Red Hat Inc., provider of open-source solutions, today announced the launch of Developer Sandbox for Red Hat OpenShift, an OpenShift-based development environment that will give organizations the ability to prototype Kubernetes-based applications rapidly.

The OpenShift sandbox is a private environment in a shared, multitenant cluster already configured with a set of developer tools, so that the preparation is done before the developers “walk” into the environment. Rather like a virtual garage, it’s set up with everything they need.

Developers can get started right away by putting together Kubernetes applications using the same infrastructure and tools that would run in production environments – without the need to worry about production hardware and no risk of breaking anything anyone can see.

Plus, since it’s all virtualized, the sandbox allows them to save states, freeze them, set them aside for later and restore them as desired. It’s even possible to destroy everything and start from a clean slate whenever needed.

“With the OpenShift sandbox and latest update to our developer tools, we are taking steps to make it even easier for developers to get started building for Kubernetes,” said Mithun Dhar, vice president and general manager of Developer Tools and Programs at Red Hat.

The OpenShift Developer Sandbox makes it easy to get started and get going with its integrated developer tools, which are designed to provide a safe environment for building new applications and services, creating containers from source code or Docker files and more.

Red Hat also announced a raft of new updates to its tools that will bolster OpenShift and Kubernetes development. Many of these new tool updates more tightly integrate with OpenShift and will benefit the use of the new Sandbox.

For example, CodeReady WorkSpaces 2.8, CodeReady Studio 12.19, CodeReady Dependency Analytics 0.3.2 and CodeReady Containers 1.25 are all updates to Red Hat’s CodeReady, a developer tool for cloud-native development using Kubernetes and containers for pre-configured development environments. Workspaces and Studio both now have an easier time logging into and configuring sandbox integrations for building and accessing applications, with more consistent user experiences.

GitHub Actions for OpenShift and now integrates with Buildah and Podman, container managers, to make it easier to push container images for deploying to OpenShift. Visual Studio Code Tools for OpenShift can now add clusters from OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka, a managed and hosted Kafka service that enables developers to easily incorporate streaming data into apps.

“Much of our work around Red Hat OpenShift has been focused on maximizing developer productivity and enabling developers to take full advantage of the power of Kubernetes,” said Dhar.

These releases, and more, are generally available today with a free Red Hat account on the developer portal.

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