News

Red Hat Updates Dev Tools for Kubernetes Across Cloud-Native Toolchain

• By John K. Waters
• August 18, 2020

Red Hat threw a spotlight on a number of updates to several tools in its developer tools portfolio at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2020 Virtual event, underway online this week, including its Teckton OpenShift Pipelines tool, the CodeReady Workspaces collaborative Kubernetes-native development solution, the CodeReady Studio Eclipse-based IDE, and its odo CLI tool for creating applications on the OpenShift Container Platform and Kubernetes. The releases emphasize automation and greater control over development pipelines, the company said, and helping developer teams "to adjust to needed application velocity without sacrificing build stability or tooling."

The IBM subsidiary, which has long been one of the leading providers of open-source solutions, touted its plan to provide tools and technologies to manage "sprawling cloud-native deployments of the future." These updates are intended to address a variety of developer challenges, the company said, from the command line to integrated development environments

"We've continued to balance investment in new and unique tools to simplify Kubernetes for developers, with a broad set of plugins to popular IDEs and CI/CD systems so teams aren't forced to change their toolset when they move to containers and Kubernetes for their deployed applications," said Brad Micklea, VP of Program and Advocacy in Red Hat's developer tools group, in a statement.

OpenShift Pipelines is a Kubernetes-style CI/CD solution based on Tekton, which is a flexible open-source framework for creating cloud-native CI/CD pipelines. (Red Hat announced its support for Tekton last July.) The expanded functionality includes added OpenShift plugins for GitHub Actions, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Jenkins, and GitLab runner support.

CodeReady Workspaces 2.2, which went GA in July, was designed to help remote development teams easily provision and share environments, which enables faster starts and best-of-breed, low-latency interactions. For the latest release, the company focused on performance and configuration, updated the tool to use newer versions of the popular runtimes and stacks, and added the ability to allocate only the CPU needed for IDE plugins. Version 2.2 also comes with a new diagnostic feature that lets developers start up a workspace in debug mode.

The CodReady Studio IDE was designed to allow developers to customize their product levels with a set of tooling capabilities for multiple frameworks, including CodeReady Containers (deploying via OpenShift4), Quarkus, JAX-RS, Contexts Dependency Injection (CDI), and Red Hat Fuse Tooling. The IDE also supports EAP 7.4, Hibernate, and Wildfly 19, and it provides built-in reinforcement for Kubernetes, OpenShift (including S2i), Docker and MicroProfile REST Client. And it supports both JDK 1.8 and JDK 11.

odo 2 is included with OpenShift and provides a new way for developers to iterate on code with its command line interface (CLI) supporting Kubernetes as well as OpenShift, open model for tools through a standard definition, and rapid iterative Java development using the Quarkus Kubernetes-native Java framework.