News

Red Hat Launches Developer Hub for Enhanced App Development

• By John K. Waters
• February 12, 2024

Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Developer Hub, an enterprise-grade internal developer platform (IDP) based on Backstage, an open source Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project. The platform includes a self-service portal, standardized software templates, dynamic plug-in management, enterprise role-based access control (RBAC) and premium support.

Red Hat, a subsidiary of IBM, is one of the world’s leading providers of open-source solutions. An IDP consists of a standardized set of self-service tools and technologies that developers need to create and deploy code.

"Internal developer platforms provide that sweet spot where domain knowledge and best practices intersect with standardized tooling and processes, delivering a developer experience that results in higher productivity, faster time-to-market, and a more effective path to innovation," said Balaji Sivasubramanian, senior director of Developer Tools Product Management at Red Hat, in a statement. "Red Hat Developer Hub enables organizations to fast-track the adoption of IDPs and scale them across the enterprise in a flexible, more secure and fully supported manner."

The platform is intended to speed up development and deployment across various platforms, integrating with Red Hat OpenShift to support innovative technologies like AI and cloud-native applications.

In a report published last October ("IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Digital Business Strategies 2024 Predictions"), industry analysts at IDC wrote that "spending on digital technology by organizations will grow at 7x the economy in 2024, as companies are compelled by market demands to grow digital business models and strengthen digital capabilities."

"Fragmentation of knowledge, lack of standardization across tools and documentation, and overwhelming complexity are all stifling innovation and making it hard for organizations to meet the needs of today's digital business imperative," said Lara Greden, research director for Cloud Platforms at IDC, in a statement. "Platform engineering teams can help bring order to the chaos; however, building and maintaining custom portals can be difficult to scale over the long term. Red Hat Developer Hub takes the heavy lifting off of these teams and gives them the tools that support the collective DevOps effort so that developers can focus on writing code and delivering a competitive advantage for their organizations."

The Developer Hub addresses the digital-first economy's demands by streamlining the onboarding of applications and developers, simplifying access to consoles, software catalogs, and documentation, and enabling faster integration of new capabilities through dynamic plugin management.

Red Hat Developer Hub addresses these challenges with a self-service portal that brings together all of the information that developers need, including access to various consoles, a unified software catalog, and up-to-date documentation within the same repository. Not only is this environment easier for teams to manage, but new team members can more easily find what they need as they familiarize themselves with tools and processes, and ultimately become productive faster.

Standardized software templates further streamline application and developer onboarding by abstracting ancillary tasks and technology details that can slow down the development and delivery process. With the click of a button, developers can get everything they need — best practices and pre-architected components from platform engineering teams — automatically built and ready to go so they can immediately start creating and delivering applications.

Red Hat Developer Hub features the same plug-in architecture as the Backstage project, enabling users to integrate new capabilities into their development toolchain. With the new dynamic plug-in management capabilities in Red Hat Developer Hub, users can quickly and easily install, update, and remove plug-ins without having to plan for downtime to modify source code, and rebuild and redeploy the base Backstage environment.

Red Hat has created a number of technology plug-ins based on feedback from users, and contributed them to the Backstage community. These plug-ins are supported and verified for use with Red Hat Developer Hub, mitigating potential compatibility risks and operational issues. In addition, Red Hat Developer Hub is fully capable of running and accommodating community plug-ins, giving organizations greater control and flexibility over their environments.

Software security is more than code. It spans people, processes, and tools. Building trust and transparency throughout the software development life cycle requires prioritizing the adoption of security measures across each of these vectors from the very beginning.

Red Hat Developer Hub simplifies and standardizes user management with role-based access control (RBAC) via a new plug-in available today. The RBAC plug-in gives administrators and project leads the ability to manage user access to the portal based on their role within a team. The plug-in can be connected to the organization’s authentication provider and mapped to custom workstream roles, allowing users to get appropriate permissions for the software catalog and the associated data.

Red Hat Developer Hub is also complementary to and integrated with Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain, a software supply chain security solution that offers an opinionated framework for curating trusted content at code-time, with an automated chain of trust that can verify pipeline compliance at build-time. These tools provide provenance and attestation for languages, frameworks and dependencies used in the Red Hat Developer Hub portal, and give platform engineers the ability to respond with updates more quickly as needed for security and compliance.

Red Hat Trusted Application Pipelines, Red Hat Trusted Profile Analyzer, and Red Hat Trusted Artifact Signer are currently available in technology preview, with general availability expected later this quarter.

Red Hat Developer Hub is now generally available with full support.