Latest Version of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Joins Infrastructure and Services Across Hybrid Cloud Environments

Enterprise Kubernetes platform enables application creation from diverse services available on Amazon Web Services and on-premise to ease administrative challenges and accelerate hybrid cloud innovation

The world’s leading provider of open source solutions, launched Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7, the latest version of Red Hat’s enterprise-grade Kubernetes container application platform. As application complexity and cloud incompatibility loom, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 helps IT organizations to build and manage applications that use services from the datacenter to the public cloud. The newest iteration of the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform includes native integrations with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Service Brokers that enable developers to bind services across AWS and on-premise resources to create modern applications while providing a consistent, open standards-based foundation to drive business evolution.
Cloud-native enterprise applications can consume services from multiple locations, including from the data center and multiple public clouds. Also, according to 451 Research, more than 60 percent of enterprises implementing cloud strategies are using two (or more) different cloud environments — on-premises private clouds, hosted private cloud, and multiple public clouds. Increasingly, modern applications built for digital transformation rely on a mesh of loosely-coupled component and microservices, making consistency across cloud providers a significant challenge, but one that Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 helps to address.
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform unites developers and IT operations on a single platform to build, deploy, and manage applications consistently across hybrid cloud infrastructures. This helps businesses achieve greater value by delivering modern and traditional applications with shorter development cycles and increased efficiencies. The platform is built on open source innovation and industry standards, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Kubernetes, and is trusted by many companies around the world.
Bringing hybrid cloud applications to life
With modern applications reliant upon disparate services and components from on-premise and cloud-based resources, being able to effectively stitch these pieces together in a consistent manner can be critical to delivering business innovation. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 helps to answer this need with the OpenShift Service Catalog, a fully-supported feature that enables IT organizations to connect any application running on the OpenShift platform to a wide variety of services, regardless of where that service runs.
The OpenShift Service Catalog helps users search for, provision, and bind application services to OpenShift applications while providing a more secure and consistent way for administrators to provide new services to end users. This helps to free development teams from having to deeply understand service creation or consumption, and places more emphasis on building applications to deliver business value rather than sourcing services.
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 will ship with OpenShift Template Broker, which turns any OpenShift Template into a discoverable service for application developers using OpenShift. OpenShift Templates are lists of OpenShift objects that can be implemented within specific parameters, making it easier for IT organizations to deploy reusable, composite applications comprised of microservices.
Also included with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 is OpenShift Ansible Broker for provisioning and managing services through the OpenShift Service Catalog by using Ansible to define OpenShift Services. OpenShift Ansible Broker enables users to provision services both on and off the OpenShift platform, helping to simplify and automate complex workflows involving varied services and applications across on-premise and cloud-based resources.
Production support for Service Catalog in OpenShift Container Platform builds upon Red Hat’s strong hybrid cloud technology portfolio, which includes:
Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes, a collection of supported runtimes to lower the entry barrier for building and deploying cloud-native applications (now in beta).
Red Hat Container-Native Storage 3.6, an enterprise-grade software-defined storage solution built from Red Hat Gluster Storage that serves storage out of containers, both on-premises and in the cloud.
AWS Service integration
First announced at Red Hat Summit 2017, Red Hat now makes popular AWS services accessible directly from Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. This integration enables AWS users to configure and deploy these services from OpenShift, and provides a single path of enterprise-grade support for customer needs.
At launch, accessible AWS services through Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 include:
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS)
Amazon Route 53
Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3)
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Amazon ElastiCache
Amazon Redshift
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR)
Additional features
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 also adds additional features and capabilities to help improve user experience and enhance platform security. These features include:
Network Policy is now out of Technology Preview and generally supported, enabling project administrators to apply network rules and policies to inbound traffic for specific OpenShift pods.
Prometheus (Tech Preview) is being introduced for monitoring and alerting in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7, building the popular monitoring solution (and CNCF project) directly into the OpenShift platform.
Supporting Quotes
Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager, OpenShift, Red Hat
“Modern, cloud-native applications are not monolithic stacks with clear-cut needs and resources; to more effectively embrace modern applications, IT organizations need to re-imagine how their developers find, provision and consume critical services and resources across a hybrid architecture. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 addresses these needs head-on by providing hybrid access to services through its service catalog, enabling developers to more easily find and bind necessary services to their business-critical applications–no matter where these services exist–and adding close integration with AWS to further streamline cloud-native development and deployment.”
Matt Yanchyshyn, director, Partner Solution Architecture, Amazon Web Services, Inc.
“We are excited about our collaboration with Red Hat and the general availability of the first 9 AWS Service Brokers in Red Hat OpenShift. The ability to seamlessly configure and deploy a range of AWS services from within OpenShift will allow our customers to benefit from AWS’s rapid pace of innovation, both on-premises and in the cloud.”