Open source solutions provider, Red Hat, has made its OpenShiftContainer Platform 3.4 generally available. The company states that it helps organizations embrace new technologies, such as Linux containers, that can deliver innovative business applications and services without sacrificing existing IT investments.
The new platform, while retaining a focus on existing mission-critical workloads, offers dynamic storage provisioning for both traditional and cloud-native applications and multi-tenant capabilities that can support multiple applications, teams and deployment processes in a hybrid cloud environment.
Red Hat which is a contributor to both the docker and Kubernetes projects, states that the latest version of its container application platform will provide an enterprise-ready version of Kubernetes 1.4 and the docker container runtime. This will help customers to roll out new services with the backing of a stable, reliable and more secure enterprise platform powered by the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Capabilities
The new platform claims to have a next-level container storage with support for dynamic storage provisioning, allowing multiple storage types to be provisioned, and multi-tier storage exposure via quality-of-service labels in Kubernetes. It also supports dynamic provisioning and push button deployment to enhance the user experience running stateful and stateless applications on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
It makes the consumption and provisioning of application storage easier for developers to use. Customers can avail a software-defined, highly available and scalable storage solution that works across on-premises and public cloud environments.
Red Hat states that the platform has enhanced multi-tenancy through more simplified management of projects, a feature powered by Kubernetes namespaces, in a single Kubernetes cluster. Multiple developer teams, applications and lifecycle environments can run fully isolated and share resources on a single Kubernetes cluster.
The platform adds the capacity to search for projects, project details, manage project membership and more via a more streamlined web console, making it easier for users to work with multiple projects across dispersed teams. These multi-tenancy capabilities according to the company, enable enterprise IT organizations to provide application development teams with their own cloud-like application environment to build and deploy customer-facing or internal applications using DevOps processes that are isolated from one another.
Also, the platform has new hybrid cloud reference architectures to run on OpenStack, VMware, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Engine and Microsoft Azure. These guides will help walk a user through deploying a stable, fault-tolerant, production-grade environment that uses the power of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform across public and private clouds, virtual machines and bare metal.
“The latest version of our flagship container application platform goes a step beyond simply creating and deploying applications by addressing the growing storage needs of both stateful and stateless applications across the hybrid cloud, allowing for coexistence of modern and future-forward workloads on a single, enterprise-ready platform,” said Ashesh Badani, Vice President & General Manager, Openshift, Red Hat.
Backed by Kubernetes
The new platform is reportedly backed by Kubernetes 1.4, maintained by the open source Kubernetes Project community. Kubernetes 1.4 features alpha support for expanded cluster federation APIs, a feature that can enable multiple clusters federated across a hybrid environment and a capability that the company views as a key component to enabling hybrid cloud deployments in the enterprise.
According to the company, as with all of its enterprise-ready Linux container solutions, the latest version of OpenShift offers community innovation as hardened, production-grade features.