As part of this year’s Red Hat Summit, the company announces Version 4 of its OpenShift Container Platform. The first major release since the reorganization of OpenShift 3 around four years ago promises administrators in particular more comprehensive automation functions, which go well beyond the usual level of Kubernetes. Red Hat speaks of an operator-driven approach to full-stack automation from installing the infrastructure underlying OpenShift and Kubernetes to upgrading the platform and applications.

Automation by operator

CoreOS Tectonic-based console gives users access to numerous Kubernetes operators for managing native applications and services. The company CoreOS , which was also taken over from the beginning of 2018, builds on application-specific controllers that extend the Kubernetes API. The operators automate the lifecycle management of containerized applications with Kubernetes. Administrators can automate the management of their own complex applications to the point that they can be as easily leveraged through the Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) in OpenShift 4 as typical public cloud services.

Introduced by Red Hat in partnership with AWS, Google, and Microsoft, the OperatorHub.io platform , as the public registry for OpenShift users, not only provides access to a wide range of Kubernetes operators, but also introduces its own operators and community exchanges , ISV partners also have a certification program, Red Hat OpenShift Operator Certification, for developing and certifying operators for shared customers.

Simplified administration with the service mesh

The new OpenShift 4 Service Mesh builds on the open source Istio tool and combines this with projects such as Jaeger (tracing) and Kiali (visualization) to give developers of cloud-native applications in microservices architectures better management and traceability of their deployments guarantee. The tracing and visualization capabilities are also designed to help troubleshoot policy-driven microservices communication.

Extending Kubernetes to deliver serverless everywhere

How late last year announced , Red Hat has now also Knative integrated into OpenShift 4 The goal is to enable users to build, deploy, and manage serverless applications from a central Kubernetes control plane for containerized and serverless deployments in hybrid cloud environments.

And more..

In addition, to make developers as familiar with OpenShift as possible, the platform can be used via a Command Line Interface (CLI) or plug-in to popular development environments such as Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse. With the CodeReady Workspaces based on Eclipse Che, there is also an integrated Web-IDE available.