers organisations with comprehensive cloud-native capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift, whether they need to accelerate application development or streamline migration to the cloud.

“Together, Red Hat and Google provide a clear, unified path for organisations to modernise their entire application portfolio, helping them manage both their traditional VMs and containerised applications on a single platform.”

Seamless access and enhanced flexibility

The arrival of Red Hat OpenShift within the Google Cloud console reshapes how customers discover, deploy and manage workloads, while smoothing the onboarding journey with guided cluster provisioning and built-in validation of prerequisites.

Through Google Cloud Marketplace, organisations can access unified billing and procurement, with flexible pay-as-you-go pricing. 

Crucially, Red Hat OpenShift subscription costs can now contribute towards existing Google Cloud committed spend, easing procurement hurdles and giving IT teams clearer cost visibility.

The collaboration also goes deeper on the technical front. Integrations with services such as Secret Manager, Certificate Authority Service and Workload Identity Federation allow organisations to build more secure and scalable applications using solutions engineered across both platforms.

Bridging legacy systems with modern infrastructure

As infrastructure costs climb and operational complexity grows, businesses are under pressure to modernise without disruption. 

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization steps into this space by enabling organisations to run virtual machines alongside containers and serverless workloads on a unified Kubernetes platform.

Running on Google Cloud C3 bare metal instances, the solution offers direct access to CPU and memory resources. 

This makes it especially useful for performance-intensive or license-constrained workloads, delivering consistent and predictable performance in the cloud.

“Our customers are constantly looking for ways to simplify their infrastructure and accelerate innovation without sacrificing performance,” says Nirav Mehta, Vice President, Product Management at Google Cloud Compute Platform.

“We are pleased to deepen our collaboration with Red Hat for OpenShift on Google Cloud. 

“Customers now have a smoother path, enabling them to run both virtualised and containerised workloads consistently on Google Cloud's global, secure and performant infrastructure.”

Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud brings a fully managed application platform into play, built to cut operational overhead and boost efficiency.

With automation and support from global Site Reliability Engineers, organisations can shift their attention from infrastructure management to innovation.

The platform also supports consistent management across hybrid environments, enabling IT teams to operate smoothly across on premises, cloud and edge deployments. 

Migration is made easier with tools such as the migration toolkit for virtualisation and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, helping businesses move forward with minimal downtime.