News

Red Hat Releases OpenShift Application Runtimes

• By John K. Waters
• December 13, 2017

Red Hat has announced the general availability of its OpenShift Application Runtimes. The new release is a collection of cloud-native runtimes for developing Java and JavaScript applications on Red Hat's packaged distribution of the open source Kubernetes container management and orchestration system.

The new runtimes will make it possible for organizations to "accelerate cloud-native app development with a curated set of frameworks and runtimes for prescriptively building and running microservices-based applications," the company said.

"The new world of cloud-native, containerized, microservices-based architecture empowers enterprises to innovate in a more rapid and flexible way than ever before," said Mike Piech, VP and GM of Red Hat's Middleware group. "But doing so at scale with performance, reliability, and improved security requires the muscle of enterprise-grade runtimes. Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes manifests Red Hat's decade-plus of experience with Red Hat JBoss Middleware in this new runtime offering built from the ground up for the next generation of microservices-based application development."

In a recent survey of Red Hat customers by the company, 87 percent of respondents said they are using or considering multiple runtimes and frameworks for developing microservices; 44 percent cited a preference for using "the right tool for the right task." Red Hat hopes to make the most of those percentages with a tightly integrated and supported offering for developing microservices in multiple languages and frameworks. The company said it "aims to balance developers' need for choice with the operational requirement for standardization and support – both for creating new applications and re-architecting existing ones."

The new OpenShift Application Runtimes are designed to reduce the complexity of developing cloud-native apps by integrating OpenShift Container Platform capabilities with multiple runtimes and frameworks. It offers a wizard-based setup, service discovery, external configurations, and circuit breakers for fault tolerance.

The new runtimes also support hybrid cloud configurations, and provide developers with a fully automated platform for provisioning, building, and deploying applications and their components. The product also integrates with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools like Git, Maven, and Jenkins.

In April, Red Hat added support on OpenShift for cloud-native Java to its existing support for enterprise Java.

OpenShift is a distribution of the open source Kubernetes container orchestration system using Docker containers and DevOps tools for app development. It was created by Red Hat, launched as a free beta in 2011, and aimed at open source developers. The original version came with built-in management and auto-scaling capabilities that freed developers from stack setup, maintenance and operational chores, allowing them to focus on coding. It also supported a range of programming languages, including Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Node.js, and Perl, as well numerous frameworks, databases, and clouds. In 2012, Red Hat launched an enterprise version of OpenShift and began an expansion of its partner ecosystem. In 2014, the company unveiled OpenShift Online, a public cloud app development and hosting platform to provide customers and developers with access to "complementary third-party solutions" developed by members of that partner ecosystem.