Keyword tags:
Big Data
Cloud Storage
Data Storage Management
Storage Strategy
Note from DSA Editor.
Unless you are using containers, they can be a bit confusing. Some people wonder if they will replace Virtual Machines, but that is not the case. There is a place for both. Containers are quick and efficient and great for application development. However, they lack some of the enterprise management capabilities and security to be used for business-critical applications. This announcement by Red Hat shows that the supporting cast of technologies around containers will continue to be more robust. Of specific interest in this announcement is that it will start to become possible to apply enterprise class storage to containers. This in itself will increase the use cases for container technology. If you are not already experimenting with container technology it may be time do so.
Press release as follows
Red Hat announced the general availability of the newest version of its container application platform Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.4. Red Hat helps organisations like Discovery Health and Pioneer better embrace new technologies, such as Linux containers, that can deliver innovative business applications and services without sacrificing current IT investments. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.4 offers a platform for this innovation while retaining a focus on current mission-critical workloads, offering dynamic storage provisioning for both traditional and cloud-native applications and multi-tenant capabilities that can support various applications, teams and deployment processes in a hybrid cloud environment.
The newest version of Red Hat’s container application platform offers an enterprise-ready version of Kubernetes 1.4 and the docker container runtime. This helps customers to roll out new services with the backing of a stable, dependable and more secure enterprise platform powered by the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.4 integrates the architectures, processes and services to allow delivery of critical business applications, from conventional and legacy applications to cloud-native and containerised workloads. New capabilities in the latest version include:
Next-level container storage with support for dynamic storage provisioning, enabling various storage types to be provisioned, and multi-tier storage exposure via quality-of-service labels in Kubernetes. Container-native storage, enabled by Red Hat Gluster Storage, now supporting dynamic provisioning and push button deployment, improves the user experience running stateful and stateless applications on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Thus, the consumption and provisioning of application storage becomes easier for developers to use. With Red Hat Gluster Storage, OpenShift customers get the added advantage of a software-defined, highly available and scalable storage solution that works across on-premises and public cloud environments and one that can be more cost efficient than traditional hardware-based or cloud-only storage services.
Enhanced multi-tenancy through more simplified management of projects, a feature powered by Kubernetes namespaces, in a single Kubernetes cluster. Multiple developer teams, applications and lifecycle environments can run isolated and share resources on a single Kubernetes cluster in OpenShift Container Platform. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.4 adds the capacity to search for projects, project details, manage project membership and more via a more streamlined web console, making it easier for users to work with various projects across dispersed teams. These multi-tenancy capabilities allow enterprise IT organisations to offer application development teams with their own cloud-like application environment to build and deploy customer-facing or internal applications using DevOps processes that are isolated from one another.
New hybrid cloud reference architectures for operating Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on OpenStack, VMware, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Engine and Microsoft Azure. These guides help a user in utilising a stable, fault-tolerant, production-grade environment that uses the power of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform across public and private clouds, virtual machines and bare metal.
Forming the orchestration backbone of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.4 is Kubernetes 1.4, which is conserved by the open source Kubernetes Project community. Kubernetes 1.4 highlights alpha support for expanded cluster federation APIs, a feature that can allow various clusters federated across a hybrid environment and a capability that Red Hat views as a key component to enabling hybrid cloud deployments in the enterprise. As with all of Red Hat’s enterprise-ready Linux container solutions, the newest version of OpenShift offers community innovation as hardened, production-grade features.
Supporting Linux containers across the hybrid cloud
Red Hat’s expanded container portfolio covers private and fully managed public cloud offerings, supporting traditional and cloud-native applications, and diverse aspects of the application development process in one solution that can span various infrastructures and enable containers-as-a-service. This includes local, lab and production environments operating in the data centre or public cloud, managed by customers or fully managed by Red Hat. Red Hat also offers a suite of no-cost developer-focused container tools, including a localised offering of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, through the Red Hat Container Developer Kit. Red Hat’s container-optimised solutions span storage, application services and management technologies, in addition to these no-cost development tools.
According to Ashesh Badani, Vice Presidet and General Manager, OpenShift, Red Hat, “While Linux containers represent an innovative future for enterprise applications, traditional and legacy applications remain critical to the modern business. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.4 can meet the needs of these existing applications while providing the tools and services to drive cloud-native application creation and deployment. The latest version of our flagship container application platform goes a step beyond simply creating and deploying applications by addressing the growing storage needs of both stateful and stateless applications across the hybrid cloud, allowing for coexistence of modern and future-forward workloads on a single, enterprise-ready platform.”
Kazuhiro Miyamoto, General Manager, Development Department, Information Service Platform Centre, Product Management Division, Pioneer Corporation said, “We have adopted a cloud environment based on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and IBM cloud infrastructure services to assist the development and operation of our latest car navigation system, ‘Super Route Finder.’ As the Super Route Finder also supports the latest models released in 2016, there was concern about the growing concentration of access requests from thousands to tens-of-thousands units. With the expectation of the numbers of users and various kinds of containers increasing, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform enables us to implement scalable allocation of containers, and readily manage respective container applications more effectively.”
Availability
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.4 is available today via the Red Hat Customer Portal. Red Hat Cloud Suite will also feature the latest container application platform update as a pre-integrated offering alongside Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Virtualization and Red Hat CloudForms.