Red Hat Inc, a provider of open source solutions, made a series of announcements focusing on hybrid cloud acceleration during its annual Red Hat Summit.
During his keynote, president and chief executive officer, Paul Cormier emphasized the importance and relevance of hybrid cloud.
“You need hybrid cloud. That’s what Red Hat has been focusing on for the last eight-plus years… I predict in the next several years, the open hybrid cloud is going to be defined by hardware innovation at the edge,” he said.
Check out the new products and announcements:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9
The company announced the upcoming release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (RHEL 9), the most recent version of its enterprise Linux platform.
RHEL 9 is designed to drive more consistent innovation across the open hybrid cloud from bare metal servers to cloud providers and the farthest edge of enterprise networks.
The company announced the release of RHEL 9 as the next-gen upgrade to power up enterprise IT infrastructure.
It includes key enhancements designed to address evolving IT needs at the edge, including:
- Comprehensive edge management: This is delivered as a service, to oversee and scale remote deployments with greater control and security functionality, encompassing zero-touch provisioning, system health visibility, and more responsive vulnerability mitigations all from a single interface.
- Automatic container roll-back with Podman: Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s integrated container management technology can detect if a newly-updated container fails to start, and will then roll the container back to the previous working version.
Additional features include a new image builder service, integration with AWS Graviton processors, and updates that address hardware-level security vulnerabilities such as Spectre and Meltdown.
“With RHEL 9’s general availability, Red Hat can deliver greater velocity to speed up your business, greater security capabilities for stronger resilience against attacks, and greater performance on new and even some of our older systems to reduce Cloud and other costs,” said Mike McGrath, vice president, Linux engineering, Red Hat, during the keynote.
The platform will be available in the coming weeks through the Red Hat Customer Portal and major cloud provider marketplaces. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is also accessible via no-cost Red Hat Developer programs that offer developers access to software, how-to videos, demos, getting started guides, documentation and more.
Cloud services
Red Hat announced advancements within its Red Hat Cloud Services portfolio.
Red Hat Cloud Services are designed to help combat the complexities of hybrid cloud. According to the company, businesses are facing challenges such as application sprawl and monolithic application support, and in order to succeed, organizations need tools to modernize applications while saving time on delivery times and operational overhead.
New cloud services include:
- Red Hat OpenShift Service Registry: This will help development teams publish, discover, and reuse application programming interfaces (APIs) and schemas.
- Red Hat OpenShift Connectors: This will supply pre-built connectivity to a variety of third-party systems and enable no-code integration with Red Hat Openshift Streams for Apache Kafka.
- Red Hat OpenShift Database Access: This service provides a consistent Database as a Service (DBaaS) consumption experience across hybrid cloud environments and enables OpenShift administrators to manage access to multiple third-party database services. In addition, it also simplifies the developer experience for provisioning and accessing cloud databases.
Red Hat has also updated some of its existing cloud services. For example, Red Hat OpenShift Data Science, a managed cloud service for data scientists and developers, received upgrades to improve support for compliance, including Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI) support.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Additionally, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Microsoft Azure, combining hybrid cloud automation with the convenience and support of a managed offering.
Supported by Microsoft and Red Hat, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure allows organizations to automate and scale in the cloud at a faster pace, with the flexibility to simply deliver any application.
By using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure, customers will now benefit from low overhead, integrated billing with Microsoft, the latest Ansible Automation Platform features, and packaged cloud content.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure is available now in North America, with global availability coming soon.
Red Hat Application Foundations
The company also announced Red Hat Application Foundations, a connected set of application services that, combined with Red Hat OpenShift, help speed up containerized application development and delivery across multi cloud and hybrid environments.
Red Hat Application Foundations serves as a toolkit for companies looking to build and integrate application and data services faster as part of their application and infrastructure modernization strategy.
Red Hat Application Foundations supplies developers with ready-to-implement components that include high-performance data streaming services, API management, service connectivity, lightweight runtimes and frameworks, and more.
To support this movement to the cloud, Red Hat Application Foundations unlocks multiple modernization patterns through microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, and more.
The Red Hat Application Foundations are now available and Red Hat customers can contact their account executive to set up this bundle.
Red Hat unveils new levels of security
The company also rolled out a set of new security innovations and capabilities across its portfolio of open hybrid cloud technologies.
The new measures are designed to help businesses alleviate risks and meet compliance requirements across IT environments that mix cloud services, traditional systems and edge devices. They will simplify complexity and help customers “improve security posture and enable DevSecOps”, the company said.
In particular, Red Hat is introducing a software supply chain security pattern that will simplify the process of adding security features throughout the complete build, deploy, and run process. It will be available later in Q2 2022.
Other new security features, part of the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes include:
- Automated DevSecOps: Will be added to the CI/CD pipeline to help protect the software supply chain for edge environments through vulnerability management, application configuration analysis, and CI/CD integration
- Threat protection: This will provide threat detection and incident response capabilities at runtime for familiar threats
- Network segmentation: Will enforce workload isolation, analyze container communication, and detect any risky network communication paths
Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes is generally available now and can be accessed here.
