Red Hat Extends Services Reach of Container Platform
Red Hat this week extended the reach of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform by adding an OpenShift Template Broker, which makes it easier to discover any service created using templates that Red Hat includes to simplify accessing and managing lists of objects that make up a microservice.
In addition, version 3.7 of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform adds an OpenShift Ansible Broker that enables IT organizations to employ the Ansible automation framework from Red Hat to define an OpenShift Service.
In addition, the latest version of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform adds formal support for the OpenShift Service Catalog, an implementation of the Open Service Broker API standard developed by The Cloud Foundry Foundation, as well as a bevy of extensions to a variety of services running on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
Ashesh Badani, general manager for the Red Hat cloud business unit, says Red Hat is committed to incorporating a variety of open-source technologies into a platform built on top of Kubernetes that continues to blur the line between platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and container-as-a-service (CaaS) environments. Earlier this week Red Hat picked up a significant endorsement for its approach from SAP, which announced that its implementation of an Apache Spark in-memory computing framework running on Kubernetes is now supported on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
With that in mind, Badani says Red Hat is developing an interest in both Istio, a service mesh for connecting and securing microservice developed by Google, IBM and Lyft; and Grapheus, a tool that is used to authorize and authenticate binaries within the context of a software supply chain. Red Hat is also in the early stages of adding serverless computing frameworks based on code being developed under the auspices of the OpenWhisk project spearheaded by IBM and Adobe.
Badani says Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is differentiated from rival microservices platforms because it comes prevalidated with integrations that now span more than 140 components. Rather than simply providing an instance of Kubernetes, Badani says Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform provides a complete IT environment that supports microservices use at scale in production environments.
Most Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform deployments today occur on top of virtual machines deployed on-premises or in cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure of Google Cloud Platform. But Badani notes that use of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on bare metal servers is now the fastest growing use case.
Badani says that Red Hat also recognizes that some enterprise IT organizations are finding it challenging to keep pace with the rate at which new releases of Kubernetes are being rolled out. To ease that challenge, Badani says discussions are taking place within the Kubernets community that would create a Long Term Release framework similar to the model employed by the OpenStack and Node.js community.
As use of microservices based on containers continues to proliferate across the enterprise, the fight is on to provide the abstraction layer that will make microservices both more accessible and easier to manage. As it stands now, a decision three years ago to embrace Kubernetes as the foundation for that abstraction layer is now starting to pay off for Red Hat in ways providers of rival platforms have yet to match.
