Red Hat has released version 4.18 of OpenShift with enhancements focused on virtualization and security.
With this release, Red Hat is pushing for more flexibility for how and where companies run their workloads. This includes support for more public cloud providers, including bare-metal deployments on Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, to expand the platform’s hybrid cloud options. Version 4.18 should achieve better consistency for all applications, from cloud-native and AI-enabled to virtualized and traditional.
Red Hat OpenShift 4.18 introduces user-defined networks for virtual machines (VMs), making setting up the virtualization platform easier. This option is also available for OpenShift on AWS and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS. This allows users to have their secondary network on AWS perform similarly to their on-premises environment.
In addition, a technology preview is available for VM storage migration, which allows data to be moved non-disruptively between storage devices and classes. This makes it easier for users to respond to their changing storage needs.
Red Hat describes tree-view navigation as another option to extend virtualization capabilities. This allows VMs to be grouped into folders that support more granular grouping. According to Red Hat, users were looking for a faster and easier way to navigate between VMs.
Improved security
On the security front, Red Hat is introducing a publicly available secret store container storage interface (CSI) driver. This new feature allows users to securely manage sensitive information without storing secrets on the cluster, improving overall security hygiene.