Red Hat Blends Innovation with Stability in Latest Release of Red Hat OpenShift

New capabilities use generative AI to help improve developer productivity and efficiency while maintaining a key focus on platform security

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today introduces new capabilities and enhancements for Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, as well as the technology preview of Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed. The new features, delivered with the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift 4.17, are designed to accelerate innovation across the hybrid cloud without compromising on stringent security and compliance requirements.

As AI-enabled and edge applications continue to be a top priority to deliver better user experiences, organizations are integrating new infrastructure and environments in order to meet the needs of these applications. These sprawling, disparate environments can lead to increased complexity as well as greater security and compliance risks. The latest enhancements to Red Hat OpenShift are designed to cut through complexity, further simplifying application development while building in security features that limit bottlenecks. Additionally, with the technology preview of OpenShift Lightspeed, organizations are able to use integrated generative AI (gen AI) to improve team productivity, regardless of skill level.

Improved productivity with integrated gen AI

Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed provides a virtual assistant integrated into Red Hat OpenShift that lets teams ask technical questions in straightforward sentences and receive detailed answers, improving how teams learn and work with OpenShift.

Using an English natural-language interface, users can ask the virtual assistant OpenShift-related questions. It assists with troubleshooting and investigating cluster resources by leveraging Red Hat’s extensive platform knowledge - enabling users to be more productive and efficient while freeing up IT teams to drive greater innovation. The technology preview release of OpenShift Lightspeed now adds support for Red Hat OpenShift AI and Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI as model providers, enabling organizations to use Red Hat as the source of the underlying LLM.

Streamlined experience across virtual machines and containers

As organizations add new intelligent workloads to their IT landscape, traditional applications, including virtual machines (VM), often remain a critical part of their infrastructure. Having a unified solution to manage VMs and containers with the same tools and create a consistent experience is essential to streamlining operations.

Red Hat OpenShift 4.17 brings meaningful enhancements to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, improving the management of virtualized workloads. Key features include improved safe memory oversubscription, which increases workload density by allowing more virtual machines to run than the available physical memory, and improved dynamic workload rebalancing, ensuring resource optimization and stability during cluster upgrades or changes to workload demand. Storage live migration is introduced, as a technology preview, allowing non-disruptive movement of data between storage devices and storage classes while a VM is running. The release also introduces, in technology preview, a dedicated virtualization admin console experience, providing a focused view for managing the OpenShift cluster which is limited to the features, add-ons, and plugins relevant to virtualization, thereby driving greater administrator efficiency.

In addition, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, available separately or as part of Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, has new capabilities for managing virtual machines across multiple clusters. These include improved search and filtering for VMs, as well as, in technology preview, the ability to stop, start, restart, and pause VMs directly from Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, enabling a single management interface for VM admins to interact with their resources, regardless of which cluster they are hosted on.

Security without holding back innovation

As developers accelerate workflows and overall application innovation, it can be difficult to keep pace with security and compliance requirements. Red Hat OpenShift 4.17 introduces new security features to help organizations focus on innovation without having to compromise on the platform’s security posture.

New features in technology preview include native network isolation for namespaces to keep sensitive workloads and data discrete, user namespaces in pods to protect against privilege escalations, as well as the Confidential Compute Attestation Operator provides attestation services for confidential container workloads, providing protection of data in use.

Availability

Red Hat OpenShift 4.17 is now generally available. More information, including how to upgrade to the latest version, is available here. Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed is now available as a technology preview. If you have an existing subscription to Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, or WatsonX.ai, or if you have an OpenShift AI or Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI subscription, you can quickly and easily install OpenShift Lightspeed in your cluster and point it at the model provider of your choosing.

Supporting Quotes

Mike Barrett, vice president and general manager, Hybrid Cloud Platforms, Red Hat

“Red Hat continues to build new capabilities and enhancements into Red Hat OpenShift to help organizations deliver on their current IT goals as well as help them meet the needs of tomorrow -- from migrating off legacy virtualization platforms to powering intelligent AI-enabled workloads. We believe our recent recognition as a Leader in the Gartner ® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Application Platforms¹ validates Red Hat OpenShift’s ability to bring together the right mix of open source projects that offers the highest impact to customer problems across any infrastructure.”

Kristaps Kulis, solutions architect, SIA Tet

"Prior to adopting Red Hat OpenShift we were running a vanilla Kubernetes environment which proved to be challenging to manage with limited engineering resources and took our focus away from delivering new, innovative applications. With Red Hat OpenShift, we now have a streamlined process for development enabling our IT teams to be more efficient and quickly deliver high-quality applications. Additionally, OpenShift's built-in security features combined with our use of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security provides Tet peace of mind that we are meeting stringent security and compliance requirements."

Additional Resources

• Learn more about Red Hat OpenShift 4.17
• Learn more about OpenShift Lightspeed
• Find more news in the Red Hat KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024 Newsroom
• Download Red Hat’s executive guide to navigating the era of constant change

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About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. Red Hat helps customers integrate new and existing IT applications, develop cloud-native applications, standardize on our industry-leading operating system, and automate, secure, and manage complex environments. Award-winning support, training, and consulting services make Red Hat a trusted adviser to the Fortune 500. As a strategic partner to cloud providers, system integrators, application vendors, customers, and open source communities, Red Hat can help organizations prepare for the digital future.

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