The mantra at the 2021 Red Hat Summit wasn’t so much “Linux” as it was “open hybrid cloud,” and, of course, Red Hat OpenShift, which, as Red Hat’s president and chief executive officer Paul Cormier pointed out, is underpinned by Linux.
“Our job is to provide customers the choice to do what is right for them,” Cormier said during his keynote. “Organizations are going to use multiple clouds. In fact, recent research showed that the typical enterprise today is using nearly eight different clouds from multiple vendors and expects to use at least ten clouds within three years. It is and will continue to be a hybrid world.”
With that in mind, Red Hat’s announcements mainly revolved around the cloud.
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It began with Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, a new version of the platform that brings together the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes (developed using the technology from recent acquisition StackRox), Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, and Red Hat Quay (the company’s container registry). Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus will be available in the second quarter of 2021. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes is available now.
“OpenShift is at the core of our open hybrid cloud strategy. But our customers have also told us that they want to leverage more managed cloud services than just OpenShift for their applications,” said Matt Hicks, executive vice president, products and technologies. “And while offloading the operations of managed services is a benefit, they still need those services to fit into their hybrid cloud architecture. And so today, we’re excited to announce the first of several new managed cloud services that do just that.”
The new managed services
- Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka, which helps developers incorporate streaming data into their applications. As a fully managed and hosted Kafka service, it lets developers focus on building their applications without worrying about the requirements of data collection and processing. It is currently in developer preview, with general availability expected later this year.
- Red Hat OpenShift Data Science builds on the Open Data Hub project to speed development, training, and testing of machine learning models. It implements common data science tools as the foundation of an AI-as-a-Service platform and is integrated with partner cloud services. It is available in beta as an add-on to OpenShift Dedicated and OpenShift Service on AWS, with general availability expected later this year.
- Red Hat OpenShift API Management provides full application programming interface (API) lifecycle management on Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS. It runs as an add-on to OpenShift Dedicated and OpenShift Service on AWS and is available now.
On the edge
As edge computing has grown in importance, Red Hat has adapted its products to service the growing needs there as well. The upcoming 8.4 release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) contains new Linux container, deployment, and management capabilities designed for the needs of the edge. It will be the foundation for the Red Hat Edge Initiative, which pushes the company’s open hybrid cloud to the edge.
Along with RHEL, other services are receiving edge love, including OpenShift, Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat Integration, and Red Hat Data Services.
The company also announced its intent to develop a continuously updated, safety-certified Linux operating system for the automotive industry, in partnership with exida, a safety and certification organization.
“Red Hat and exida are committed to give automation and automotive companies with functional safety applications access to innovative and high-quality open-source software,” said Jonathan Moore, director, Advanced Systems at exida. “The Red Hat support and the exida open certification scheme based on a continuously enhanced safety case provides the leadership needed in the use of open-source software at scale and a firm foundation for integrators to better understand safety features and safety assumptions when developing the next generation of automotive safety applications that take advantage of open-source software ecosystems.”