Red Hat is a leading provider of open source solutions, founded in 1993. It was acquired by IBM in 2019 for $34 billion. Red Hat's flagship products are Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift, an enterprise Kubernetes platform. OpenShift provides a full platform for developing, hosting, and managing containerized applications, and includes additional services beyond just Kubernetes. It offers advantages for security, automation, and developer experience compared to managing raw Kubernetes. Operators are an innovative approach in OpenShift to package and automate application logic using Kubernetes as the automation engine.