With the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift 4.14, new features are now accessible that further simplify application development processes, reducing skill gaps and addressing complexities in IT innovation.
As a global leader in open-source solutions, Red Hat has announced new features and improvements to its industry-leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift. These new features in Red Hat OpenShift 4.14 help infrastructure, development, and security teams simplify infrastructure complexities and application development processes.
According to Gartner®, the demand for IT talent greatly exceeds the current number of experts. A recent Gartner survey found that 86% of CIOs are experiencing increased competition for qualified workers, and 73% are concerned about burnout in their IT teams.
As companies face skill shortages and capacity constraints in IT teams, these teams are empowered to do more with less. Red Hat believes a comprehensive application platform can significantly reduce the IT skill burden by taking over complex daily operations and infrastructure management requirements from IT teams. The latest improvements in Red Hat OpenShift are designed to help companies reduce operational costs and the complexity of infrastructure management, enabling teams to focus on innovation and delivering cloud-native applications.
Improving Time and Resource Efficiency
Hosted control planes for Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on physical hardware have been made generally available to help companies reduce management expenses. Based on the Hypershift project, these hosted control planes lower management costs, improve the configuration time of clusters, assist in scaling beyond limits, enable self-service clusters for developers, and strengthen security boundaries by decoupling control planes from workloads.
With hosted control planes for Red Hat OpenShift, companies can operate control planes with fewer nodes, achieving both operational and cost efficiencies. According to research supported by Red Hat, companies using hosted control planes can save up to 30% in infrastructure management costs, while developers can gain up to 60% time savings, increasing efficiency and enabling faster application deployment. On the operational side, multi-cluster management is centralized and scalable, reducing the number of external factors affecting the clusters’ state and consistency.
Increased Flexibility and Options in Hybrid Cloud
To help companies improve resource utilization and deploy applications wherever it makes sense, Red Hat OpenShift offers increased flexibility, enabling companies to start building, deploying, and modernizing applications. The latest enhancements to Red Hat OpenShift enable companies to do the following:
- Modernize applications and move them to the cloud more easily with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, now accessible through Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), allowing virtual machines to run alongside containers on AWS. This offers users a consistent experience and a single management interface for all types of applications across all environments while leveraging existing virtualization investments.
- Develop, train, and deploy high-computing AI applications with NVIDIA GPUs. Companies can create and deploy advanced AI applications, comprehensive language models (LLM), chatbots, and graphics-intensive applications with NVIDIA AI platform support on Red Hat OpenShift, including NVIDIA L40S GPU and NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU.
- Deploy applications on resource-constrained devices at the farthest edge of edge computing networks with the general availability of Red Hat Device Edge. As an enterprise-ready and supported distribution of MicroShift, Red Hat Device Edge extends the operational consistency of existing hybrid cloud environments to any part of the edge computing network, even in remote locations, using the same tools and processes with Red Hat OpenShift.
- Start working on Google Cloud faster with Red Hat OpenShift. Now accessible through Google Cloud Marketplace, Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated offers a flexible pay-as-you-go model and allows customers to use the Google cloud with commitment discounts.
- Benefit from Arm’s superior computing speed and cost savings with Red Hat OpenShift on Arm on Google Cloud. Supported Red Hat OpenShift on Arm instances can now be deployed with Google Cloud’s native services.
- Deploy clusters more consistently and automatically with Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA) now accessible through Terraform. This reduces the risks associated with manually changing infrastructure components or creating custom scripts.
Integrated Security Features at Every Stage of the Application Lifecycle
Red Hat OpenShift, with integrated security and compliance features designed to help companies reduce risks and meet compliance requirements, helps teams improve operations and limit the number of additional tools required to implement DevSecOps strategies.
New security enhancements enable customers to:
- Better protect sensitive data with secret management through the Red Hat OpenShift Shared Resource CSI Driver, accessible as a technology preview. Secrets like certificates, encryption keys, passwords, and tokens can be stored away from clusters, with the secret management system offering encryption and authentication to meet security requirements. This trusted local system helps teams limit potential threats and address potential IT security issues with minimal additional budget.
- Use consumer cloud provider services with enhanced visibility through Azure Managed Identities and Google Cloud User Tags. Azure Managed Identities and Google Cloud User Tags allow users to obtain services directly from the cloud provider while providing security teams with visibility to implement IT security policies, adding an extra layer of security to the hybrid cloud application platform.
- Azure Managing Identities enables security teams to create short-lived tokens as an additional verification method to define the boundaries of given identities. Google Cloud User Tags allow security teams to define role-based access controls and identify resources used in the OpenShift environment.
- Adopt a security-first approach in developing and managing applications with a free trial of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service. With the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service trial, companies can take advantage of powerful cloud-native security features, regardless of the underlying Kubernetes platform.
Accessibility
- Red Hat OpenShift 4.14 is now generally available. More information on how to upgrade to the latest version can be found here.
- Joe Fernandes, Vice President and General Manager, Hybrid Cloud Platforms, Red Hat, comments on the subject: “Reducing the time spent creating value is one of the top priorities we hear from customers, but it can be a challenging goal for IT teams constrained by both time and resources. Red Hat OpenShift aims to simplify modern application development processes and IT operations with a comprehensive platform offering a full set of tools and services, removing complexity and unifying everything under one platform. With the latest version of Red Hat OpenShift, we’re further lightening the daily infrastructure operation burden on IT teams, empowering companies to drive innovation and develop solutions that best meet the changing needs of their customers and businesses.“
