Red Hat, Inc. introduced new capabilities and enhancements for Red Hat
OpenShift, the industry's leading hybrid cloud application platform
powered by Kubernetes, as well as the general availability of Red Hat
Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service. The new features, delivered
with the general availability of
Red Hat OpenShift 4.16,
are designed to help organizations more easily develop, connect and
enhance the security of diverse workloads for a more consistent
experience across applications and environments.
Delivering better experiences and driving customer satisfaction are at
the center of most organization's IT goals. To do so, they frequently
look to intelligent apps, including both AI-enabled applications and
edge applications, that allow for insights to be delivered more quickly
wherever they are needed. The technology decisions made today around
these applications and more are often in support of setting
organizations up for an AI and edge-focused future. However, it's not as
simple as purely adopting the latest AI technology, as those systems
and platforms also need to run in harmony with critical traditional
applications and infrastructure like virtualized environments.
The latest enhancements to Red Hat OpenShift are designed to help
organizations connect their disparate, diverse workloads and create a
more consistent management and deployment experience, wherever an
application lives across the hybrid cloud and regardless of whether the
application is a traditional workhorse or built to harness AI
innovation.
A modern option for virtualization
As the virtualization landscape continues to evolve, many organizations
are looking to migrate existing virtualized workloads to a platform that
can run virtual machines (VMs) side-by-side with modern containerized
applications and serverless functions with the ability to modernize
those VM-based applications when needed. Red Hat is now offering
directly and through its partners a Virtualization Migration Assessment
that will take organizations through a risk assessment methodology to
help determine the best path forward for migration away from a legacy
virtualization solution.
The latest enhancements in Red Hat OpenShift for virtualization use
cases help further simplify migrating and modernizing virtualized
workloads. New features include:
-
Metro disaster recovery provides regional disaster recovery for
virtual machines (VMs) that use storage deployed on Red Hat OpenShift
Data Foundation in conjunction with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management
for Kubernetes for management.
-
Hot-add CPU provides users the ability to add additional vCPU
resources to a running VM in a declarative manner for improved memory
density with safe memory overcommit, and enables users to more easily
scale up VMs with CPU hotplug.
-
Multi-cluster virtualization monitoring with Red Hat Advanced
Cluster Management enables users to view all VMs across multiple Red Hat
OpenShift clusters as well as collect and more quickly build reports
for the VMs.
Improving the customer experience at the edge
Minimizing service downtime is paramount to delivering a quality
experience for customers and is particularly important for those
applications at the edge. To enhance service quality at the edge, Red
Hat OpenShift 4.16, introduces a "shift left" approach with image-based
updates (IBU) for single node OpenShift. Single node OpenShift users can
now shift a large portion of the update process to a pre-production
environment, which reduces the time spent updating at the production
site. Additionally, if an update fails or the application doesn't return
to a functioning state, it can be rolled back to the pre-update state.
This helps to restore service as quickly as possible, regardless of
whether the update is successful or not.
Additionally, the OpenShift-based Appliance Builder is now available as a
technology preview to Red Hat partners seeking to build turnkey,
customized appliances with self-contained Red Hat OpenShift instances.
The OpenShift-based Appliance Builder is a container-based utility that
builds a disk image that includes the Agent-based Installer, which is
used to install multiple Red Hat OpenShift clusters. This makes it
easier to install Red Hat OpenShift at remote edge sites at scale, as it
can be done with limited or no connectivity and without the need for an
external registry.
Scaling workload security across the hybrid cloud
According to Red Hat's 2024 State of Kubernetes Security Report,
security issues continue to impact business outcomes, with 67% of
respondents indicating that their companies delayed or slowed
application development as a result of rising concerns. Additionally,
the complexity of container-based Kubernetes environments is also a
factor that some organizations still struggle with.
Helping organizations take a security-forward approach to building,
deploying and maintaining cloud-native applications at scale, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service
is now generally available. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud
Service is a fully managed Kubernetes-native security cloud service that
supports both Red Hat OpenShift as well as non-Red Hat Kubernetes
platforms, including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Google
Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
With Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service, organizations can
start securing workloads within minutes while scaling more easily across
clouds and geographies without the additional overhead or complexities.
Availability
Red Hat OpenShift 4.16 is now generally available. More information,
including how to update to the latest version, is available
here.