Red Hat Brings GitHub Actions to OpenShift
Ret Hat today announced that the Red Hat OpenShift platform is now more integrated with GitHub Actions, a framework through which code residing in a repository can be pushed out more easily to a Red Hat application development environment based on Kubernetes.
Announced at the online GitHub Universe event, Red Hat GitHub Actions will be made available via the GitHub Marketplace.
William Oliveira, a senior manager for product management at Red Hat, says that integration will reduce the friction DevOps teams encounter when moving code from GitHub repositories on to the Red Hat OpenShift platform as they build and deploy cloud-native applications. The Red Hat OpenShift platform already incorporates the open source Argo continuous delivery (CD) platform being developed under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the Tekton pipeline framework being advanced under the auspices of the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CD) Foundation.
Red Hat and GitHub are also exploring self-hosted GitHub runners for OpenShift. A runner is the combined application and server that hosts a job that executes a workflow. DevOps teams should also be able to increase memory size, enable GPUs or install software that may only be available locally as part of a tailored application development experience.
That integration further advances a transition to GitOps workflows that are starting to be more easily enabled using GitHub Actions, notes Oliveira. Rather than pushing code using a traditional continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, it is now possible to automatically pull code directly from a GitHub repository to enable continuous deployment. While most DevOps teams have mastered CI, the promise of CD has proven to be more elusive because each IT platform that needs to be supported is unique. Kubernetes creates an opportunity to have a standard set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for deploying applications consistently either on-premises or across multiple hybrid clouds.
GitHub also revealed it has joined OpenShift Commons to help drive connections and collaboration across the OpenShift ecosystem.
As organizations embrace microservices-based applications based on containers to build and deploy applications faster it’s only a matter of time before DevOps processes are employed more widely. The challenge organizations face is that while containers and microservices make it easier to build and update applications, the underlying IT environment continues to become more complex to manage.
It’s not quite clear to what degree or rate that organizations will embrace containers and microservices as those IT environments become more complex. However, a recent survey published by the CNCF finds 92% of respondents are now running containers in production environments, with 83% reporting they are also employing Kubernetes in those environments. However, the bulk of applications running in IT environments are still monolithic, with most IT teams still trying to determine when to employ microservices based on varying use cases.
Regardless of the path forward, however, Oliveira says the one thing IT organizations can count is IT environments will become more a lot more hybrid in terms of not just platforms but also in terms of how applications are constructed and deployed.
