Red Hat Readies Major DevOps Upgrade for OpenShift Platform
Red Hat today announced it will update the Red Hat OpenShift platform based on Kubernetes in July to add support for OpenShift Pipelines based on the open source Tekton software and an OpenShift Console that makes it possible to locally write and test code.
Version 4.8 of Red Hat OpenShift also provides access to technical previews of an OpenShift Serverless capability that enables developers to create functions and instances of Kata container runtimes to isolate containers using lightweight virtual machines.
Finally, Red Hat OpenShift 4.8 also adds support for both a IPv6/IPv4 dual stack and IPv6 single stack.
Based on version 1.21 of Kubernetes and version 1.21 of the Container Runtime Interface defined by the Open Container Initiative (OCI), otherwise known as CRI-O, Red Hat is also now making it possible for partners to have their offerings certified by Red Hat regardless of whether they employ operators or Helm Charts to install them. Red Hat reports there are now more than 150 offerings that have been certified to run on Red Hat OpenShift.
A recent survey of 100 enterprises IT executives conducted by Pulse on behalf of Red Hat suggests application environments based on Kubernetes are becoming more diverse. More than three quarters of respondents (77%) said they are deploying or plan to deploy a mix of both stateless and stateful workloads on containers and Kubernetes. A full 99% are modernizing their Java and .NET applications on containers and Kubernetes using either monolithic, microservices, or a mix of both architectures. The top challenges most associated with modernizing existing and legacy applications are reducing the time and cost of modernization (57%), settling on the right approach (52%) and absence of knowledge of the legacy applications (50%).
The top workloads being deployed are databases or data cache (80%), data ingestion, cleansing and analytics (66%) and logging and monitoring (60%).
Stu Miniman, director of market insights for cloud platforms at Red Hat, says support for OpenShift Pipelines provides access to a set of tools for declaratively creating DevOps pipelines using the Tekton project that is being advanced under the auspices of the Continuous Delivery (CD) Foundation, an arm of the Linux Foundation. Generally available since last month, OpenShift Pipelines will make it simpler for DevOps teams to create workflows based on GitOps best practices, notes Miniman.
OpenShift Serverless, meanwhile, represents an effort to make Knative, a set of middleware for accessing serverless computing platforms based on open source software, more accessible, while OpenShift Console makes the platform more appealing to developers that want to employ, for example, Spring Boot to build Java applications, adds Miniman.
Competition among providers of the platforms that will host the containerized applications being developed and deployed on Kubernetes is, of course, already fierce. Red Hat, however, is betting that a distribution of Kubernetes that can run on any cloud or any on-premises IT environment will attract enterprise IT organizations that want to be able to standardize on a platform that can be consistently managed the same way, regardless of where it runs. It’s hard to say how far down the path toward achieving that hybrid cloud computing goal organizations are just yet, but, as Kubernetes becomes more widely deployed, one way or another, most of them will eventually get there.
