A Roundup of Red Hat Revelations from KubeCon+CloudNativeCon

So much Red Hat news has been coming out of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2020 Virtual event this week that it has been hard to keep up. We reported earlier on the spotlight announcements around its dev tools for Kubernetes. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. The IBM subsidiary has had a busy week!

Here's a roundup of Red Hat's other big revelations from the show:

OpenShift 4.5 Gets Virtualization Platform
Red Hat's enormously popular packaged distribution of the open-source Kubernetes container management and orchestration system gets an upgrade that includes a new virtualization platform.

OpenShift 4.5, announced this week, includes OpenShift Virtualization, a new platform feature that enables IT organizations to bring standard VM-based workloads to Kubernetes, helping eliminate the workflow and development silos that typically exist between traditional and cloud-native application stacks. Virtual machines can now coexist side-by-side with cloud-native services and containers on Kubernetes simultaneously, either for to be rebuilt as a container image or to simply make workflows more efficient, Red Hat said in a statement. OpenShift 4.5 also introduces full-stack automation for VMware vSphere deployments, making it "push-button" easy to deploy OpenShift on top of all currently supported vSphere environments.

Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes Goes GA
The advanced cluster management capability, now generally available, was designed to help organizations more effectively scale OpenShift deployments via unified Kubernetes management.

Built specifically for a cloud-native world, the cluster management toolset supports containerized application deployments across multiple clusters, whether an organization is just beginning to explore cloud-native computing or they are running next-generation workloads in production, Red Hat says. Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes "meets organizations where they are on their containerization journey," from container proofs-of-concepts to containerized production deployments, with tools to more effectively manage multiple Kubernetes clusters and enforce security policies and governance controls. The toolset also provides a single control plane, which aims to eliminate the fragmented tools that can be required to manage Kubernetes across the hybrid cloud.

New Edge-Computing Support
Red Hat also announced the addition of new capabilities and technologies to its hybrid cloud portfolio designed to support enterprise-grade edge computing, starting with OpenShift.

Red Hat OpenShift now supports three-node clusters, scaling down the size of Kubernetes deployments without compromising on capabilities, and making it better suited for space-constrained edge sites. The Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes tools provides management for thousands of edge sites along with core locations via a single, consistent view across the hybrid cloud, which managing scaled out-edge architectures as straightforward as traditional datacenters, Red Hat says.

Red Hat Joins Intuit on Argo Project
The two company's announced that they will be collaborating on Argo CD, a declarative continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes deployments. If it works as planned, the tool will make it easier to manage configurations, definitions, and environments for both Kubernetes itself and the applications it hosts using Git as the source of truth.

Argo CD, which was open sourced by Intuit in January 2018, is also an incubation-level project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and is currently deployed in production by many companies, including Electronic Arts, Major League Baseball, Tesla, and Ticketmaster.

Red Hat, a long-time leader in the open-source community, will help to drive the contributor base and engage with a broader open source ecosystem, the company's said. Red Hat also intends to work to integrate Argo's GitOps capabilities into future versions of OpenShift, which would provide a more developer-centric way of controlling Kubernetes infrastructure and applications.

Posted by John K. Waters on August 20, 2020