With the face-to-face interaction still on hold, Red Hat held its virtual experience event. All in all, I was impressed with the execution. There was a technical hiccup here and there, but even live events don’t always go 100% as planned.
In retrospect, a virtual event offers an appropriate setting for communicating Red Hat’s Open Cloud strategy. In uncertain times, often the most valuable thing you can do is position yourself and your business with as much flexibility as possible. Provide yourself the ability to leverage any infrastructure you want or need, with as little extra effort as possible. Offer this capability not just to IT, but to application developers and IT’s consumers. Empower digital businesses to continue and even thrive with as little human action and interaction as possible.
In essence, this was Red Hat’s theme this week. Open up the cloud with greater flexibility; empowering, protecting digital businesses while expediting operations.
Announcement Highlights from the Week
- OpenShift Virtualization – Red Hat OpenShift extends support to include virtual machines as well as containers. Based on the KubeVirt open source project, the addition of support for virtual machines is extremely valuable, and ultimately essential. Having separate orchestration layers to manage adds unnecessary cost and complexity and will ultimately become unsustainable as demands increase. What’s possibly more interesting is this allows IT admins to bring traditional VMs into a container-native architecture, rather than adding container support to an existing environment. It’s unclear what the short-term difference of those two approaches will be, but it seems like building from a cloud-native foundation will provide dividends in the long run.
- OpenShift 4.4 & OpenShift Serverless – The latest version of Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform includes several advances designed to make life easier for IT admins and developers. OpenShift 4.4 introduces a developer-centric view of platform metrics and monitoring for application workloads; monitoring integration for Red Hat Operators, improving the use of automation; and cost management tools to help clarify resource utilization applications across hybrid cloud environments. Red Hat is also working to extend its OpenShift enhancements to its partnership with Microsoft Azure.
With Red Hat Serverless, applications can automatically increase or decrease resource consumption based on event triggers, such as automatically scaling up based on changes in incoming demands or scaling back after use. With these advances, Red Hat is supporting the increasing convergence between app development and IT in modern digital organizations. Empowering developers with the right tools is one valuable method of expediting app development while reducing the personnel burden on IT.
- Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes – To address the growing adoption of containers, Red Hat is augmenting its ability to manage large Kubernetes clusters at scale. This advanced cluster management provides a single control point for the monitoring and deployment of large OpenShift clusters while offering advanced management tools such as policy-driven governance and application lifecycle management. This adds an essential tool that will likely fuel Kubernetes adoption even further.
Covid-19 has likely presented the most powerful argument for digital transformation available. Manual, in-person activities are not only slow and costly, they now can introduce business risk. Red Hat’s vision of an open, automated cloud world is a powerful one that the industry needs to embrace.
