DEVOPSdigest

Red Hat introduced Red Hat OpenShift 4, the next generation of its trusted enterprise Kubernetes platform, reengineered to address the complex realities of container orchestration in production systems.

OpenShift 4 is designed to deliver a cloud-like experience across the hybrid cloud by driving automated updates across Kubernetes deployments everywhere. Paired with enhanced developer flexibility and backed by Kubernetes Operators, this helps to lay a more secure and consistent foundation for modern and emerging cloud-native workloads. More than 1,000 organizations across industries and around the world, including ANZ Bank, Banco Santander, Cathay Pacific, Copel Telecom, GE, Lufthansa Technik, Macquarie Bank, Miles and More GmbH, Paychex, Porsche Informatik, Sabre, Swisscom AG, Via Varejo, and X by Orange, and this year’s Red Hat Innovation Awards winners BP, Deutsche Bank, Emirates NBD, HCA Healthcare, and Kohl’s use OpenShift to accelerate application development and delivery.

Red Hat OpenShift 4 simplifies hybrid and multicloud deployments to accelerate how IT organizations deploy new applications, helping businesses to thrive and differentiate themselves in an ever-increasing set of competitive markets.

Designed for diverse environments, Red Hat OpenShift 4 ushers in the next era of the Kubernetes standard to automate and operationalize best practices for modern application platforms. Red Hat OpenShift 4 operates as a unified cloud experience for the hybrid world, and enables an automation-first approach with:

- Self-managing platform for hybrid cloud to provide a cloud-like experience via automatic software updates and lifecycle management across the hybrid cloud, powered by the trusted foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS. This enables greater security, auditability, repeatability, ease of management and user experience.

- Adaptability and heterogeneous support, available in coming months across major public cloud vendors including Alibaba, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, private cloud technologies like OpenStack, virtualization platforms and bare-metal servers.

- Streamlined full stack installation with an automated process makes it easier to get started with enterprise Kubernetes quickly.

- Simplified application deployments and lifecycle management with Kubernetes Operators. Red Hat pioneered stateful and complex applications on Kubernetes with Operators that automate application maintenance, scaling and failover. Now OpenShift 4 provides Red Hat OpenShift Certified Operators. Working in conjunction with the broader partner ecosystem, OpenShift 4 includes a broad set of applications to run as-a-service across the hybrid cloud.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is certified, conformant Kubernetes, as validated by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It is an enterprise Kubernetes offering built on the backbone of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform backed by the open source expertise, compatible ecosystem, and leadership of Red Hat. As a top Kubernetes community contributor, Red Hat refines Kubernetes for enterprises in OpenShift 4, providing a codebase that is hardened and more secure while retaining key innovations from upstream communities.

To provide a more flexible deployment footprint while still maintaining enhanced security and stability, OpenShift 4 introduces Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS, an OpenShift-specific embedded variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS provides expanded choice for enterprises in deploying enterprise-grade Kubernetes, offering a lightweight, fully immutable, container-optimized Linux OS distribution. In this variant, security features and stability are still paramount, with automated updates managed by Kubernetes and enabled by OpenShift with the push of a button. This helps to reduce maintenance and improve business productivity.

OpenShift 4 is backed by Red Hat’s support and professional services, including Red Hat Consulting. With technical expertise and strategic advising and analysis, Red Hat helps IT organizations build solutions that meet the needs of today and in the future.

Application development is imperative for many IT organizations given its role in accelerating digital transformation. OpenShift 4 supports the evolving needs of application development as a consistent platform to optimize developer productivity with:

- Self-service, automation and application services to help developers extend their application by on-demand provisioning of application services and providing build and deploy automation for containerized applications backed by Operators.

- Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces enable developers to leverage the power of containers and Kubernetes, while working with familiar integrated development environment (IDE) tools that they use day-to-day. CodeReady Workspaces are more consistent, collaborative and protected than when running containers or virtual machines (VMs) on a laptop. This includes the tools and dependencies needed to code, build, test, run, and debug containerized applications in a web-based IDE.

- OpenShift Service Mesh, which combines Istio, Jaeger, and Kiali projects as a single capability that encodes communication logic for microservices-based application architectures, freeing developer teams to focus on business-add logic.

- Knative for building serverless applications in Developer Preview, which makes Kubernetes an ideal platform for building, deploying and managing serverless or function-as-a-service (FaaS) workloads. Knative features include scale-to-zero, autoscaling, in-cluster builds, and eventing frameworks for developing cloud-native applications on Kubernetes. It enables developers to focus on writing code by hiding complex parts of building, deploying, and managing their applications.

- KEDA (Kubernetes-based event-driven autoscaling), a collaboration between Microsoft and Red Hat that supports deployment of serverless event-driven containers on Kubernetes, enabling Azure Functions in OpenShift, in Developer Preview. This allows for accelerated development of event-driven, serverless functions across hybrid cloud and on-premises with Red Hat OpenShift.

- Operator-enabled application environments on OpenShift with Red Hat Middleware, bringing the power of OpenShift Certified Operators to critical integration and process automation technologies. This enables IT organizations to unify their development environments around Operator capabilities, enabling developers to focus purely on delivering next-generation services and applications without having to worry about updating or maintaining of tooling.

- Operator-enabled Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4, currently under development. It offers highly scalable persistent storage for cloud-native applications that require features such as encryption, replication, and availability across the hybrid cloud. Application teams can dynamically provision persistent volumes for a wide variety of workload categories including SQL/NoSQL databases, CI/CD pipelines and AI/ML.

Red Hat OpenShift 4 will be available in the next month.