Red Hat Inc. has issued a major update to its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, focusing on better support for cloud-native applications and containers.

Red Hat acquired JBoss just over a decade ago, and since that time the world of technology has evolved beyond all recognition. In light of that, JBoss EAP 7 has been optimized for deployment in cloud environments, where much of IT development now takes place. The new platform is described as “lightweight” and comes with a much smaller footprint than earlier versions, making it ideal for building both traditional apps and modular, microservices- style applications.

The company said JBoss EAP 7 combines Java EE 7 APIs with popular DevOps tools such as Red Hat’s JBoss Developer Studio integrated developer environment, Jenkins, Arquillian and Maven. In addition, Red Hat has built in support for numerous JavaScript and Web frameworks.

Users can take advantage of numerous new technologies and features with JBoss EAP 7 when it’s deployed on Red Hat’s OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS), including containers, elastic scaling, load balancing and health monitoring. For example, users can deploy containers directly from JBoss Developer Studio. The new platform eliminates the need for overlapping features, Red Hat said, which can contribute towards making a more efficient DevOps environment.

Red Hat wants to “bridge the reality of building and maintaining a business today with the aspiration of IT innovation tomorrow,” according to its vice president and general manager for middleware, Mike Piech.

Members of Red Hat’s Developers community can download JBoss EAP 7 now, while customers can obtain the new update from Red Hat’s Customer Portal.

Alongside JBoss EAP 7, Red Hat also unveiled a new JBoss Core Services Collection. The new services encompass all the common foundational building blocks needed to build modern enterprise apps, including Web single sign-on, HTTP load balancing, proxying, and management and monitoring capabilities for applications and services.

Users can access the JBoss Core Services Collection through their Red Hat JBoss Middleware subscription at no extra cost. Red Hat promised that customers will receive full support online and via the phone, as well as all the latest patches, security fixes and updates for each component version.

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