Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open-source solutions, has announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5, the latest version of Red Hat’s enterprise-grade, Kubernetes-native container application platform. While enabling enterprises like Swiss Railways, Produban and Pioneer to actively embrace cloud-native applications in mission-critical roles, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5 also helps enterprises retain existing IT investments through expanded support for traditional business applications. This dual application support is provided by new security enhancements as well as several innovations emerging from the Kubernetes upstream community.
As a leading contributor to both the docker and Kubernetes open-source projects, Red Hat provides an enterprise-ready container platform based on Kubernetes 1.5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the integrated docker container runtime through the latest version of Red Hat’s container application platform. This helps customers to more quickly roll out new services with the support of a stable, reliable and more secure enterprise platform powered by the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform.
Expanded application support
While cloud-native application strategies are gaining traction in the enterprise for building mission-critical services, enterprises need to continue to use existing IT investments. Existing applications should not be left behind, and companies can use a single, more streamlined way to manage both ‘legacy’ and containerised applications. OpenShift provides a single platform designed to support both traditional and cloud-native applications and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5 expands this broad application support with new capabilities, including:
• StatefulSets – While Kubernetes already supports stateful services with features like integrated storage orchestration, many traditional stateful services like SQL databases, messaging queues and other ‘pet’ services require more capabilities to manage the configuration of each service instance in a cluster. Kubernetes StatefulSets, now available in Tech Preview, can bring the same powerful Kubernetes automation features for scaling and declarative health management to traditional stateful services so they can run in containers, instead of directly on traditional virtual machines or physical servers.
• Cloud-native Java – Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform already provides a platform for running traditional Java EE applications, which includes integrated enterprise middleware services from the Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5 provides a new Java container image for cloud-native workloads, enabling enterprise developers to focus on coding their new cloud-native Java applications while the platform, through OpenShift source-to-image (S2I), handles the compiling, building and assembling of the final, runnable artefact.
• Expanded developer toolbox – The latest version of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform also supports Red Hat Software Collections, curated versions of the latest, stable developer tools and languages, including updates for Redis, MySQL, PHP and more.
Bolstered container security
A leading contributor to upstream container communities like Kubernetes and docker, Red Hat is also seeking to drive container adoption within the enterprise by emphasising greater IT security across the platform. While Linux forms the foundation of all Linux container platforms, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, provides the trusted backbone for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5.
To use containers in production environments, organisations need to consider multiple levels of container security. This includes container isolation at the kernel and supported container images built from trusted content, as well as cluster-level concerns like limiting platform access to authorised users and allowing them to deploy their applications in a more secure manner. The latest version of Red Hat’s container application platform continues to deliver a hardened, enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform, with new features that provide:
• Enhanced certificate management – Certificates in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform help to allow only authorised users and platform components are able to take actions in the Kubernetes cluster. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5 includes enhancements for managing certificates, such as the ability to provide warnings based on certificates expiring and for a rolling refresh of security certificates.
• Improved Secrets management – Secrets are used to manage sensitive information like passwords when deploying applications in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5, with new support added for more granularity in determining who owns a given Secret.
Powering innovation
As one of the fastest growing enterprise open-source projects on Github, the Kubernetes community is able to deliver new innovations at a rapid pace. A leader in bringing open-source projects to enterprise customers, Red Hat maintains an important role in not only driving new innovations in container orchestration but also making these innovations consumable for production workloads. Red Hat also helps deliver a level of standardisation to Kubernetes for business-grade deployments, driving features that enable the orchestration platform to run across the hybrid cloud, from physical servers and virtualised environments to private cloud platforms and multiple public cloud providers.
To learn more about how enterprises are using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to help drive innovation while retaining existing IT investments, attend Red Hat Summit 2017 and the OpenShift Commons Gathering at Red Hat Summit to hear from Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform customers, including leading financial institutions, government agencies and large commercial organisations.
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5 is available now via the Red Hat Customer Portal.
Ashesh Badani, General Manager, OpenShift, Red Hat, says: “While containerised applications and associated infrastructure present a vision of enterprise IT’s future, traditional applications still function as the workhorse for modern businesses and should not be left behind as enterprises add next-generation services to their technology mix. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5 provides a Kubernetes-based platform for traditional and cloud-native applications with the tools, greater security features and capabilities designed to retain existing IT investments while planning for future needs and business growth.”
