Red Hat introduces Application Platform and Linux Container offerings

Red Hat has unveiled key enhancements to its comprehensive portfolio for developing and deploying enterprise-ready applications using Linux containers, OpenShift and Atomic. As more enterprises look to adopt container-based architectures for application workloads, Red Hat’s enhanced offerings enable the use of Docker-formatted Linux containers to create microservices-based applications and modernize traditional workloads - all benefiting from security features of a consistent foundation based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

 

Red Hat’s updated offerings are:

• OpenShift Enterprise 3.1, the latest version of Red Hat’s application platform designed to build, deploy and run stateful and stateless applications on private and public cloud infrastructure.
• Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform Public Preview, an optimized container infrastructure platform for deploying, running and managing containers across the enterprise.

 

Together, they provide a comprehensive platform for running traditional and container-based applications. This means that customers do not need to re-architect applications to run on Red Hat technologies, and enables enterprises to develop, integrate, deploy, and manage a variety of applications consistently across a more secure, container-optimized infrastructure.

 

OpenShift Enterprise 3.1

OpenShift by Red Hat is the industry's only enterprise-ready, web-scale container application platform based on Docker format Linux containers, Kubernetes orchestration, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. This newest release updates the Docker and Kubernetes experience for developers, adds middleware services for OpenShift, and expands OpenStack integration. These enhancements and new features deliver a next-generation platform that provides developers with flexibility and choice and IT operations teams with actionable insight and more streamlined management, supporting traditional stateful applications and newer cloud native stateless applications.

 

New and enhanced capabilities within OpenShift Enterprise 3.1 include:

• Application lifecycle management for containers including new and updated self-service tools for developing applications from Web, command line or IDE interfaces, application build automation enhancements, Jenkins CI integration and automated deployment capabilities to manage applications from development to production.
• An enterprise-grade container infrastructure (also available separately in public preview as Atomic Enterprise Platform) which uses the latest, stable Docker container format standard and the Kubernetes orchestration engine, providing a reliable environment for developing container-based applications.
• Access to new Red Hat JBoss Middleware services that easily integrate within a container architecture, including Red Hat JBoss Fuse, Red Hat JBoss BRMS, and Red Hat JBoss Data Grid. These offerings help developers to build and integrate faster and adaptable applications with familiar, supported open source tools with significantly less “ramp-up” time and a unified experience across hybrid architectures.             
• Advanced management capabilities (provided by Red Hat CloudForms) around containers, projects and users with an ability to extend across traditional VM based infrastructure and private and public clouds.
• Enhanced user experience and web console with better application controls and activity visualization; logging and metrics capabilities.

 

Atomic Enterprise Platform Public Preview

To encourage early customer and partner adoption of container technology and foster community participation, Red Hat is also making its container infrastructure capabilities available through Atomic Enterprise Platform as a freely accessible public preview. The platform is powered by a scale-out cluster of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host, Red Hat’s minimal footprint, container-optimized operating system, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 instances, forming the enterprise-class foundation for delivering both cloud-native and traditional applications with containers.

 

Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform includes:

• Runtime and packaging format powered by Docker and the Open Container Initiative (OCI) format.
• Orchestration and cluster services, built on Kubernetes, for complex multi-container services and scheduling across a host cluster.
• Networking and storage plug-ins: scalable, multi-host container networking, powered by Open vSwitch, and persistent storage plugins to enable running of stateful services in containers.
• Registry services for more secure storage and management of shared container images
• Container standards and security highlighted by Red Hat’s expanded certified container ecosystem, which aims to help fully realize a comprehensive, more secure model for containerized application delivery.

 

In addition, the integration of Red Hat Gluster Storage and Red Hat Ceph Storage with OpenShift Enterprise 3.1 and Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform Public Preview is now fully supported by Red Hat, with the goal to provide seamless, elastic storage for applications or microservices running in containers. Through a number of Kubernetes volume plugins, Red Hat gives IT organizations significantly more granular control and flexibility in choice for the best storage protocol for use with stateful container-based applications.