Red Hat Refines Kubernetes for Both Traditional and Cloud-Native Applications with Latest Version of Red Hat OpenShift

RALEIGH, N.C.
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February 24, 2021
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Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced Red Hat OpenShift 4.7, the latest version of the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform. Designed to simplify and accelerate application modernization, the latest version of Red Hat OpenShift is based on Kubernetes 1.20 and helps remove the strain on IT teams as they seek to unite traditional applications with cloud-native. All of these new capabilities are built on the consistent platform that Red Hat OpenShift provides across the open hybrid cloud.

Whether to address a competitive threat, expand business offerings or keep pace with consumer expectations, it’s critical for businesses to have an application modernization strategy. According to IDC, “Providers of application modernization services must understand how organizations are prioritizing modernization as part of their application portfolio initiatives, as well as grasp how organizations are approaching a variety of modernization tactics for their applications.”¹ Red Hat recognizes that few organizations have the opportunity to throw away existing IT investments without suffering major disruptions and that there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for organizations to modernize applications.

Red Hat OpenShift provides diverse application modernization and migration capabilities to fit specific enterprise needs. The latest release expands modernization tools for moving legacy applications to new, microservices-based architectures and drives management consistency across all applications for operational efficiency without slowing innovation.

In the aerospace industry, IT solutions should be innovative and streamlined to rapidly deliver applications. Lockheed Martin’s collaboration with Red Hat is based on the core value of engineering and finding the best solution to modernize application development. OpenShift Virtualization has enabled us to move our virtualized workloads onto containers, giving us the ability to continue to support those workloads from a single management plane with Red Hat OpenShift. In working with Red Hat, we have been able to discuss key areas that Lockheed Martin IT is interested in adding or improving and Red Hat has listened and taken our ideas back to engineering. We value this relationship with a technology provider and look forward to continually improving application solutions for the industry.

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Bringing traditional workloads to Kubernetes

Red Hat OpenShift 4.7 includes the latest version of OpenShift Virtualization. First released in July 2020, OpenShift Virtualization is designed to help organizations break down application barriers between traditional and cloud-native infrastructure and extend control over distributed resources. New features and enhancements include:

• The ability to import existing virtual machines into Red Hat OpenShift
• Templates for one-click VM creation
• Integration with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, providing enhanced policy and governance across application deployments including virtualized

Additionally, Red Hat OpenShift 4.7 expands Windows Containers support, first announced in late 2020. In addition to Windows Container support for Red Hat OpenShift on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure, OpenShift will soon include support for Windows Containers on vSphere (expected to be available next month) using Installer Provided Infrastructure (IPI). This provides a pathway for organizations to move Windows Containers to Red Hat OpenShift regardless of where they live and without needing to completely re-architect or write new code.

Streamlined and simplified migration at scale

Migration Toolkit for Virtualization, soon to be available as a technology preview, simplifies the migration of virtual machines at scale to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. By doing so, developers have the ability to more easily access legacy virtual machines, while developing new cloud-native applications.

Migration Toolkit for Virtualization can be quickly deployed on an OpenShift environment, taking advantage of the easy-to-use Operator available on OperatorHub. Migrations are performed in a few simple steps, first by providing source and destination credentials, then mapping the source and destination infrastructure, creating a choreographed plan and finally executing the migration effort.

Migration Toolkit for Virtualization will be generally available later this year and will include extended capabilities to further reduce downtime, diminish risk and optimize overall project success. Features will include pre-migration checks to detect potential compatibility issues, enhanced data copy functionality and deeper automation capabilities, reducing the need for many manual tasks during the migration effort.

Faster, more secure, scalable development

Red Hat OpenShift 4.7 also introduces a technology preview of OpenShift GitOps, delivering a framework for organizations to start executing on GitOps. Based on Argo CD, OpenShift GitOps delivers declarative, continuous delivery to OpenShift by integrating CI/CD tools including OpenShift Pipelines, with code repositories GitHub and GitLab, to update operations through Git workflows.

By delivering infrastructure as code from idea to production, OpenShift GitOps enables organizations to manage, secure and update applications through Git, improving time to market, ease of updates and security.

Availability
Red Hat OpenShift 4.7 is now generally available.

Supporting Quotes
Ashesh Badani, senior vice president, Cloud Platforms, Red Hat
“Red Hat understands that modernizing applications presents immense opportunity for organizations, but also ratchets up the pressure on already-stressed IT teams. Red Hat OpenShift 4.7 incorporates features to help organizations modernize in phases, on a timeline that makes the most sense for them and without disrupting existing services. Additionally, by bridging together modern and traditional applications Red Hat OpenShift is able to provide a consistent operational and management experience across applications regardless of where they live or the underlying infrastructure.”

Matt Wittstock, cloud architect, Lockheed Martin
“In the aerospace industry, IT solutions should be innovative and streamlined to rapidly deliver applications. Lockheed Martin’s collaboration with Red Hat is based on the core value of engineering and finding the best solution to modernize application development. OpenShift Virtualization has enabled us to move our virtualized workloads onto containers, giving us the ability to continue to support those workloads from a single management plane with Red Hat OpenShift. In working with Red Hat, we have been able to discuss key areas that Lockheed Martin IT is interested in adding or improving and Red Hat has listened and taken our ideas back to engineering. We value this relationship with a technology provider and look forward to continually improving application solutions for the industry.”

¹IDC Survey Spotlight: Application Modernization Priority, Doc # US45979516, Peter Marston, Feb 2020