DEVOPSdigest

Red Hat introduced new capabilities and enhancements for Red Hat OpenShift, a hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, as well as the technology preview of Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed.

The new features, delivered with the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift 4.17, are designed to accelerate innovation across the hybrid cloud without compromising on stringent security and compliance requirements.

The latest enhancements to Red Hat OpenShift are designed to cut through complexity, further simplifying application development while building in security features that limit bottlenecks.

Additionally, with the technology preview of OpenShift Lightspeed, organizations are able to use integrated generative AI (gen AI) to improve team productivity, regardless of skill level.

Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed provides a virtual assistant integrated into Red Hat OpenShift that lets teams ask technical questions in straightforward sentences and receive detailed answers, improving how teams learn and work with OpenShift.

Using an English natural-language interface, users can ask the virtual assistant OpenShift-related questions. It assists with troubleshooting and investigating cluster resources by leveraging Red Hat’s extensive platform knowledge - enabling users to be more productive and efficient while freeing up IT teams to drive greater innovation. The technology preview release of OpenShift Lightspeed now adds support for Red Hat OpenShift AI and Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI as model providers, enabling organizations to use Red Hat as the source of the underlying LLM.
Streamlined experience across virtual machines and containers

Red Hat OpenShift 4.17 brings meaningful enhancements to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, improving the management of virtualized workloads. Key features include improved safe memory oversubscription, which increases workload density by allowing more virtual machines to run than the available physical memory, and improved dynamic workload rebalancing, ensuring resource optimization and stability during cluster upgrades or changes to workload demand. Storage live migration is introduced, as a technology preview, allowing non-disruptive movement of data between storage devices and storage classes while a VM is running. The release also introduces, in technology preview, a dedicated virtualization admin console experience, providing a focused view for managing the OpenShift cluster which is limited to the features, add-ons, and plugins relevant to virtualization, thereby driving greater administrator efficiency.

In addition, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, available separately or as part of Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, has new capabilities for managing virtual machines across multiple clusters. These include improved search and filtering for VMs, as well as, in technology preview, the ability to stop, start, restart, and pause VMs directly from Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, enabling a single management interface for VM admins to interact with their resources, regardless of which cluster they are hosted on.
Security without holding back innovation

Red Hat OpenShift 4.17 introduces new security features to help organizations focus on innovation without having to compromise on the platform’s security posture.

New features in technology preview include native network isolation for namespaces to keep sensitive workloads and data discrete, user namespaces in pods to protect against privilege escalations, as well as the Confidential Compute Attestation Operator provides attestation services for confidential container workloads, providing protection of data in use.

Red Hat OpenShift 4.17 is now generally available.