According to Red Hat, companies need three things: more edge, more Kubernetes and, above all, simplifications in multi-cloud environments.
Red Hat presented four new features at this year’s virtual summit event today: RHEL 8.4, a new version of OpenShift and two new management tools for hybrid cloud environments.
New in the Linux distribution is RHEL 8.4 broad support for edge computing. This includes various extensions, such as the support of 3-node clusters and remote nodes through OpenShift, which allows this platform to be used even in the environment of limited IT resources. Other components geared towards the edge are Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, the Ansible Automation Platform, which can be used to automate workflows in the edge, Red Hat Integration to connect applications across multiple edge deployments, and Red Hat Data Services to manage the data in the data center and at the edge.
OpenShift gets a plus
Red Hat’s OpenShift Kubernetes platform has been expanded to include the OpenShift Platform Plus. Above all, the new version should better support DevSecOps across complex multi-cloud environments. It builds on the features of the existing OpenShift Container Platform, but also offers additional features such as support for security criteria during development, simplified application management and full container registration.
Support for multi-cloud environments is a particular focus of Red Hat. An extended version of Insights was presented for this purpose. This is a predictive analytics tool that can now also be used for OpenShift and the Ansible Automation Platform. At the same time, the previous usage options for RHEL have been expanded. The main purpose of the new Insights version is to improve the transparency of multi-cloud environments across many teams, since, according to Red Hat, there is often a lack of a holistic overview. This, in turn, would harm IT productivity.
Multi-cloud costs too much
Based on a Forrester study, Red Hat emphasizes: “Companies where product development, operations optimization and Resource management that takes place in silos will not be successful.” Another problem that can be addressed with the new Insights version is the sometimes rampant costs of a multi-cloud. There is a special module for this that allows an intuitive overview of all costs – top-down from the total cloud and on-premise costs down to individual bare metal servers as well as each project and each team.
In this category of enhanced multi-cloud management also falls the fourth announcement: a managed cloud service to support cloud-native applications. The service consists of OpenShift API Management, OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka and OpenShift Data Science. Together, they should offer an optimal user experience with which cloud-native applications in hybrid environments can be created, deployed, managed and scaled faster. According to Red Hat, these services help reduce the operational complexity of large-scale IT environments without impacting development productivity.
