Red Hat Simplifies and Expands Application Development with New Capabilities in Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift 4.14 helps mitigate skills gaps and simplify the complexities of IT innovation

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, introduced new capabilities and enhancements for Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes. The new features, available with the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift 4.14, are designed to help further simplify infrastructure complexities and application development for development, operations and security teams.

According to Gartner®, the current demand for IT talent significantly exceeds supply – with a recent Gartner survey finding that 86% of CIOs report facing more competition for qualified candidates and 73% saying they were worried about IT talent attrition.

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As organizations face IT staffing shortages and skills gaps, teams are often challenged with having to do more with less. Red Hat believes that having a complete application platform in place can help significantly reduce the IT skills load by abstracting away complex day-to-day operations and infrastructure management tasks from IT teams. The latest enhancements to Red Hat OpenShift are designed to help organizations reduce the operational cost and complexity of managing infrastructure and free up teams to focus on innovation and delivering cloud-native applications.

Optimizing time and resources

To help organizations reduce management overhead, hosted control planes for Red Hat OpenShift on bare metal and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization are now generally available. Based on the Hypershift project, hosted control planes help organizations reduce management costs, improve cluster provisioning time, overcome cluster scale limitations, enable self-service clusters for developers and strengthen security boundaries by decoupling control planes from workloads.

With hosted control planes for Red Hat OpenShift, organizations can run control planes on fewer nodes, providing both operational and cost efficiencies for customers. Based on a Red Hat conducted study, by using hosted control planes organizations can save up to 30% in infrastructure management costs. Additionally, developers can experience time savings of up to 60% helping to increase productivity and enable teams to deliver applications faster. From an operational perspective, multicluster management is centralized at scale, which results in fewer external factors that affect cluster status and consistency.

Increased flexibility and options across the hybrid cloud

To help organizations optimize resources and enable them to run applications where and how it makes the most sense, Red Hat OpenShift offers increased flexibility for customers so they can get started building, deploying and modernizing applications. The latest enhancements to Red Hat OpenShift enable organizations to:

• Modernize applications and move to the cloud more easily with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, now available on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), as well as Red Hat OpenShift running on AWS. This allows virtual machines to run side-by-side with containers on AWS, enabling users to preserve their existing virtualization investments and providing a consistent experience and single management interface for all types of applications, across environments.
• Develop, train and deploy compute-heavy AI applications with NVIDIA GPUs. Organizations can build and deploy generative AI applications, large language models (LLMs), chatbots and graphics-intensive applications with the NVIDIA AI platform, along with the NVIDIA L40S GPUs and the NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, which are now supported on Red Hat OpenShift.
• Deploy applications to resource-constrained devices at the far edge with the general availability of Red Hat Device Edge. With Red Hat Device Edge, an enterprise-ready and supported distribution of MicroShift, Red Hat extends operational consistency from existing hybrid cloud environments out to the edge, no matter how remote, with the same tools and processes that teams already use with Red Hat OpenShift.
• Get started faster on Google Cloud with Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated is now available on Google Cloud Marketplace, providing a flexible, consumption-based billing model. Additionally, customers can now use their Google cloud committed use discounts with Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated.
• Leverage Arm’s superior compute speed and cost savings by using Red Hat OpenShift on Arm on Google Cloud. It is now possible to deploy supported Red Hat OpenShift on Arm instances in combination with Google Cloud’s native services.
• Deploy clusters more consistently and in a more automated manner as Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) is now available via Terraform, minimizing the risks presented by manually changing infrastructure components or managing custom built scripts.

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Security features integrated throughout the application lifecycle
Red Hat OpenShift provides integrated security and compliance features designed to help organizations mitigate risks and better address compliance requirements, helping teams further streamline operations and limit additional tools needed to implement DevSecOps strategies.

New security enhancements allow customers to:

• Better protect sensitive data with secrets management, via the Red Hat OpenShift Shared Resource CSI Driver, now available as a technology preview. Secrets like certificates, encryption keys, passwords and tokens can now be stored off of clusters and in a secrets management system, which provides encryption and verification to validate compliance with security requirements. This trusted native system can help teams limit potential threats and remediate potential IT security issues more quickly with minimal overhead.
• Consume cloud provider services with increased visibility with Azure Managed Identities and Google Cloud User Tags. Azure Managed Identities and Google Cloud User Tags allow users to consume services directly from the cloud provider while providing security teams visibility to enforce IT security policies – adding another layer of security capabilities for the application platform across the hybrid cloud. With Azure Managed Identities, security teams can issue short-lived tokens as an additional authentication method to define the scope of given identities. Google Cloud User Tags allow security teams to define role-based access controls and identify the resources being used across an OpenShift environment.
• Take a security-forward approach to developing and managing applications with a no-cost trial of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service. With the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service trial, organizations can take advantage of powerful cloud-native security capabilities regardless of the underlying Kubernetes platform.

Supporting Quotes
Joe Fernandes, vice president and general manager, Hybrid Cloud Platforms, Red Hat
“Accelerating time to value is one of the top priorities we hear from our customers, but this can be a difficult ask for IT teams who are strapped for both time and resources. Red Hat OpenShift aims to simplify modern application development and IT operations with a complete application platform – abstracting away complexity and providing a comprehensive set of tools and services in a single platform. With the latest version of Red Hat OpenShift, we further reduce the strain of day-to-day infrastructure operations facing IT teams, enabling organizations to focus on driving innovation and building solutions that best meet changing customer and business needs.”

Andreas Zerfas, CTO Digital Industrial Solutions, German Edge Cloud GmbH & Co. KG
ONCITE Digital Product Systems, our scalable application platform, is exclusively powered by Red Hat OpenShift and allows us to facilitate industrial solutions for the smart factory – including analytics at the edge, quality control and real-time production insights. The adoption of self-managed Red Hat OpenShift with hosted control planes in our development ecosystem has resulted in long-term infrastructure cost savings, promoting sustained resource efficiency. It has also optimized application development processes by boosting productivity, enabling our developers to focus on building the core of industrial solutions utilizing the cluster-as-a-service, self-service option.”

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Carl-Johan Schenström, IT Infrastructure Specialist, University of Gothenburg
“Many of our most critical and sensitive projects are based on virtual machines but we knew we needed to modernize our portfolio to best meet our customer needs. We chose Red Hat OpenShift as our application platform because of the OpenShift Virtualization capabilities that allow us to run legacy applications based on VMs side by side with new cloud-native applications, making management easier and more consistent for our admins. With Red Hat OpenShift, we have been able to save a lot of time that we can now apply towards building new applications. Additionally, with the new OpenShift Virtualization support extended across public clouds, the platform will help support our strategy to utilize public cloud environments in the future, especially for compute-heavy, AI/ML and data science workloads.”

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