Red Hat Adds Slew of OpenShift Tools to Advance App Modernization

At the Kubecon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference, Red Hat added a slew of additions to its cloud-native application development and deployment portfolio that includes a version of the Red Hat OpenShift platform that now includes support for the Outposts and Wavelength Zones services from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In addition, version 4.15 of Red Hat OpenShift adds support for open source Telemetry agent software being developed under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) along with a Testcontainers Cloud, an open source framework for testing integrations.

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The latest version of Red Hat OpenShift also now supports version 1.0 of OpenShift Virtualization, a mechanism for encapsulating virtualization in containers.

Stu Miniman, director for market insights for Red Hat Cloud, said that latter capability is gaining traction as more organizations encapsulate legacy monolithic applications in containers as part of a larger effort to modernize their IT environments.

A global survey of 1,000 IT professionals conducted by the market research firm Illumina and published today by Red Hat found that more than half have already seen security (58%), reliability (52%) and scalability (53%) benefits from these efforts, with more than two-thirds (68%) identifying improvements to continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines as their top definition of application modernization.

The survey also noted more than three quarters are already using AI to accelerate application modernization process, with 42% adding AI to existing legacy applications to modernize them.

There is, of course, no single path to application modernization, but at this point, it’s clear containers will be involved to varying degrees, noted Miniman. The challenge organizations face now is determining whether to refactor legacy monolithic applications versus simply making it easier for them to run in the cloud.

Overall, complexity (48%) is the top organizational challenge for application modernization identified by survey respondents.
Red Hat is also making available an instance of Kepler, a tool for monitoring energy consumption, on Red Hat OpenShift to enable IT teams to better monitor carbon emissions.

At the same time, Red Hat is adding support for the latest version of the open source Kubeflow software that added a Model Registry capability for organizations building artificial intelligence (AI) applications for Kubernetes environments.

Red Hat is also making available the latest version of the Quay private container registry that provides additional permission management, greater image life cycle automation capabilities and the ability to fine-tune Kubernetes resource requests with the Quay operator.

The latest version of Podman, a tool for creating and managing containers, now provides simpler onboarding and training for developers.

Finally, version 4.4 of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes adds a vulnerability scanner that incorporates upstream features from StackRox Scanner and Clair V4. It also adds compliance tools and integration with Paladin Cloud. The default method for collecting telemetry data is also now extended Berkeley Packet Filtering (eBPF).

It’s not clear to what degree organizations are deploying Kubernetes clusters in production environments, but as the numbers increase, so will the number of tools inevitably required to manage them all. The challenge, as always, is integrating them in a way that enables enterprise teams to manage IT environments that are only becoming more complex with each passing day.