Enterprise technology company Red Hat Inc. said today it’s updating the version of its cloud-native and container-based application development platform Red Hat OpenShift that’s specifically targeted at Amazon Web Services Inc. customers.

The company said at the AWS re:Invent 2023 conference that the Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, also known as ROSA, is being enhanced with the general availability of hosted control planes, bringing a number of benefits to users, including lower costs, greater operational efficiency and enhanced reliability and resiliency.

The ROSA platform was first launched in 2021 as a turnkey application development platform that enables companies to build and deploy business apps more quickly while leveraging the scale and capabilities of the AWS cloud. The idea is that developers can focus on innovating rather than managing the underlying infrastructure of their applications, taking advantage of Amazon’s native cloud services. In addition, customers benefit from simplified billing through the AWS Marketplace.

ROSA is a specialist version of the Red Hat OpenShift platform for building and deploying modern applications at scale using the Kubernetes container orchestration platform. With it, companies can more easily create applications that can run on any computing platform and in any location.

With the addition of hosted control planes, Red Hat said customers stand to benefit in a variety of ways. Hosted control planes provide them with a highly available control plane that’s isolated from other applications, within AWS’ infrastructure, resulting in more effective and efficient use of cloud resources, the company said.

One of the most noticeable benefits for users will be a lower total cost of ownership, Red Hat promised. The company’s own studies show that when customers deploy ROSA with hosted control planes, they can save up to five times the costs versus hosting the control plane within their own AWS account.

In addition, customers can spin up and tear down clusters more easily as they require them, leading to even greater cost savings. Another advantage of hosted control planes is they make it easier for customers to change between node types.

The efficiency gains stem from the fact that infrastructure provisioning is now fully automated, meaning it takes less time to deploy new applications. Moreover, workload scheduling is accelerated, since users only have to wait for worker nodes. Finally, ROSA with hosted control planes eliminated the need for autoscaling, as this is now fully automated.

In terms of reliability and resiliency, Red Hat said, offloading control plane infrastructure management eliminates the chances of an accidental deletion of cloud resources. That’s because AWS administrators will have to interact only with the workloads, not with the control plane artifacts. It results in a simplified ownership model, where users can just selectively upgrade the control plane and worker nodes separately, meaning more control and flexibility.

Finally, Red Hat reeled off a long list of benefits that result from the architectural improvements it has implemented within the ROSA platform. The latest version is said to introduce a “paradigm shift” in how users can deploy and manage ROSA clusters. For instance, developers can now roll out their applications within a single availability zone, two zones or all of the zones within a cloud region, without concerning themselves with control plane availability. That’s because availability will always be distributed across multiple zones, the company said.

Users also gain the ability to quickly provision a dedicated, isolated control plane for each Kubernetes cluster, with the option to make it available publicly or expose it privately via a dedicated AWS PrivateLink endpoint.

As for cloud admins, they’ll benefit from the simplified provisioning process, in which various resources have been moved outside the scope of the cluster boundary. Instead, they simply have a single source of truth that’s provisioned directly via the ROSA command line interface or OpenShift Cluster Manager tool.

Red Hat also spoke of security benefits, with strengthened boundaries that result from the decoupling of the control planes from workloads. The control plane is also separated from worker node upgrades, ensuring a more consistent and secure control plane upgrade cadence that won’t affect those nodes.

Image: Red Hat