Red Hat Expands OpenShift Application Development Environment
Red Hat this week added a bevy of additional capabilities to its OpenShift platform, including adding support for live migration of virtual machines and making generally available a set of hardened container images to improve application security.
Announced at the Red Hat Summit conference, Red Hat is previewing an instance of Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite that includes a Trusted Software Factory that provides access to a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform for building software using Red Hat Trusted Libraries and containers that Red Hat uses internally.
Red Hat is also including software bill of materials (SBOMs) and cryptographic signature capabilities in that CI/CD platform along with a vulnerability analysis tool developed using an artificial intelligence (AI) framework created by NVIDIA that reasons across a code base.
At the same time, Red Hat is making available Red Hat Desktop, an application development environment for local machines that includes the Podman tool it developed for building cloud-native applications using containers that can also be used to create a sandbox environment for AI agents. Red Hat also revealed that the Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces framework now supports the Kiro AI coding tools developed by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Red Hat also announced that it will be adding support for Karpenter, an open source autoscaler for Kubernetes clusters, to improve utilization rates across the clusters it manages on various cloud services on behalf of customers, in addition to making Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization now available on Google and IBM cloud services.
Mike Barrett, vice president and general manager for hybrid cloud platforms at Red Hat, also noted that going forward Red Hat is committing to adding a range of additional agentic AI capabilities to streamline the management of its OpenShift platform.
Based on Kubernetes, Red Hat recently revealed that it has generated in excess of $2 billion in annual recurring Red Hat OpenShift revenue, with the number of virtual machines deployed on the platform growing 417% over the last year.
Mitch Ashley, vice president and practice lead for software lifecycle engineering at the Futurum Group, said the 417% jump in virtual machines running on OpenShift signals enterprises consolidating legacy, cloud-native, and agentic workloads onto a single control plane. IT vendors that require separate stacks for virtual machines, containers, and AI agents will face procurement challenges now that consolidation is underway at scale throughout 2026 and 2027, he added.
It may be a while yet before most applications are running on the same core IT platform, but it may now be more a question of when rather than if. Kubernetes, for example, keeps being extended to run both virtual machines and AI workloads more efficiently. In the meantime, however, IT teams should, in addition to deploying new applications on Kubernetes clusters, at the very least have some type of migration plan for the legacy applications that need to be modernized.
The challenge and the opportunity, of course, then shifts to finding and retaining all the expertise that will be needed to manage those clusters.
