DEVOPSdigest

Red Hat introduced new capabilities and enhancements for Red Hat OpenShift, available with the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift 4.14, designed to help further simplify infrastructure complexities and application development for development, operations and security 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.

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.

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.

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.

Red Hat OpenShift 4.14 is now generally available.