Red Hat bolstered its Kubernetes-focused OpenShift platform with new virtualization capabilities and plans to add a new cluster management service. Both are part of the vendor’s ongoing efforts to more fully form the OpenShift product that is becoming increasingly important to enterprises and Red Hat’s parent company IBM.
The OpenShift virtualization feature launched today as a technology preview. It taps into the KubeVirt open source project in allowing organizations to develop, deploy, and manage applications that use virtual machines (VMs), containers, and serverless from a single, container-based platform as if they were a standard Kubernetes object. This allows an organization to bring VMs into an OpenShift environment and migrate applications that are running in VMs into a container-based environment as needed.
“This allows you to treat VMs like any other Linux container,” explained Matt Hicks, SVP of engineering at Red Hat, as part of this week’s Red Hat Summit 2020 Virtual Experience. Hicks added that it also allows customers to “bring virtualization forward to the infrastructure and reduce the licensing costs.”
The virtualization feature, which takes the place of Red Hat’s previously named container-native virtualization (CNV) platform, also targets telecommunication operators that are starting to deploy 5G networks. Hicks said those operators need the ability to run OpenShift on bare metal but are also dealing with virtual network functions (VNFs) that are built on a virtualized platform.
Red Hat said its Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes platform will soon join the virtualization feature as a technology preview. It will provide a single control point for the monitoring and deployment of OpenShift clusters at scale and support policy-driven governance and application lifecycle management for those clusters. This support runs across OpenShift on-premises, on bare metal, or on the major cloud hyperscalers.
OpenShift 4.4
Red Hat also updated OpenShift to a 4.4 iteration. The update includes the Kubernetes 1.17 version that was launched at the end of last year, which is one version behind Kubernetes 1.18 that was unveiled late last month. This delay is typical as vendors like to vet the latest Kubernetes iteration before rolling out a supported version to customers.
OpenShift 4.4 includes broader support for Kubernetes Operator model to support monitoring visibility, a cost management feature for OpenShift clusters running across hybrid cloud, support for the latest Helm 3 Kubernetes packaging tool, and initial support for the Tekton continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) project.
Red Hat last updated OpenShift earlier this year, folding in a multi-cloud gateway into OpenShift Container Storage 4 and additional security enhancements across its storage and broader OpenShift platform.
Red Hat Red Hot
Red Hat continues to be an important growth driver for IBM, which closed on its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat last year. IBM’s software business, which houses the Red Hat operations, posted a 5% year-over-year increase in revenues during the first quarter of this year. Most of that was on the back of its Red Hat-powered cloud and data platforms business, which posted a 32% increase.
Specific to Red Hat, revenues surged 20% and Red Hat’s OpenShift and Ansible platforms helped to boost IBM’s emerging technologies revenues nearly 40% in the quarter. Highlighting Red Hat’s heat, Kavanaugh said that the division signed its two largest deals in history during the quarter, and now counted more than 2,200 customers using Red Hat services.
BMO Capital Markets analyst Keith Bachman noted in a research note that without Red Hat, IBM’s revenues actually contracted nearly 4% year over year.
―SDX Central
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