News

Red Hat Runtimes Gets an Update

• By John K. Waters
• July 2, 2020

Red Hat this week announced the latest release of its Red Hat Runtimes product suite, which includes updates of Quarkus, Red Hat Data Grid, and the Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) expansion pack, as well as new support for IBM Z-Series and Red Hat Single Sign-On.

Red Hat Runtimes is part of the Red Hat Application Services portfolio, which comprises products, tools, and components for developing and maintaining cloud-native applications. It provides lightweight runtimes and frameworks for highly-distributed cloud architectures, such as microservices and serverless applications.

Quarkus, which the IBM subsidiary launched last year and began supporting in Red Hat Runtimes in May of this year, is a lightweight, high-performance framework designed to reduce the footprint and latency of Java apps, specifically for cloud-native architectures. It's tailored for the GraalVM and HotSpot JVMs, and combines support for the imperative programming model with support for cloud-native, event-driven, asynchronous and reactive models in the same platform. Red Hat released Quarkus 1.3 in March of this year, and plans to add full support for building native Quarkus apps to the product suite and incorporate it into OpenShift Serverless later this year.

Red Hat Data Grid is a distributed in-memory key-value data store commonly used for fast in-memory caching of data, support for analytics workloads, and distributed streams. Version 8.0, which comes with this release Red Hat Runtimes, introduces a new server architecture that uses significantly less system resources for basic server functions, Red Hat said, and provides "a better base for future development." This version also improves the operational user experience for administrators via a new, streamlined administrative console and a Kubernetes Operator for Red Hat OpenShift. (An "operator" is a method of packaging, deploying and managing a Kubernetes-native application.) This version also comes with improved REST application programming interfaces (APIs) and introduces a new command line interface.

JBoss EAP is an open source platform for highly transactional, web-scale Java applications. Version 1.0 of the expansion pack, which was just released in June, enables JBoss EAP developers to build Java microservices using Eclipse MicroProfile 3.3 APIs, while continuing to support Jakarta EE 8. "The expansion pack is designed to provide its own support policies and lifecycle definitions closer to the release cadence of the Eclipse MicroProfile specifications," said Red Hat technology evangelist James Falkner, in a blog post. "This means that JBoss EAP instances, with the expansion pack installed, will be covered in their entirety by the new expansion pack lifecycle, maintaining access to support or functions."

This update also enables most Red Hat Runtimes components to run on IBM Z systems to support IBM Cloud Paks for Applications, which are built on OpenShift, bringing "the option of Red Hat Runtimes to an even wider base of customers, and enables IBM Z-Series customers to take advantage of their investments with additional choices for runtimes," Falkner said.

Newly supported distributions include:

• Universal base images for Red Hat Runtimes deployments will have Eclipse OpenJ9, rather than OpenJDK images, to be compatible with IBM Z-series
• Container distributions on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for IBM Z and OpenJ9 for JBoss EAP, Red Hat JBoss Web Server (Tomcat), Red Hat Single Sign-On (SSO), and Data Grid
• Kubernetes Operators for JBoss EAP and AMQ Broker
• Testing of the cloud-native runtimes (Quarkus, Spring Boot, Node.js, Vert.x and Thorntail) for RHEL for IBM Z systems and OpenJ9

This release also includes an update of Red Hat Single Sign-On that enables developers to easily integrate Web single sign-on capabilities based on industry standards for enterprise security into their applications. "We have further expanded this with updates that include a technology preview of the Red Hat implementation of the Web Authentication specification," Falkner said, "which uses public key encryption and strong authenticators, including device biometrics and fobs, among other things, to create a more secure and user-friendly authentication experience that does not rely on shared passwords.

The list of updates in this release also includes support for Spring Boot 2.2 and Open Liberty.