DEVOPSdigest

Red Hat announced updates to its portfolio of developer tools, bringing new capabilities that further equip customers to build, deploy and manage applications in Kubernetes-based environments.

With tools optimized for Red Hat OpenShift, developers can tap into the benefits of Kubernetes—including speed, consistency, portability and scale—without extending development time or complexity.

The realities of today's business environment are driving organizations toward more efficient and agile development and deployment approaches. This is the essence of cloud-native applications, where containers and Kubernetes are at the heart of these efforts. However, it often requires a shift in the tooling and processes for development teams. OpenShift eases this transition, enabling organizations to lean into this new paradigm while continuing to use their current tools and skill sets, and maintaining and supporting existing applications.

Red Hat OpenShift 4.5 addresses the needs of both developers who are unfamiliar with Kubernetes and just want to code, as well as expert Kubernetes developers seeking maximum flexibility. In addition, Red Hat continues to move toward a supported Kubernetes-native continuous delivery and GitOps solution based on ArgoCD, where Red Hat is working with the Argo open source community to drive faster innovation in this space.

Red Hat has made enhancements to a number of other important areas in the developer portfolio:

- CodeReady Workspaces 2.2 enables remote development teams to provision and share environments with the click of a button, enabling faster starts and best-of-breed, low-latency interactions.

- Container builds continue to evolve in OpenShift with developer preview support for Buildpacks and Kaniko alongside Source-to-Image and Dockerfile builds through Buildah.

- Helm 3.2 is now a core part of OpenShift with a web console that simplifies working with charts and releases.

- odo 2 is also included with OpenShift and provides a new way for developers to iterate on code with its command line interface supporting Kubernetes as well as OpenShift, open model for tools through a standard definition, and rapid iterative Java development using Quarkus.

- OpenShift Serverless support of Knative serving and eventing enables developers to build serverless and event-driven applications that include Strimzi (Apache Kafka on Kubernetes) and service mesh.

- Finally, as continuous integration (CI) tools have become integral to development teams, Red Hat has expanded the functionality of Tekton in OpenShift Pipelines, and added OpenShift plugins for GitHub Actions, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Jenkins, and GitLab runner support.

Brad Micklea, VP, Developer Tools, Program and Advocacy, Red Hat, said: “Red Hat OpenShift began as a developer-focused application platform and that ethos didn’t change when it adopted Kubernetes as its execution engine. We’ve continued to balance investment in new and unique tools to simplify Kubernetes for developers, with a broad set of plugins to popular IDEs and CI/CD systems so teams aren’t forced to change their toolset when they move to containers and Kubernetes for their deployed applications. OpenShift 4.5 shows continued acceleration in these areas, and is evidence of why IDC said that OpenShift ‘represents a breakthrough in the space of cloud-native development tools.’”