Red Hat does a lot more than just RHEL. They've got a Kubernetes distribution (OpenShift) and a ton of useful software under their umbrella. (Ceph, GlusterFS, FreeIPA, Ansible... etc)
None of those are exotic if you're running on-prem/colo'd workloads. They might be exotic to app develoers but for anyone in operations they're your staple tools.
They're the tools used by the people backing your Kube cluster :P
IPA/IdM is the gold standard for user management on a fleet of servers.
Gluster is the best replicated filesystem hands down and Ceph is the only alternative to expensive SANs that scales well.
Ansible is by far the most popular config management tool.
Foreman+Candlepin/Satellite is one of the few sane ways to do patch management.
There are a lot more things RH has under their belt that I could talk about but I just did the list that was mentioned.
I agree, My point here is that I see the acquisition as a result of the market shift that is happening due to the introduction of Kubernetes. And in this case, it was the result of openshift.
Note that once you use containers, you decouple your infra tools from the app dev tool.
Yes but that only changes how you, an app developer, perceive your underlying infrastructure not the tools by which that infrastructure is provisioned and maintained.
You can kick the can really far down the road but whether is your ops team, your VPS provider, or a massive cloud someone has to pick it up and they will likely do so using tools developed by Red Hat.
OpenShift is pretty well positioned as the Kubernetes variant for big enterprise, with the often-necessary vendor support and responsibility that simply doesn't come with open source. Cloud vendor implementations can take away some of the risk there, but there are a ton of servers still sitting in datacenters still.
