Red Hat Extends OpenShift Platform Plus Environment
Red Hat today furthered its efforts to provide a complete curated Kubernetes environment with an update to its Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus offering that provides a raft of additional management and security capabilities.
The latest iteration of Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus is based on version 4.11 of Red Hat OpenShift, a distribution of Kubernetes that is based on version 1.23 of the platform and version 1.23 of CRI-O 1.23 of the now default container runtime for the platform.
Other capabilities added in this release of Red Hat OpenShift include support for Pod Security Admission integration to better isolate Kubernetes pods and sandboxed Katana containers that can now run on a single OpenShift node or the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
OpenShift can now also install OpenShift directly from major public cloud marketplaces and has been made easier to install via a single click on top of Nutantix virtual machines.
At the same time, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management has been updated to provide the ability to now deploy and manage up to 2,500 single-node OpenShift clusters. There are also now edge metrics-collectors designed specifically for single-node clusters and smaller workloads to enable observability at the network edge. Red Hat also enables automatic fleet-wide visibility of applications.
In addition, Red Hat is making available technology previews of integrations between Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management and the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform along with an Kyberno PolicySet integration to manage policies as code.
Finally, Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation has been updated to add support for the OpenShift API for data protection to provide an operator to backup and restore applications and specific data sets. It now also provides multi-cluster monitoring capabilities via Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management.
Tushar Katarki, director of product management for Red Hat, said it’s becoming clear enterprise IT organizations are looking to streamline deployment and ongoing management of Kubernetes environments by relying more on an integrated set of curated open source tools that extend the core Kubernetes platform. That is especially critical as enterprise IT organizations look to deploy a set of Kubernetes clusters that can be consistently managed from the network edge to the multiple public clouds.
It’s not clear to what degree enterprise IT organizations are moving to standardize on a Kubernetes distribution to drive hybrid cloud computing initiatives. Most organizations are, however, aware they don’t want to be locked into a particular distribution or service that invoked proprietary APIs that lock them into a specific platform, said Katarki.
Of course, it’s only a matter of time before more organizations eventually confront that issue as more microservices-based applications based on containers are built and deployed on a Kubernetes cluster. While Kubernetes itself provides a standard set of APIs, almost every managed instance of Kubernetes in the cloud, for example, invokes proprietary APIs that make it challenging to migrate an application from one platform to another. The challenge and the opportunity now is to define a single Kubernetes environment that can run anywhere today and tomorrow as requirements continue to evolve and change, and as use cases for Kubernetes platforms continue to evolve and change.
