Red Hat Extends Scope and Reach of OpenShift Platform
Red Hat today expanded the portfolio of offerings it provides on top of Red Hat OpenShift to include a suite of tools for developers in addition to making OpenShift Lightspeed, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) developed in collaboration with IBM, generally available.
Announced at the Red Hat Summit 2025 conference, Red Hat also revealed that Microsoft and Oracle will join its roster of cloud service providers that support Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, an offering based on open-source KubeVirt software that makes it possible to encapsulate kernel-based virtual machines (KVMs) in a container.
James Labocki, senior director for product management at Red Hat, said the Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite combines several existing tools into a single offering that is easier to deploy and manage. Those tools include an internal developer portal (IDP), Red Hat Trusted Artifact Signer, a tool based on open-source Sigstore software that enables developers to apply cryptographic signing and verification to software artifacts, and Red Hat Trusted Profile Analyzer, a tool for managing software bill of materials (SBOMs) and vulnerabilities.
Red Hat has also extended Red Hat Trusted Artifact Signer to now include support for containers based on the Open Container Initiative (OCI) format.
The overall goal is to make it simpler for DevOps and platform engineering teams to securely provide self-service capabilities to application developers using templates accessed via a portal that can be easily integrated with Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines and Red Hat OpenShift GitOps platforms for building cloud-native applications, said Labocki.
Those teams can also make available Podman Desktop tools to create and manage containers, plugins for various integrated development environments (IDEs), Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces, a cloud-based IDE and Red Hat Inference Server, a platform for deploying AI workloads.
Additionally, Red Hat also makes available a toolkit for migrating monolithic applications to Red Hat OpenShift.
Collectively, these latest additions to the Red Hat cloud native portfolio serve to make the Red Hat OpenShift platform based on Kubernetes more accessible at a time when many organizations are re-evaluating their commitment to rival platforms such as VMware, noted Labocki.
Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed, for example, provides step-by-step assistance in natural language directly within the Red Hat OpenShift web console to better navigate complex application environments, he noted. IT teams can also share information from their environment to enable OpenShift Lightspeed to provide answers with greater context using models from OpenAI or IBM. Red Hat is also previewing a bring your own knowledge (BYO Knowledge) capability that enables them to add their own organizational knowledge and process documentation to Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed.
It’s not clear how many applications are currently running on Red Hat OpenShift, but with the forthcoming aid of Microsoft and Oracle, it’s apparent Red Hat sees an opportunity to migrate more legacy monolithic applications to its Kubernetes platform. Oracle, for example, in addition to providing support for Red Hat Virtualization, now provides a wider range of configurations for Red Hat OpenShift running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Oracle is now also validating key applications and software, including Oracle WebLogic Server, to run on Red Hat OpenShift.
Red Hat, meanwhile, has initiated a validation effort for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to better support IT teams running Oracle Database.
According to Red Hat, there has been a 178% growth in Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization deployments since the start of 2024, including Johnson Controls and Finis Terrae University.
Regardless of the distribution of Kubernetes that might be preferred, the one clear thing is that the portfolio of tooling provided is now clearly becoming significantly broader with each passing day.
