News

Red Hat Extends OpenShift Across Archs, Apps, and Infra with New Capabilities

• By John K. Waters
• November 19, 2020

Red Hat unveiled a raft of new capabilities for its OpenShift Kubernetes container platform at this week's KubeCon + Cloud Native online event, from updates to OpenShift Serverless to extended support across architectures.

Red Hat, an IBM subsidiary, views Kubernetes as "the cornerstone of hybrid cloud computing, delivering a common platform that spans bare-metal servers, virtual environments, and private and public cloud environments with familiar tools and services." It also sees OpenShift as the "foundation for hybrid cloud computing use cases across industries and regions," the company said in a statement.

This week's announcement includes the latest update to OpenShift Serverless. Red Hat OpenShift Serverless 1.11 comes with full support for Knative eventing, a system designed to abstract away complex details from developers and provide composable primitives to enable late-binding event sources and event consumers.  This enables containerized applications to consume as many resources as needed at a given time, without leading to over or under consumption.

Red Hat also announced the Red Hat build of Quarkus, a Kubernetes-native Java stack. With a single Red Hat OpenShift subscription, customers now have full access to Quarkus, enabling developers to repurpose mission-critical Java apps on Kubernetes, backed by Red Hat's enterprise support and expertise.

The company unveiled two important updates to Red Hat OpenShift 4.6 aimed at enterprises hybrid clouds: a new remote worker node architecture to help deliver Kubernetes to space-constrained and remote deployments at the edge; and new capabilities for public sector Kubernetes deployments, including availability on AWS GovCloud and Azure Government Cloud, and extended OpenSCAP support.

Red Hat OpenShift also improves on its previously released OpenShift Virtualization feature set by adding informed, one-click and template-based VM creation and performance and scale optimizations targeted at VMs running Microsoft Windows-based workloads.

The company announced the technology preview of an integration of its Ansible automation solution with its OpenShift last month, which is now being delivered as Certified Content for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, a collection designed to help organizations manage and extend OpenShift using Ansible IT automation technology.

"Building a hybrid cloud strategy with Kubernetes at its core requires more than just a container orchestration engine; wide-ranging enterprise transformation requires extensive application services, hardware and public cloud support and a strong ecosystem of supporting partners," said Ashesh Badani, senior vice president of Red Hat's Cloud Platforms group. "Red Hat OpenShift delivers all of these features to IT organizations, from integrated developer features with Quarkus and OpenShift Serverless to supporting technology strategies from the datacenter to the network's edge to the public cloud. True digital transformation requires a common platform to build and innovate upon, and we see that platform as OpenShift."

KubeCon + Cloud Native the flagship conference of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).