Red Hat had much to say at the recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2024 conference, held in Paris this March. The company did its best to explain that it’s no longer just a software company, no longer just a container company, an application platform company, an edge company and, increasingly, not even just an AI company. It is, like a lot of firms, all of those things. So how does Red Hat substantiate and validate its claim across these different but of course essentially connect technology arenas and, crucially, what cloud-native developer pain points is it looking to now address?
The latest round of announcements from Red Hat aims to help CIOs stack all of those above technology ‘hats’ [or disciplines] and compress them into a single hat or, at worst, a couple of hats. Many of this year’s announcements were tailored to help bring order at scale to containers and cloud-native workloads and development processes. Why? Because, says Red Hat, container sprawl is said to be rapidly replacing Virtual Machine (VM) sprawl in many technology organisations.
Looking at the firm’s hybrid cloud application platform, Red Hat OpenShift, the Red Hat OpenShift 4.15 iteration is said to refine Red Hat’s approach to bridging traditional IT investments with cloud-native technologies. It does this through the use of new resiliency and disaster recovery capabilities in OpenShift Virtualization, an OpenShift capability that enables VMs and containerised workloads to be managed and maintained in a single workflow.
Red Hat has added support for AWS Outposts (a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs and tools to customer premises) and AWS Wavelength Zones (AWS infrastructure deployments that embed AWS compute and storage services within telecommunications providers’ datacentres at the edge of the 5G network) both of which developments sit in line with the firm’s efforts to deliver unified monitoring with the Red Hat build of OpenTelemetry. This in turn is also logically designed to power sustainability functionality with the tech preview of power monitoring based on Kepler, the Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter.
“Securing and maintaining these new workloads is critical for all businesses, regardless of industry. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security 4.4 helps bring comprehensive workload scanning features to nearly any Kubernetes-based application platform, not just OpenShift. The latest version incorporates a new scanner (Scanner V4) that builds on the latest upstream innovations in the Clair V4 container scanner while also helping to improve the compliance chaos that can exist around containerised applications,” notes the company, in a technical product statement.
Container control permissions
There’s a lot of product spec news to keep up with here. Red Hat Quay 3.11, the company’s private container registry is described as a technology to help cut through potential container sprawl by making it easier to control permissions based on existing internal groups and provides greater control over how the registry uses compute resources in low-power/low-resource environments (like edge-compute for the Internet of Things).
Keen to echo the developers, developers, developers message (but without the Ballmer bounce no doubt), Red Hat says that developers remain the innovation engine for most enterprises, regardless of industry, so increasing developer productivity and efficiency is vital to do more than just tread water. The focus here then shifts to Testcontainers.
What (are) is Testcontainers?
As testcontainers.com itself defines for us, “Testcontainers is a testing library that provides easy and lightweight APIs for bootstrapping integration tests with real services wrapped in Docker containers. Using Testcontainers, [developers] can write tests talking to the same type of services used in production without mocks or in-memory services.”
Red Hat likes this concept in both theory and practice. Integrating Testcontainers with Red Hat OpenShift is promised to help limit the cognitive load on developers, enabling them to “just build” in local environments with real dependencies without having to worry about all of the associated overhead. Updates to the Red Hat Universal Base Image make it easier for developers to build on the same resources and container image that will ultimately be deployed into production, with the latest updates providing RHEL 9-based images and a micro (smallest footprint) option.
“Red Hat also maintains incredibly strong ties to the open source communities that fuel tectonic shifts in IT strategy. Kubeflow helps simplify and scale machine-learning workloads on Kubernetes and Red Hat was integral in the 1.9 release, including in crafting the model-registry feature, which enables the reuse of AI models, metrics, tooling and more,” notes the company.
Get to know Kubeflow
As another reminder, the Kubeflow project is dedicated to making deployments of Machine Learning (ML) workflows on Kubernetes simple, portable and scalable. The project team insist that its goal is not to recreate other services, but to provide a straightforward way to deploy best-of-breed open source systems for ML to diverse infrastructures.
Red Hat and other community members are working towards developing Kubeflow into a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) graduated project. Podman Desktop 1.8 (an open source graphical tool to allow programmers to work with containers and Kubernetes from their local environment) provides a fully open source container and Kubernetes development tool, driven in large part by Red Hat, with the latest version offering a host of new features to ease the learning curve for developers starting to work with Kubernetes.
Red Hat also launched its ‘State of Application Modernization Report’ at Kubecon CloudNativeCon Europe 2024, driven by Red Hat and research firm Illuminas. In this year’s report, security, reliability and scalability stand out as the primary drivers of modernisation regardless of industry. The majority of respondents no longer define modernisation as containerisation; instead, Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines are the top definition of a modernised app. Obviously, AI has a major part to play too, as over 75% of organisations surveyed are using AI to support the application modernisation process.
While that last point on CI/CD might be somewhat of a ‘yeah okay, we were talking about that a decade ago’… the wider trend to provide tools for working in native developer desktop environments while still dipping toes (and for that matter feet, knees and legs) into container environments that have a defined emphasis on combating container sprawl is all key. Dipping in and out of various cloud-native projects (and indeed the expansive universe of the AWS stack) as we have done here generally requires reminders, definitions and illustrative validations – and that could also be a lesson to take away i.e. we’re making cloud simpler and cloud-native simpler from the start, or at least we hope we are, there is still of lot of infrastructural DNA to weave together.
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