Red Hat Adds Capabilities to OpenShift Platform Plus

During its online Red Hat Summit event today, Red Hat launched Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, an edition of its Kubernetes-based application development and deployment platform that includes the Quay registry, cluster management tools and the security software gained via the recent acquisition of StackRox earlier this year.

Stuart Miniman, director of market insight for cloud platforms at Red Hat, says this latest edition bundles additional capabilities with the core OpenShift platform that most IT teams would otherwise have to acquire separately. Red Hat ultimately expects this edition of Red Hat OpenShift to become the most widely employed of the three editions of the platform it now offers, says Miniman.

IT teams that have opted to manage fleets of clusters themselves will now be able to more readily employ version 2.2 of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes to enforce policies and embrace workflows based on GitOps best practices.

Meanwhile, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, based on the StackRox security platform, provides access to data collection and analysis tools as well as more than 60 pre-defined security policies that can be applied and enforced from the time that apps are built to when they are deployed and running. Red Hat is also reiterating its commitment to make all the components of its security platform available as open source software. The StackRox platform was based on closed proprietary software prior to being acquired by Red Hat.

In general, IT teams are weighing the merits of managing Kubernetes environments themselves or relying on a managed service. In the case of Red Hat, the company makes available a set of services it provides to manage instances of Red Hat OpenShift running on public clouds. However, Red Hat itself has not opted to extend that capability to on-premises IT environments. IBM, the parent company of Red Hat, however, will provide managed services for both on-premises and cloud computing environments.

Red Hat today also announced it is extending its managed services offerings to include Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka, Red Hat OpenShift Data Science and Red Hat OpenShift API Management.

It’s not clear to what degree IT teams will opt to manage Kubernetes environments themselves. Historically, less than 20% of IT has been consumed as a managed service. However, there is a shortage of IT skills when it comes to cloud-native technologies, which, in the short term, at least, is pushing more organizations toward relying on a managed service. In some cases, however, that may be a short-term strategy that will only be employed until an organization has acquired a sufficient level of Kubernetes proficiency or until Kubernetes environments become easier to manage. In other cases, organizations are making a strategic decision to focus more of their internal resources on application development rather than managing infrastructure.

The pace of updates to Kubernetes itself, which typically occur every three to four months, is also a factor. Many organizations prefer to rely on an external IT service provider to determine what versions of Kubernetes, along with companion platforms like open source Prometheus monitoring tools, are ready to be employed in a production environment.

Regardless of approach, the pace of innovation in Kubernetes environments shows no signs of slowing. From an IT perspective, however, absorbing that rate of innovation is, one way or another, always going to be a challenge.