Red Hat Expands OpenShift Reach Across Hybrid Clouds
Red Hat today extended the reach of its Kubernetes-based Red Hat OpenShift platform to address a range of capabilities from making it easier to deploy the platform at the network edge to providing extensions in the form of cloud services.
At the same time, Red Hat is adding cloud services to make it simpler to access to Red Hat OpenShift Service Registry, Red Hat OpenShift Connectors, Red Hat OpenShift Database Access, Red Hat OpenShift Data Science, Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka and Red Hat OpenShift API Management.
The updates to Red Hat OpenShift, announced at the Red Hat Summit 2022 conference, are part of a larger Red Hat Edge initiative that brings zero-touch provisioning to version 4.10 of the platform. A single instance of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management hub cluster can be used to deploy and manage 2,000 single-node OpenShift clusters using zero-touch provisioning.
Red Hat is also providing centralized controls for the oversight and scaling of edge deployments along with support for rollback capabilities using the open source Podman tool for deploying containerized applications. In addition, Red Hat is providing support for version 4.10 of OpenShift Data Foundation container storage software as a technology preview to the single-node edition of Red Hat OpenShift.
Nick Barcet, senior director for technology strategy for Red Hat, says IT teams and OEMs can both use pre-configured instances of Red Hat OpenShift to provide, for example, faster delivery of radio access networks (RAN) for next-generation mobile networks or error detection capabilities for manufacturing facilities.
Red Hat OpenShift is at the core of a broader hybrid cloud computing strategy that Red Hat has been driving. As a subsidiary of IBM, Red Hat is leveraging Kubernetes to make it possible to build and deploy applications that run at the network edge, in on-premises IT environments and across multiple public clouds.
Today, most of those platforms are managed in isolation from one another but Red Hat is betting that, over time, IT organizations will look to centralize the management of highly distributed computing environments to reduce the total cost of IT. Each platform added to an IT environment increases the total cost of IT as more specialists are needed to build, deploy and manage applications across an extended enterprise.
It’s not clear how quickly IT teams are moving to embrace Kubernetes as the foundation upon which to build a hybrid cloud computing environment. But as the number of container applications deployed in production environments continues to expand, the operational benefits of Kubernetes become more evident. Naturally, it will take time for IT teams to master Kubernetes, but as platforms that leverage it become more available, Kubernetes clusters are becoming more accessible.
Regardless of the level of Kubernetes expertise, it’s clear that there are more concerns about the cost of IT than ever before as application workloads become more distributed. The issue is finding a way to manage all those applications that doesn’t necessarily require a massive expansion in the size of the IT teams trying to manage them.
