Red Hat simplifies workload diversity across the hybrid cloud with latest version of Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat, Inc., introduced new capabilities and enhancements for Red Hat OpenShift, an 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 organisations 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 organisation’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 organisations 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 virtualised environments.

The latest enhancements to Red Hat OpenShift are designed to help organisations 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 virtualisation

As the virtualisation landscape continues to evolve, many organisations are looking to migrate existing virtualised workloads to a platform that can run virtual machines (VMs) side-by-side with modern containerised applications and serverless functions with the ability to modernise those VM-based applications when needed. Red Hat is now offering directly and through its partners a Virtualisation Migration Assessment that will take organisations through a risk assessment methodology to help determine the best path forward for migration away from a legacy virtualisation solution.

The latest enhancements in Red Hat OpenShift for virtualisation use cases help further simplify migrating and modernising virtualised 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 virtualisation 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

Minimising 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, customised 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 organisations still struggle with.

Helping organisations 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, organisations can start securing workloads within minutes while scaling more easily across clouds and geographies without the additional overhead or complexities.