Red Hat OpenShift 4.8 helps organizations accelerate the creation of new cloud-native applications

Red Hat announced Red Hat OpenShift 4.8, the latest version of the enterprise Kubernetes platform. Providing a powerful foundation to develop and connect diverse workloads across the hybrid cloud, Red Hat OpenShift 4.8 helps organizations accelerate the creation of new cloud-native applications without abandoning existing environments and IT investments.

As organizations grow application landscapes to meet evolving needs, Kubernetes-powered cloud platforms need to not only span all open hybrid cloud infrastructure footprints, but also the variety of workloads and applications running on this foundation.

A recent Red Hat-sponsored study conducted by Pulse further expands upon this need, with the survey highlighting evolving trends for application usage on Kubernetes. Respondents reported a wide variety of workloads deployed on containers and Kubernetes, including:

• Databases or data cache
• Data ingestion, cleansing, analytics
• Logging and monitoring
• Web and application servers
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning software
• Custom apps based on Java and Microsoft .NET frameworks

As new customer goals continue to create room for market innovation, Red Hat OpenShift 4.8 provides organizations a common foundation to more consistently develop, deploy and run a hybrid mix of applications and services.

Organizations across the globe including AXA France, Bao-zun, Türkiye İş Bankası and WorldPay from FIS are turning to Red Hat OpenShift to run heterogeneous workloads, from modern data analytics and AI/ML to modernizing traditional applications built on Java and .NET frameworks. The latest release of Red Hat OpenShift helps to further accelerate developing and running a mix of applications across the entirety of the hybrid cloud.

Accelerated development and simplified management across workloads

Red Hat OpenShift 4.8, based on Kubernetes 1.21 and CRI-O 1.21 runtime interface, further simplifies the developer experience while helping expand the use cases and workload possibilities across industries. New features and enhancements include:

• IPv6/IPv4 dual stack and IPv6 single stack support provides applications with interoperability and communications for environments using IPv6 in addition to IPv4 such as in Cloud-Native Network Functions for telecommunications, and government agencies globally that require IPv6 support. This capability helps provide additional security for applications, including regulatory compliance.
• OpenShift Pipelines now allows users to declaratively define, version and track changes to their application delivery pipelines alongside their application source code in Git repositories. By doing so, developers can rely on the Git workflow to automate the deployment of their CI/CD pipelines, turning code into features at a faster and more secure pace for the business. Developers can rely on the Git workflow for managing their pipelines and leave an audit trail as Git commits as the pipelines are collaboratively updated throughout their lifecycle.
• An enhanced developer experience within the OpenShift console, including the ability for Spring Boot developers to code and test locally before sharing the code more broadly. Additionally, to further improve development with Serverless, Red Hat OpenShift 4.8 enables advanced scaling options for the developer console.
• OpenShift Serverless functions capability enables developers to create and run functions, on demand, on OpenShift. Available as a technology preview, OpenShift Serverless functions help to simplify, automate and speed up application development and operations, removing the burden of manual infrastructure provisioning and scaling.
• OpenShift sandboxed containers, based on the Kata Containers open source project, provide a more secure container runtime using lightweight virtual machines. Available as a technology preview, this adds capabilities for specific workloads that require extremely stringent application-level security. While the vast majority of applications and services are well-served by the strong security features of Linux containers, sandboxed containers provide an additional layer of isolation ideal for highly-sensitive tasks, such as privileged workloads or running untrusted code.

Expanded partner ecosystem

Over the past several years, Red Hat has seen growth in the number of Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partner workloads running on Red Hat OpenShift. According to the survey by Pulse, 63% of respondents run either a mix of ISV and custom workloads, or just ISV workloads on containers and Kubernetes.

To provide even more choice for organizations, Red Hat has expanded Red Hat OpenShift Certification to support a broader range of workloads on the enterprise Kubernetes platform. Red Hat partners can now enable and certify software solutions on OpenShift through either Operators or Helm charts. With this enhanced certification, partners can more easily tap into Kubernetes-native technologies to manage and scale software deployments.

The certified OpenShift ecosystem with Kubernetes Operators and Helm certification, now includes over 150 partner solutions, with recently certified Operators including: Intel OpenVINO Model Server and OpenNESS, Ionir container-native data platform for Kubernetes, MinIO hybrid cloud object storage, MongoDB Atlas cloud database service and certified Helm charts for HashiCorp Vault. This integrated ecosystem helps empower organizations with solutions that work hand-in-hand with OpenShift and answer a broad spectrum of cloud-native needs, including databases, AI/ML tools, application runtimes, developer tools, storage, networking, security, monitoring and logging, and more.

Additionally, to further empower organizations, Red Hat Services provides application development expertise and proven field experience to help organizations navigate the complexities of building modern, scalable, hybrid applications.

Availability

Red Hat OpenShift 4.8 is expected to be generally available in July, including the ability to try it on the Developer Sandbox for Red Hat Openshift.

“Red Hat understands that no two applications are alike and each has unique needs. Red Hat OpenShift is designed to support organizations regardless of workload type or where an application lives across the hybrid cloud. With Red Hat OpenShift 4.8, we further that vision by making it even easier for organizations to run a diverse mix of workloads from data driven intelligent applications to the mission critical traditional applications that teams are working to modernize,” said Joe Fernandes, vice president and general manager, Cloud Platforms, Red Hat.

“We are using Red Hat OpenShift to deploy large AI/ML models that automate our contract subscription process, which was previously manual and error-prone. We use a PaaS service from AXA Group Operations called OpenPaaS, a superset of OpenShift, making it easier for us to consume OpenShift in compliance with AXA security rules. We are able to build AI/ML models that automatically scan and validate documents, and improve client satisfaction. Additionally, we use GitOps for automating deployment and it helps us carry out up to 10 deployments a day,” said Pierre-Henri Gache, cloud solution architect, AXA France.