DEVOPSdigest

Red Hat announced a series of updates in its portfolio of developer tools and programs aimed at delivering greater productivity, security and scale for developers building applications on Red Hat OpenShift.

With updates to tools like Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines, Red Hat OpenShift GitOps and the Red Hat build of Quarkus — as well as an expanding roster of training resources available on Kube By Example — Kubernetes developers can more easily build, automate and deploy cloud-native applications for hybrid multicloud environments.

"We hear loud and clear that Kubernetes is still the platform of choice for developers today, and strive to build out our portfolio of developer tools for Red Hat OpenShift in ways that improve the developer experience and help maximize productivity. To be effective at this, we've built a solid understanding of what developers need in order to address today's challenges, and how that might be different from what they will need tomorrow. This is the hallmark of our focus and commitment to the developer community." said Mithun Dhar, VP and GM, Developer Tools and Programs, Red Hat.

Enhancing the developer experience with tools and capabilities that not only address the top challenges developers face, but also enable them to work more efficiently, is critically important for organizations today. When speed and agility can mean the difference between remaining competitive or losing relevance in the market, the ability to quickly deliver new products and services needs to be a top priority.

Kubernetes and Git are two of the most loved and most wanted tools among developers today— and for good reason. Kubernetes is the leading container orchestration platform and the de facto standard for automating the deployment and management of cloud-native applications in production. Combined with tools like OpenShift Pipelines, a cloud-native CI/CD system, and OpenShift GitOps, a powerful version control tool, Red Hat OpenShift gives developers a solid foundation to drive greater agility across the application life cycle.

The latest versions of OpenShift GitOps and OpenShift Pipelines introduce new capabilities that help improve the developer experience. OpenShift Pipelines now further integrates into software development lifecycles, automating updates to be applied across all environments. This includes deeper integration with the open source Tekton project, using webhooks to trigger pipelines upon specific git events like a push to a repository or merging a pull request. OpenShift Pipelines is also now verified to work in fully managed environments, via Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS and Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated. With the OpenShift console, developers can more easily take advantage of community tasks in pipelines via an integration with TektonHub.

With OpenShift GitOps, developers can now enable greater code security through practices that define where, when and how updates can be made via Git. This includes enhanced security, simplifying multitenancy configurations and the ability to use OpenShift credentials for logging into ArgoCD.

The open source Quarkus project offers developers powerful capabilities for building and extending their Java- and Spring-based applications in a Kubernetes-native world.

Using a unique compile-time boot process and tight integration with OpenShift, the Red Hat build of Quarkus provides access to production-ready capabilities that are well-suited for building cloud-native applications.

The latest release introduces a number of features that help to improve overall developer productivity, including:

- Continuous testing, which gives developers near-instant feedback on code changes, helps to boost developer efficiency.

- A new Quarkus CLI that eliminates the need for developers to use Gradle or Maven commands, which provides greater consistency and brevity for common tasks.

- An updated, more graphical developer user interface gives visual representations of extensions and documentation, REST endpoints, CDI beans, and more.

- New developer services that automatically create, configure, and connect popular databases, message queues, and more to applications as they are developed.

As a Kubernetes-native framework designed for developing fast, lightweight applications, Quarkus also provides an ideal platform for writing serverless functions. The latest release introduces integration with Funqy, a portable function API, and Knative, an open source project that adds components for deploying, running, and managing serverless, cloud-native applications to Kubernetes (both integrations currently available as technology previews).

Serverless computing is continuing to evolve and become increasingly suitable for general-purpose workloads. To help developers more fully take advantage of this trend, particularly in the context of event driven container-based architectures, Red Hat OpenShift Serverless continues to evolve and bring in updated components from upstream Knative.

Security continues to be a focus for Red Hat OpenShift Serverless, which now includes the encryption of inflight data through OpenShift Service Mesh. Red Hat OpenShift Serverless provides one-click installation through an Operator. In addition to the Knative kn command line interface (CLI), serverless deployment and topology can also be created using elevated developer experience through the OpenShift DevConsole.

Further, Red Hat has introduced and enhanced the technology preview of OpenShift Serverless Functions, a function development framework and tooling built on top of Knative. The central user tool is the kn func command line utility, which is a plugin that extends the Knative kn CLI to enable function development capabilities on the Knative platform. These functions provide a local developer experience through Docker and Podman on MacOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows platforms.

Development of this plugin was led by Red Hat through the open source Boson project. In July 2021, Red Hat donated Boson to the Knative project and its community, enabling developers to more fully take advantage of function development capabilities on top of Knative.

Kube by Example, a free online training resource backed by Red Hat, offers development and operations professionals the opportunity to learn about Kubernetes in a personal, hands-on manner. Developers will find courses designed to cover the full spectrum of Kubernetes-related technologies, covering essential knowledge to more advanced topics.