Calling it a common operating platform for the hybrid cloud, Red Hat, Inc. today rolled out version 4 of OpenShift, its version of the Kubernetes platform for container orchestration.

The new version adds extensive automation features that Red Hat said enable administrators to provision and manage large container collections across a mix of infrastructure. Originally positioned as a platform-as-a-service, OpenShift was overhauled three years ago in a Red Hat response to growing enterprise adoption of containers and the initial success of Kubernetes.

Containers are portable, self-contained operating environments that support discrete applications and Kubernetes is an open-source orchestration layer that automates provisioning and management. Red Hat said more than 1,000 customers are now managing containers with OpenShift.

Simpler administration

The new release, announced at the Red Hat Summit conference in Boston, is focused on simplifying administration for customers using multiple cloud and on-premises platforms. Much of the process of updating containers has been automated and many basic management tasks can now be performed on a simplified console that can be even accessed from a mobile device.

“One traditional challenge of Kubernetes has been that the installation process is tricky,” said Ashesh Badani, senior vice president and general manager of cloud platforms at Red Hat. “We’ve taken a container-optimized operating system and integrated one-click installation and over-the-air updates. The platform itself is able to understand the need for updates as well as auto-scaling.”

The operating system is based on CoreOS, which Red Hat picked up with the acquisition of CoreOS Inc. last year.  It has all the security and stability features of its bigger sibling but is optimized for automated updates managed by Kubernetes and enabled by OpenShift.

Application maintenance, scaling and failover can be handled with “operators,” which are prepackaged code modules from Red Hat and others that automate specific management functions. With this release Red Hat introduced OpenShift Certified Operators, an expansion of the operator framework that it picked up with CoreOS. The first 30 certified operators are listed in an app-storelike catalog that Red Hat debuted in February.

“The beauty of operators is that they run exactly the same in any Kubernetes environment” both on-premises and in the cloud, said Brian Gracely, Red Hat’s director of product strategy. “[Independent software vendors] are motivated to embrace this framework.”

In keeping with its traditional focus on developers, Red Hat folded in numerous features designed to appeal to coders. CodeReady Workspaces provide an integrated development environment for building containerized applications. OpenShift Service Mesh combines the open-source Istio service mesh controller with Jaeger distributed tracing and Kiali mesh visualization into a single package for microservices-based development.

Serverless development is aided by inclusion of Knative, an open-source platform for building serverless applications that was birthed at Google LLC, and KEDA, a platform for deploying serverless event-driven containers on Kubernetes that was jointly developed by Red Hat and Microsoft Corp.

Red Hat said OpenShift 4 will be available on all major public clouds as well as on private cloud platforms, virtual machines and bare-metal servers.

Photo: Paul Gillin