Red Hat Summit: Red Hat OpenShift Getting Deeper Virtualization Features

… mission-critical applications, without being tied to inflexible, legacy architecture, he said.

“Managing a single platform, versus virtualization and cloud-native stacks that compete for man-hours and resources, also frees up the ability of developer and operations teams to add business value beyond keeping existing systems running.”

Pete Cruz, a Red Hat technical marketing manager, said community and customer feedback has driven the cluster management innovations.

“In addition, partners are a valuable part of the open source communities and we look forward to their feedback and community contributions,” he said.

Analysts See Useful Advances

Gary Chen, an IDC analyst, said the Red Hat Summit announcements offer good road maps for customers and partners.

IDC’s Gary Chen

“I think we’re really seeing Red Hat prep the platform for the future, there’s a lot expansion here with container-native virtualization, serverless, multicluster management, containerized network functions for telco, and the operator marketplace,” said Chen. “Do customers need any of these things today? No, most have really small clusters with modest workloads. But Red Hat is laying the groundwork to be ready when customers start growing in scale and maturity.”

For now, “OpenShift is arguably the broadest container platform in the market when you look at its scope,” he said.

Another IDC analyst, Mary Johnston Turner, said she sees Red Hat doubling down on its commitment to making OpenShift a common platform for applications running across public and private clouds.

IDC’s Mary Johnston Turner

“With the tech preview of OpenShift container-native virtualization based on KubeVirt, the company is hoping to accelerate adoption of OpenShift as a standard platform for legacy and cloud-native workloads,” said Turner. “As part of this effort, the company has introduced a tech preview of Advanced Cluster Management and expanded core OpenShift 4.4 cost management and platform monitoring capabilities. This prioritization around management indicates Red Hat is working to scale with enterprise customers as they build out broad container-based infrastructure platforms for production workloads as well as dev and test.”

With IDC’s research showing many organizations refocusing on costs, operational efficiency and security as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the new product enhancements will help with those goals, she said.

“Red Hat’s announcements are focusing on providing partners and customers will better tools to run mission-critical applications on containerized workloads and to take advantage of the different cost and security profiles offered by private data centers and public cloud infrastructure,” said Turner. “Channel partners will be well served to focus on the needs of workloads and support customer needs for portability, security and control.”

Analyst Paul Delory of Gartner said he’s most interested in the work Red Hat has done around policy-based management.

“It allows you to define your policies programmatically, and have your tools enforce compliance automatically. Red Hat has taken steps in that direction, by creating management policies within advanced cluster management (ACM), and also within the operating system itself, via the Insights product.”

Today, there are limits on those policies. But he expects more as the product matures and its user base grows.

“Some of the other automation announcements might get lost in the shuffle, but they shouldn’t,” said Delory. “They’ve integrated Red Hat Insights and parts of the Red Hat Smart Management product into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. That means, most importantly, improvements for patching and compliance management. Patching is always a huge pain point for Ops teams.”