Red Hat Inc. is using the KubeCon/CloudNativeCon virtual exposition kicking off today to underscore its intentions to be to the Kubernetes container orchestrator what Red Hat Enterprise Linux is to the widely used operating system.

Among a slate of announcements today are the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift 4.5 and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, a set of new Kubernetes-based edge computing capabilities, improvements to developer tools for software containers and a collaboration with Intuit Inc. on a declarative continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes deployments.

The highlight of OpenShift 4.5 is OpenShift Virtualization, a feature Red Hat announced last spring that enables organizations to build and manage applications in virtual machines alongside applications in containers, which are lightweight software environments that include all the dependencies an application needs to run. Based on the KubeVirt open-source project, the feature addresses the limitations of VM-based workloads that can’t easily be encapsulated in containers.

The feature means OpenShift users can now choose whether to run Kubernetes on top of bare metal servers or in a virtual layer, said Joe Fernandes, vice president and general manager of core cloud platforms at Red Hat. “Most people running Kubernetes today are running on top of some kind of virtualization layer, whether in the data center or public cloud,” he said. “Making sure we run great on [VMware Inc.s’] vSphere is important for our customers.”

Once VMs are under OpenShift management, applications within them can be moved to containers gradually or kept in virtual machines. Hybrid applications can be created that leverage both environments on the same platform, Red Hat said.

OpenShift 4.5 also includes easier OpenShift deployment in vSphere environments. In previous versions, users had to set up the underlying virtual or bare-metal infrastructure before installing OpenShift. The new features come closer to “one click” installation, Fernandes said.

“The installer can boot the VMs, configure network and storage and install Kubernetes and all the components that come on top,” he said. Full-stack automation was already available in public clouds from Amazon Web Services Inc., Google LLC and Microsoft Corp. Azure along with Red Hat Virtualization.

Cluster management features that were also announced last spring are also now available, enabling users with clusters that span multiple on-premises and cloud platforms to manage them from a central point with consistent policies and governance principles. “It’s a central management console that gives you a unified view of cluster health and you can deploy applications out to one or multiple clusters,” Fernandes said.

Combined with that are edge management capabilities intended for customers that are increasingly moving intelligence to the far reaches of their network. Allied Research expects the edge infrastructure market to grow nearly 33% annually through 2025 to $16.5 billion.

Small machines can’t support large clusters, so Red Hat has started certifying configurations of as small as three nodes and is aiming to support configurations with just a single distributed worker node reporting back into a control plane, Fernandes said.

New and improved developer tools include improved remote development support in CodeReady Workspaces, preview-level support for the container-related BuildPack and Kaniko projects and full  support for the Helm 3.2 application manager and Knative serverless management platform.

The partnership with Intuit covers Argo CD, a declarative continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes deployments based on Git repositories. Open-sourced by Intuit Inc. in 2018 and incubated with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Argo CD makes it easier to manage configurations, definitions and environments for both Kubernetes and applications it hosts, Red Hat said.

Photo: Red Hat